Or, If You Can’t Make Executive Function in Your Own Brain, Store-Bought Is Fine.
I’ve made no secret about some of the ways my brain isn’t always a team player with me — there’s no reason not to be open about them. It’s a non-shameful thing that happens. (And even people with generally reliable brains run into busy or stressful periods that push the limits of their executive function.)
If I want to continue paying the bills, though, I have to participate in all these silly rituals like meeting deadlines, attending meetings on time, answering questions, and producing documents when needed. And as long as they’re going to make me attach the attachment I just said I was going to attach, I’m going to have a tool or technique to make sure I do that. Here are five free or as-good-as-free tools that let me handle my business without anyone knowing I struggle sometimes, as long as I don’t go online and write about it in a blog post.
Like, say, this one.
Here are my standards for a tool that’s useful to me:
- As few moving parts as possible. The more I have to carry information around, the more likely it is to get misplaced.
- Easy learning curve. I’m actually pretty good at picking up new technology and even enjoy it, but these are supposed to be making my life easier.
- Availability on multiple platforms. Particularly laptop and phone — I generally prefer my laptop, but when I need my phone, accept no substitutes.
- Visual cues. Anything I can glance at and see, “Hey, guess what’s important to pay attention to?” gets extra points for me.
And here are the tools that meet the standards and help me look like a person who doesn’t need them.
(Quick list for skipping: G Suite + Google Desktop, Obsidian, Beeper, Todoist, and NordPass.)
G Suite + Google Desktop
(Google Workspace now, I think, but whatever.) Yeah, I’d rather not dump all my critical data into the hands of an organization that actively removed “don’t be evil” from its official code of conduct, but we don’t always have the luxury of choice. But it’s important for me to have all my information connected and available in the cloud, so it’s going on the list. A meeting invite via email goes straight to my calendar, calendar invites and shared documents get shared directly, and there’s minimal opportunity to forget to transfer information because a dog barked.
The thing that takes this beyond the yeah-obviously-everyone-knows-this features you yourself probably used ten minutes ago is Google Drive for Desktop. It lets me sync my Drive and my computer, so I can keep everything important on my Drive but just use my computer like I usually do. I get to skip the part where I forgot to upload a file to my Drive and now don’t have access to it at exactly the wrong time.
How free is it? I do pay $7.20 a month for Google Workspace, because I’m a business and use it for business things, but obviously all the features I mentioned here are free.
Obsidian
If I have one tool that’s about as close to outsourcing my brain as I’m gonna get, it’s this one. Obsidian is an app that lets you create your own wiki, essentially, on your computer. You build a vault (even on your G Drive, if you have Drive for Desktop), and you put documents in it, and you link them to other documents, so everything is connected and easily accessible instead of having to sort through files and folders and remember where you saved something. The only thing that isn’t stellar about Obsidian is that the pages are all in markdown, which isn’t in any way difficult to use but doesn’t create doc files you can open in Word or Pages. All the rest of the convenience makes it worth the minor inconvenience, though.
I mean, if your thought process is like an uncontrolled plunge down a Wikipedia K-hole, organize it with a tool that’s like a controlled plunge down a Wikipedia K-hole.
How free is it? Entirely. (It is fully user-supported, though, so if you want to pay for an optional commercial license, they’d be grateful.)
Beeper
I have clients who want to communicate with me via Discord, Slack, and WhatsApp (plus one who desperately wants to do all our business via Facebook Messenger and y’all, I just can’t), and Beeper keeps me from having to track (read: lose track of) messages in three different apps. It currently connects with 12 platforms, including WhatsApp and Signal (and maintains the end-to-end encryption on those last two, which is important), and it has desktop and mobile versions. And you can, for instance, specifically leave Instagram and Facebook off your list of connected networks to avoid the distraction.
How free is it? Entirely.
Todoist
Todoist is a task organizer that organizes, like, tasks. Tasks, details, deadlines, all the things you’d expect, viewable in list, Trello-style board, or calendar format. What makes it more useful for me than other similar apps is that it understands natural language — instead of having to enter a task manually, I can just type “#[CLIENT] [SUBJECT] blog post by 4:30 pm Thursday p1,” and on my list it goes, with a li’l red dot because it’s high priority and an automatic two-hour reminder. And there’s space to add more details, additional reminders, subtasks, and such.
(A trick I find useful: If you go to Filters & Labels and make a filter with the query !no date, and then make it a Favorite, that gives you a task list that omits any days that don’t have tasks on them. Far less visual clutter, if that’s a problem for you.}
How free is it? Todoist does have a free version, but I pay $4 a month for Pro because it allows for more projects and more features I find useful.
NordPass
Yeah, I know, a password vault, y’all, please have one. I know it’s super handy to just have your passwords in a doc, or your Notes app, or a post-it, or whatever, but you’re begging for your identity to be stolen. That document can be copied or cracked more easily than you think, and that post-it is crackable by… looking at it. Lock that shit up.
Features that make it great: It lets you unlock your vault with your fingerprint, so you don’t have to enter your super-long secure password (yours is super-long and secure, right?), and it lets you log in to things with one just click. And it saves your information to fill in forms, but it’s not obnoxious about it — when I had LastPass, it would always get pushy and try to fill in my information even if I didn’t want it there and sometimes got in the way, whereas NordPass is just, like, “Hey, I’m here if you need me.”
How free is it? I pay $1.29 a month for the premium version of NordPass to have access across multiple devices. But if you just want it on one device, it’s free.
Not a tool, just a trick: The thing with folder colors
This isn’t a tool, per se, but it is a trick I’ve found very helpful. I put a folder alias on my desktop for every project I’m working on, and sometimes the result is a bunch of important folders that blend in with all my other folders and give me no visual cues of what I’m supposed to be actively working on. But you can change the desktop icon, to a different-colored folder or anything else you like. I did an image search for recolored Mac desktop folder and found a bunch of free and paid options, and I searched for change desktop folder image for Mac for instructions, and now my regular folders are blue and my project folders are bright, can’t-miss-it green.
I’m sure there’s at least one person blinking at the screen and saying, “Um, yeah, obviously you can do that.” But it’s a new trick for me, so get off my tits.
How free is it? I mean.
SQUIRREL.
If I may get up on my soapbox for a minute: Just as there’s no shame in having challenges like the ones I mentioned, there’s no shame in using tools and techniques to overcome them. People will tell you to, like, meditate or whatever to improve your focus and memory and act like using an app instead is cheating or giving up or being lazy. There is no particular virtue in being able to remember something unaided, any more than there’s a virtue in being able to put things in the highest cabinet without a step stool. Let people use the tools they need to use to be successful.
There is no shame in using tools to support your executive function rather than forcing yourself to develop skills that just aren’t going to come. The only important thing is that you’re able to keep your shit together, by whatever means. Hopefully, these tools can help you more easily, confidently do that.
And if you have any beloved organizational tools, drop ‘em in comments. They might be helpful for other reader here, and more importantly, they might be helpful for me.