To be honest, nothing really works for me except medications. like i have a spare smartphone that's running my pomodoro timer, but if it's a task that interests me i will blow past every 5min pause and anything else because im focused on the task that interests me on hours end, like i would program in my head while drive home, but if the task is boring that i don't want to do i can have 100 timers it would not help. like for example i have to fill a form and send it that would return me 17k in overpaid taxes i did not do it for last 4 months. there is X amount of those task that no amount of timers would help me do it. i fucking hate my adhd in that without medications im a zombie. the only thing that i can hope without medications is find interesting problems. that's also shit when you have a family because you cannot turn of, because you are dealing with the interesting problem all the time and it consumes you. my brain is great in resolving big challenges, but the worst at doing daily tasks.
I very much relate to this (or at least parts of it; everyone's relationship with their own adhd is very specific and personal).
I was medicated as a 90s kid, then went a long time without being medicated. It took awhile to get medicated again and a longer time to be okay with it as a part of my life instead of constantly trying to wean myself off of it because of lingering stigmas around medications and mental health.
The timer for me is 100% in conjunction with meds and other life strategies for managing my ADHD and honestly, even then it feels crippling at times, especially since I've been laid off. Without the day-to-day structure of a job, my brain feels like a tornado in fog a lot of days.
Context is another big one for me. I don't do well working from home, so if I have a remote job I rent a small office. Part of it is having "work context" and part is just the fact that I don't have a VR headset, a thousand books on random hobbies, ten unbuilt lego sets, and a shelf of books on elm, clojure, idris, or whatever random language I'm interested in that week.
Anyhow, what you're saying makes a ton of sense. I feel like the timer thing just helps me specifically with even being aware of time at all, but I really find that coping mechanisms for adhd are super varied.
Appreciate you contributing your own experience, though, and highlighting that it's not as simple as one or two life hacks
I was in similar situation. From my experience a lot of people for whom timers, to-do lists, blockers etc. don't work react positively to body doubling (i.e. doing a task in presence of another person). Have you tried it? It's the only method that works for me (granted, I haven't tried meds yet, I'm at the end of diagnosis process).
