Why every organising system eventually fails
I found the whiteboard in the garage last weekend. The big one. It still had the weekly meal plan from, I want to say, April. There were magnets and colour-coded sections and my handwriting in three different marker colours, getting progressively less neat as the week went on. Monday was detailed. Tuesday was fine. By Thursday it just said “pasta?” with a question mark.
That whiteboard was going to change everything. I remember buying it.
If I sat down and listed every organisational system I’ve started and abandoned in the last ten years, it would be genuinely long. Embarrassingly long. I’m not going to list them all because that would be a listicle and I have some dignity left, but let me paint a picture.
There was the Bullet Journal phase. I bought the specific notebook, the specific pens. I watched the videos. I understood the index system. I set it up beautifully. I used it for eleven days. It’s in a drawer now, and if I opened it, the last entry would probably say something like “remember to use this journal more.”
There was Notion. God, there was Notion. I built databases. I built databases that linked to other databases. I had a “life dashboard” with widgets and embedded calendars and a section called “Weekly Review” that I never once reviewed. The setup took an entire weekend. I felt so productive. I had produced nothing except the system itself, but it felt like progress. It felt like I was one template away from having my life together.
There were the apps. Todoist, Things 3, TickTick, Google Tasks, Apple Reminders, a brief and confusing period with Trello where I was moving cards between columns like I was managing a software team of one. There was the app where you grow a virtual tree by not touching your phone. The tree died. Multiple trees died.
There was the physical planner I ordered from the US that took three weeks to arrive and cost forty dollars in shipping. I used it for a month, which is actually my personal record for any planning system, so in a way it was a success. But by week five the pages were blank and it was living under a pile of mail.
The family wall calendar. The shared Google Calendar. The “just put everything in one place” approach, which failed because I could never decide which place. The sticky notes. So many sticky notes. I found one in my jacket pocket last winter that said “CALL BACK” with no other information. Call who back. About what. It’s gone now, whatever it was.
I think the pattern goes something like this. I’m mostly talking about myself but I suspect it lands for other people too.
The new system arrives and your brain lights up. Novelty is heroin for an ADHD brain, I’m pretty sure someone with a PhD has said that in more clinical language. The new app, the new notebook, the new approach. It feels different this time. It feels like the answer. You can see yourself in the future, using this system effortlessly, being the kind of person who checks things off and follows through and never misses a deadline.
So you go all in. You set it up. You customise it. You spend more time organising the system than doing the things the system is supposed to help you do, but that’s fine, that’s just the setup phase, that’s investment.
And then the novelty wears off. It doesn’t happen suddenly. It fades. The dopamine drip slows down. Checking the app becomes a chore instead of a thrill. You skip a day. Then two. Then a week. And then you can’t open it at all because the weight of all the things you didn’t check off is worse than just not looking.
The system didn’t fail. Your interest in the system failed. And that’s not a character flaw, but it feels like one.
I used to beat myself up about this. Every abandoned planner was evidence that I was lazy, or flaky, or just not trying hard enough. Neurotypical people pick a system and use it. Why couldn’t I? What was wrong with me?
What was wrong with me was undiagnosed ADHD, it turns out. But even after the diagnosis, the pattern didn’t magically stop. I still get excited about new systems. I still abandon them. The difference is that now I sort of expect it, and I’ve stopped treating each abandoned system as a personal failure.
My current approach, if you can call it that, is deliberately low-effort. I use Apple Reminders because it’s already on my phone and I can set things up with Siri while I’m walking. I don’t customise it. I don’t colour-code it. I don’t build a productivity cathedral in it. It’s ugly and basic and that’s the point. The less I’ve invested in the setup, the less guilt I feel when I inevitably ignore it for three days.
I also just… accept that some things will fall through. I’ve told the people in my life that I need reminders, and most of them are fine with it. My partner texts me things I need to do, and I do them immediately, because if I put them on a list I’ll never look at the list. Immediate action or it’s gone. That’s not a system. That’s barely even a strategy. But it works more often than the whiteboard did.
The whiteboard is still in the garage. I keep meaning to throw it out but I also keep thinking maybe I’ll use it again for something. That optimism is probably the most ADHD thing about me.
Somewhere in a drawer there’s a bullet journal, half a dozen unused planner pages, and a login for a Notion workspace I haven’t opened in eight months.
They’re not failures, exactly. They’re just evidence that I kept trying. I think there’s something in that, if you don’t look at it too hard.