Latest / JOY LOVING HOME - SAHM, Productivity, Home Organization, Declutter, ADHD Mom, ADHD SAHM, ADHD Brain / 234: ADHD Organizing Hack - Create a Lost and Found Basket in Your Home

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234: ADHD Organizing Hack - Create a Lost and Found Basket in Your Home · JOY LOVING HOME - SAHM, Productivity, Home Organization, Declutter, ADHD Mom, ADHD SAHM, ADHD Brain

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  Welcome to the Joy Living Home Podcast. Today I want to talk about the idea
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  of having a lost and found basket in your home.
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  Now, notoriously we are familiar with the concept, schools, places of business
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  have these lost and found baskets that accumulate all those unknown items that
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  just get left behind for various reasons.
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  And it's this really wonderful practice because it gives those who are employed
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  there a place to put items that are left behind without even thinking.
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  And then it gives the students or the patrons of that business hope that they
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  might actually have a place to look for that when they remember that they're lost.
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  So why don't we have those in our home?
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  Let's talk about that right after this.
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  A wise person once said everybody is
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  a genius but if you judge a fish by its ability to
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  climb a tree it will live its whole life believing that
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  it's stupid well fish quit trying
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  to climb trees while getting advice from well-intentioned monkeys
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  it's time to jump in the water and learn
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  how to swim with the current of your life I'm Joy a
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  professional organizer mom of four and fellow
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  fish brain if you're looking for a place to get understanding encouragement
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  and ideas for your home that actually fit how your brain thinks then i'm glad
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  you're here let's ditch the type a advice and embrace what makes our brains
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  and our homes unique together we could have a joy loving home.
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  Okay, the idea hit me for the reason why most ideas have hit anybody.
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  It's because you're trying to solve a problem that you have.
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  So in my particular scenario, and you can try and see if this sounds familiar at all in your home,
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  I currently have college kids that have come home for the summer,
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  and they have brought with them items that don't normally have spaces to exist in our home.
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  And some of the things they maybe acquired during the school year,
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  some of the things just sort of appear.
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  Whether it's because friends came through and visited and left and they're working
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  chaotic work schedules or activities or visiting friends and then there's the
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  vacations coming and going and we're getting out these items that we don't always
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  have around and have some sort of system for,
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  not that my home has any ideal system. That's why you're listening to me.
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  But there are times when I'm just like, I've had it, and I'm trying to get my
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  main spaces clear and back to some reasonable sense of order.
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  And I'll come across these items, and I'll just pile them on my island thinking
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  somebody's going to come through and move them.
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  And of course, nobody ever comes through and moves them and you
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  know that clutter attracts clutter and the
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  island is sort of the heart of the home and all of a sudden
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  I'm like I did all this work and it just feels like there's a bunch of
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  stuff dumped around so I'm like where can I stash it and I'll stash it you know
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  over in the mudroom or something or off on the kitchen or dining room table
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  or I'll cart it upstairs and plop it at the end of the hall or all because sometimes
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  I don't know who it belongs to and so I'm not quite sure where to put it.
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  And then the inevitable, mom, have you seen my mom?
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  Where did you put my mom? It was just sitting here and now I need to go. And where is it?
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  And then you're like, ah, so I was like, why, why didn't, why don't we just have a lost and found?
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  It would solve a whole lot of problems because we could just have the basket and,
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  Everybody knows if mom moved anything, she moved it to that one spot.
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  I don't have to think about whose it is, where it goes, whether it's even part
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  of our family's stuff or not.
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  It solves not just that problem for me because, you know, mainly I now have
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  a place without even thinking that I can drop all these unknown items.
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  Two, it gives them an easy spot to check before yelling that,
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  Mom, where is this commentary?
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  The other nice thing is it creates this immediate limit that as soon as it's
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  full, we're going to have to address it, right?
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  Like, it's not this endless piles of stashes everywhere.
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  If I make it a laundry basket or I make it a much smaller basket,
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  either way, it's going to hit a limit at some point.
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  And it's going to trigger my brain to remember to, hey, we have to actually
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  address the stuff that's in here.
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  And then I can call everybody over and go, look, all of this stuff got gathered
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  over the last week, two weeks, month, and I need you to see if any of it's yours.
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  You can employ the little tip they do at school, which is at the end of each
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  semester, they say, everything from the lost and found has been spread out in the front hallway.
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  If it's not yours, it's being donated by the end of the day on Friday.
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  You can have that same sort of policy in your home, and then if nobody comes to claim it,
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  then they didn't really care that much about it, and you can haul it off to
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  Goodwill or wherever you like to donate things, which is great because the whole
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  goal is for us to get stuff out of our house.
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  Now, you might be saying, how is this different from the timeout baskets I hear about?
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  Because those timeout baskets sound really brilliant because your kids are never,
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  ever, ever going to learn to be more responsible with their stuff if there aren't consequences.
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  So they supposedly cleaned up, but they left all this stuff around anyway.
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  And so you put it in the time basket, timeout basket, and now they've got to earn it back.
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  I hear you, and I believe those can be a somewhat useful tool,
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  particularly for a neurotypical type kid.
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  But let's face it, you're listening to me most likely because you are an adult
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  who has ADHD or believes they have ADHD, and you have lived your life with the
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  myriad of times that you have lost,
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  misplaced, sat down,
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  walked away from items that you had consequences for.
