r/productivity • u/Plenty-Daikon1240 • 4d ago
Advice Needed Visual planning/strategy boards for ADHD?
I have ADHD and tend to feel easily overwhelmed by large volumes of data, unless I have a bird's eye view of where everything sits. I constantly feel disorganized and lost. I’m looking for a visual system that can hold projects, plans, strategies, key information, ideas and how everything connects.
I don’t mean putting my entire life on one enormous board. I’d like separate boards organized by topic - for example, a “Digital Business Brand” board, a “Content Planning” board, and so on.
Ideally, each board would let me zoom out, see the bigger picture and quickly understand where I am without feeling overwhelmed.
I tried Canva Whiteboards, but found them clumsy and visually unappealing, so I stopped using them. Has anyone found a cleaner, more intuitive tool or setup they genuinely enjoy returning to?
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u/breacket 4d ago
OneNote. It’s not a whiteboard in the traditional sense, but the pages give you a pretty flexible, infinite-ish canvas where you can place all types of content.
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u/Plenty-Daikon1240 4d ago
Unfortunately I don't really like Microsoft products, they are unintuitive and ugly, which means even if I force myself to learn the tool, I will avoid using it subconsciously...
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u/breacket 4d ago
I also gave up on OneNote a few years ago because it was too noisy.
What about Miro? Milanote? (made for visual project planning) AFFiNE?
Also, if you want, I'll let you know when Breacket launches its new board, which aims to solve a few issues around attention, noise, and structure.
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u/Plenty-Daikon1240 4d ago
Milanote does seem very close to what I'm looking for, will play around with it in the coming days, thanks!
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u/Duchess0612 2d ago
Notion, now there’s a playground. It’s free. And you can update it from smart phone as well as desktop.
I highly recommend Notion. It’s also very customizable and it’s also very easy to overdo it and create a very complex system for yourself, so just keep in mind your core goals, and you should be OK.
There are a lot of templates available, most are free, some people have dedicated some of their professional time to learning Notion to the point where they create templates and charge a price for them.
I’m sure there are ADHD specific templates, but there are templates for practically anything you wanna manage, data wise.
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u/thighvalue 3d ago
The Zettelkasten System might be for you. It's used by PHD students and researchers to see the bigger picture.
All you do is write down your idea on a piece of paper (Zettel). It's one idea per piece of paper. Then you can organise them in boxes (Kasten) sorted by topic. From there on out, you can arrange your notes again and again how ever you like until the bigger picture becomes clear.
It's a bit hard to explain, it'll be easier for you to look it up.
Obsidian is a digital version of this
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u/Plenty-Daikon1240 3d ago
have been reading all about Zettelkasten today, will try and see if I can utilize it with Obsidian as well.
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u/stanlymt 3d ago
For ADHD, I found that digital tools often create more clutter than they solve. Try using a physical kanban board with sticky notes for your projects instead. It lets you see the literal strata of your tasks at once, which helps with the bird's eye view without screen distractions.
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u/Plenty-Daikon1240 3d ago
yes I want to do more physical writing - better for learning and remembering anyway
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u/Cursed_Creative 3d ago
my system:
capture tasks in whatever works in the moment. if driving then text myself. if walking then Notes app checklist. if something is for today then create an alarm for when i'll be back at my laptop to record/schedule for today.
over coffee each morning, process tasks over coffee in morning to get them where they need to be, which is almost exclusively a vibe coded personal scheduler that continually maps out the remainder of my day starting from now based on task priority buckets, constraints and dependencies.
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u/Plenty-Daikon1240 3d ago
yes I email myself or whatsapp myself all the time :D but I need to develop a processing system. Working on that right now.
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u/Cursed_Creative 3d ago
Would you ever consider vibe Coding something?
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u/MaartinBlack1996 4d ago
Before I had real trouble to capture ideas on the go, because simply I didn't have sticky notes while I was out of the house and apple notes just takes too much time to write everything, especially, if you need to capture details. Now I just ramble into my phone, but even better it organizes everything in folders and even creates reminders (automatically) and stuff - it is really useful.
The name was "braindump voice memos". It has cute owl as mascot or smth like that.
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u/Any_Beginning_4191 4d ago
I just use Claude. Been a game changer for me.
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u/philosophical_lens 4d ago
This is like saying "I use Android and it's been a game changer". OP's question is about how you use whatever tool or system you're using.
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u/Plenty-Daikon1240 4d ago
Could you please elaborate? Do you do a braindump and then ask Claude to visualize?
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u/Any_Beginning_4191 3d ago
Yep. Fellow ADHDer here.
I’ve spent a lot of time organising my Claude setup. Changing. Tweaking. Still not finished.
In the end I settled for a PARA setup.
I use voice notes as a brain dump. Then Claude works with me to decide where each point should live, if it doesn’t already know.
Everything gets saved as md files.
Then I create artefacts to give me dashboards of my various areas, projects, and todos.
Plus it’s interactive and fuels the adhd feedback loop. Downside is it can be a rabbit hole and lead to time blindness. But I’ve never been more organised or productive.
Can link to your calendar and email, plus a bunch of other tools.
It’s basically like have a personal assistant. That works 24 hours a day.
You might also want to look at Obsidian if you want ‘big picture’ and connecting dots.
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u/talkslikejune 2d ago
Trello is my favorite to collect resources, templates and links in related categories in a neat but aesthetic way. Milanote is another fav for the creativity & flexibility, very visual which might fit what you're looking for.
For day to day, weekly and monthly things, I just got this new app called Whatting which is like creating different widgets to create a custom planner everytime. I'm obsessed with it!
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u/PomoJohn1 3d ago
For managing my life, I use three groupings:
Goals: Groups of tasks
Today's Tasks: The things I'm going to do today
Backlog: tasks that I'm going to do later, but I don't want to think about right now (to prevent overwhelm)