A Reading List for Your ADHD Brain

Being a tech-geek, ADHDer, podcaster, Life & ADHD Coach, and overall life-long learner, I tend to have a lot of articles, webpages, and links from emails that my brain says "must be read" as they come across my various feeds.  I still use a framework called RSS to gather most of the content I read on a daily basis, but also find many intriguing pages on the web that spark my curiosity.

Be it the latest tech news from The Verge or financial snark from Mr. Money Moustache (caution not always SFW), just about everything I ultimately read winds up in a web service called Pocket. In addition, each month I receive any number of newsletters that contain links to articles that may be worth ingesting. The mail program I use (saved for another article) has a quick "Save to Pocket" action that I use judiciously, and most smartphones allow sharing of links directly from an email to the Pocket app. 

Pocket is a save-for-later service integrated into more than 1500 apps, including the RSS reader I use, Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Flipboard, Twitter, and Zite. I use it on my Kindle Tablet when at home, and on my phone while on the go. Many times when I find myself in an "unbearable" line, I'll pull up my Pocket feed and blast through a few articles to keep my sanity in check. 

The great thing about Pocket is I don't have to read everything! All new saved articles/pages go at the top of my list (this can be configured in settings) so older stuff naturally sinks out of sight. This is helpful as I tend to save much more than I can ever hope to read! When this inevitably happens, using Pocket allows me to quickly scan through the feed and trash the junk that isn't worth a read.

If there's an article that is timely or an absolute "must read" I flag it with a custom tag so it doesn't get lost. I also use tags to curate a list of items for a particular reading session. I'll use a tag call Focus to curate a list of 10-15 articles I'd like to read in one sitting. Another tag, ADHD Coaching, gets articles I want to read when I'm in "coach learning mode". There are still more tags in my system that group sets of articles by topic, for reading years from now when I truly have time to become engaged with that topic. 

Pro Tip: At the start of each month, go through your list and tag all of the articles you haven't read with a tag for this year, and then use the "untagged" filter to see a pruned list. This allows you to retain all of the unread stuff from previous months "out of sight" so your brain doesn't feel like it's lost something great. It also alleviates the "guilt" of having a giant stack of unread stuff. For example, I have a tag -2017 that received all of my unread stuff from August and now I'm only seeing the stuff I've saved this month. 

Before adopting Pocket, I used to become overwhelmed (thanks ADHD) by the number of items I wanted to read (again, thanks ADHD). My new workflow allows me to save everything I think might be a worthwhile read, but then allows me to prune the list when the reality of "I won't read this" strikes. This software is a key part of my daily life, and I highly encourage everyone to try it for themselves. If you find yourself constantly losing stuff from the web and email that you've been meaning to read, or becoming overwhelmed by the stuff you want to read, then Pocket is a resource that can help.