My favorite subscription-free tools for adult ADHD
Cut through the BS and stop paying for subscriptions. These tools will change your life and help you become the best ADHD version you can be.
In a world full of marketing, paid subscriptions and flashy apps, it’s incredibly daunting to sift through what can actually help symptoms of ADHD in adulthood and what can drag you further down into hyperfixation. Apps that are marketed for ADHD seem dreadfully detailed and may be bogged down with details that distract more than do anything productive.
Real resources for ADHD in adulthood seem impossible to come by without paying a premium or feeling like your time is wasted after trying something new that doesn’t work. Luckily, I’ve come across many of these in my time and would like to share a few of my favorites with you. These picks aren’t exhaustive but they’ve worked the best for me in times of uncertainty. It will be broken down into time management, distraction blockers, visual calendars, and much more. If you’ve thought of it, we’ve got it. These will all be under $5 to use, and I’m not including anything with a subscription.
If you want a full list that this article takes inspiration from, take a look at this exceptional repo on github by XargsUK: https://github.com/XargsUK/awesome-adhd
Let’s get into it.
Task management: goblin.tools
Price: free
This app is small, free and super intuitive. It takes a task and, using AI, breaks it down into sub-tasks that might be relevant to what you’re facing ahead. Large tasks with ADHD, like cleaning the house, can sometimes feel vague and overwhelming, which is why professionals recommend breaking them down into more simple, manageable ones.
goblin.tools uses a magic to-do list and also estimates the time each sub-task might take. For example, doing the dishes might take ten minutes, vacuuming the floor might take 15, and so forth. This is very useful for ADHD because of time blindness — a difficulty in accurately estimating the passage of time or how long tasks will take. This can pose a number of challenges for us, ending up taking much longer than we intend.
There’s a daily planner feature too, and a priority sorter — where you can visually prioritize tasks by importance or urgency. If you don’t follow a strict schedule, and feel blind-sighted by how daunting all your tasks can be when grouped together, this helps you take action quickly.
There’s a bunch more nifty, free tools baked in, like a randomizer, which randomly picks a task for you to do, a journal/reflection tool, and a mood tracker.
Overall, this app is simple and accessible for those with ADHD, and can make large tasks much more easy to wrap our heads around.
Time management: ActivityWatch
Price: Free
ActivityWatch is a free and open-source time-tracking software that can be particularly useful for people with adults with ADHD. It helps users understand how they spend their time on their computer or mobile device by automatically tracking activity, such as the websites they visit, the applications they use, and the tasks they engage in.
Its use of automatic time tracking really helps monitor what you’re using your devices for. If you hate manually logging all of your tasks and trying to predict trends through your own methods, this is a godsend feature.
It gives detailed reports and visualizations of how much time you spend on websites and applications. This feature makes it super easy to quickly recognize glaring time management issues that might be popping up when using your devices.
It also boasts customizable alerts and goals, where the app can let you know when you’ve gone over a certain pre-defined time limit that you can set for yourself. You can set goals for yourself to reduce time spent on certain websites or other distractions.
It’s focused on privacy, by storing all data on your local device. Nothing will be sent to the cloud, and you can remove the stored data at any time.
This app is magical for those of us with attention deficits, and is completely free to use. It is designed with a genuine desire to foster insights into how our time is spent with a motivation to improve.
Distraction blocker: Forest
Price: $0.99
This one kills it for us neurodivergent folks. Forest is about planting a tree, and after a timer counts down to zero, the tree grows fully. In order to keep the tree growing, you have to stay off certain apps on your phone, or else you will get notified that the tree is about to die. You need to close the app quickly in order to make it to the end of the tree growth. This app works marvelously for a number of reasons:
It reduces procrastination by gamifying productivity. The act of planting a tree and letting it grow is excellent motivation for us with ADHD, because there is an attempt at relating our tasks to a more simple, external concept in the real world. Just like a game!
It supports routine building and demonstrates visual progress by actually showing the trees you plant in a digital forest over time, increasing your likelihood that you’ll keep growing them every day.
The only issue with this app is that it takes quite a bit of self-discipine, and when a tree doesn’t make it, it can make you feel pretty discouraged.
This adorable app helped me tons through the busiest times in school and university, but the upfront cost can make it off-putting for some. If you have the spare money, this one is an incredible investment.
Visual calendar: Structured
Price: First year free
Structured combines a calendar, to-do list and reminders app all into one. You can visually track your tasks during the day with a fresh, simple UI, and once you’re done a certain task or calendar event, you can tick it off in the app, adding an extra layer of motivation to keep going.
This app allows you to sync with Calendar and Reminders for iOS, reducing the copy-pasting you’ll have to do. This makes it super easy to stay on top of everything to do during the day, because even the events that are automatically added to your calendar, or the repeating events that show up every day are synced with Structured.
There’s plenty of novel features, like an AI that you can talk to and will structure your day with a simple conversation. You can track your energy during the day with an energy monitor, which was developed using research and time-management professionals.
This has been my daily go-to for two years now, and I paid $30 for the lifetime membership because of how much I used it in the first year I had it. It’s definitely worth checking out if you have ADHD and want a more visual way of seeing your to-do lists.
And that’s the list! I hope you try some of these tools out and find some use from them. These apps have changed my life in so many ways and I hope they can do the same for you. Thanks for reading this article!
~ Starseed Scientist