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  It was either at the very least embarrassing or stressful or painful or expensive to lose or forget or.
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  Be made to have some attention drawn to the fact that you're a mess or a slob or scatterbrained.
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  And we have had this lifetime of consequences, and none of those consequences
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  has changed the way our brain handles executive function.
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  So I want you to be really careful with the use of the timeout baskets if you
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  are not seeing a correlation between consequence and change in behavior.
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  99% of the time, their brains, why I call them fish brains,
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  are swimming out there in a world in motion, and they're leaving things behind
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  not because they are being mean or spiteful or intentionally forgetful or careless or.
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  And help me with all the other words you know that have been thrown in your
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  own self-talk, if not actually at you.
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  So this lost and found, instead of it being punitive, is a tool to go,
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  oh, I have an easy solution for when I'm remembering suddenly that I want something
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  that I haven't thought about in a week or two weeks.
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  Because a lot of that out of sight, out of mind stuff is happening and they're
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  not even going to know it was left behind to even go take care of it again very quickly.
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  So if it helps solve all of these things, I think that's a worthwhile thing to give a try.
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  They all understand the concept of the lost and found. And y'all find a place for it.
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  And it is just that give and take, give and go moment of it fosters a little
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  bit of responsibility because they know independently where to go and retrieve
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  things that they had forgotten that they left behind in the first place.
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  Now, some of you may have heard of a weekly basket or a Sunday basket.
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  How is this any different?
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  Well, for one, you know, I don't love anything that has to be handled consistently.
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  How many times do we have an interruption in our weekly schedule, or we are out of town,
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  particularly in the summer, or we've spent a long hot day outside,
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  and the last thing we want to do is tackle a basket clean out that was on somebody's
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  calendar to handle that moment.
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  So this is self-regulating. You don't have to have it on a calendar.
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  You don't have to worry about when it's actually full. It's just when it is full.
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  Deal with it. And you'll know it's full because you'll go put something else
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  in it, and it will fall over onto your feet. It couldn't be a better trigger than that.
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  And then finally, I have this thought that if you have just you and a spouse
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  at home or one kid, that maybe you're like, this seems like more trouble than it's worth.
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  I know whose stuff is being left behind. I know what this is about.
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  But if you don't like the idea of calling it a lost and found basket,
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  or if that seems too institutional, you could consider calling it your rush basket.
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  All those times you're in a rush and you can't properly go put something away,
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  you could intentionally drop it into your rush basket and know that later when
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  you're trying to remember where you put something, there's that one spot you're
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  going to go to instead of it could be one of a hundred spots.
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  Or you know those times when you say, oh this is something really important,
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  let me put it somewhere special and I'll definitely not forget that I'm putting
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  it here because it's really important that I know where this is.
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  Maybe just make it a habit of dropping even things like that in your rush basket
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  because you will at least be revisiting and seeing it again every time it gets
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  full and it will give you one place to look every time you want to turn around and look for something.
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  Just a thought. And then because I love acronyms, you could consider that your
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  rush basket stands for reasonably unavailable side quest helper.
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  Yes, I know I might have stretched that one. But what I'm saying here is,
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  If you could be putting something all the way away, like Dana K.
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  White says, like, just take it there now.
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  Take it there now. I don't want to discourage you from taking it there now.
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  But there are times when you're reasonably unavailable to take it there now.
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  Let's say you're cleaning up after dinner with some friends and you're stumbling
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  across all these toys or these items as they're helping you.
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  And you're like, I don't want to keep taking everything exactly where it goes.
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  I want to stash it for a moment.
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  I'm in a rush. I'm reasonably unavailable to do it right, right now.
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  Or you're on the way out the door, or you only have five minutes,
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  or you're in a Zoom call and you're allowed to kind of listen,
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  but you can't keep heading out the door and putting things all the way away.
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  There are many times when you're reasonably unavailable to do something the right way.
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  I'm using air quotes there. So it gives you an offloading space to handle it.
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  And I'm calling it a side quest helper because those of us with ADHD brains
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  know how dangerously distracting a little side quest can be when we go to put
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  something all the way there.
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  And then we get there and we get sidetracked by something else and we forget
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  what the original focus was in the first place. So it's going to help with that focus.
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  Now, did I just spend 12 minutes on a podcast describing a doom basket?
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  And for those of you unfamiliar with doom baskets, those are acronyms too.
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  They stand for didn't organize, only moved.
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  Now, yes, it's quite possible I just did.
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  But I am considering mine better only because when I hear doom basket, there's a lot of guilt,
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  associated to, can't believe you just shoved everything in this basket and took it out the door.
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  I can't believe you just threw a bunch of stuff in a place as a way to clean up.
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  That to me is more your doom basket, this intentional lost and found,
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  this intentional rush basket is a lovely, guilt-free,
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  reasonable tool to use
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  that will help keep you focused on your tasks at hand to help offload all of
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  the decision making in your brain about what to do with every single unsure
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  item you come across when you're already actually focused on doing something
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  that you're trying to get done.
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  So I'm going to stand by it's a little unique in its own right.
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  So if you have not tried having a rush basket or a lost and found,
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  maybe give it a go for the summer and see how it turns out.
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  Let me know. I'd love to hear your feedback.
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  Until next time, continue to choose joy.