Learning with ADHD at Home: Seven Tips on How You Can Learn Productively at Home

The place “college” is associated with productivity, aspiration, and ambition. But “home office” takes place at home – in your own four walls. Your room or apartment is associated with other thoughts, habits, and tasks. You have other options, other people around you – and much less external structure. Something always comes up, there are always distractions. Roommates or family members knock on the door, the coffee machine beckons once an hour, and internet access is unlimited.

But you don’t have to go through this situation alone and secondly, you don’t have to be helpless. Many ADHDers before you have learned and mastered how to work independently, and you will be able to do it too. To make things easier for you, I’ll show you my seven best tips for learning with ADHD in the home office – the tips that accompanied me in my first home office semester and that will also be my help in the next semester.

Tip #1: Use a Diary

At first, this tip sounds strange. You’re at home more or less the whole day – maybe there’s a doctor’s appointment or a single online lecture, but otherwise, you don’t have any appointments – right? But. Because everything you do can be entered as an appointment. Putting appointments on a calendar that you keep constantly in front of you causes you to build up pressure. You don’t want to miss those appointments because being unreliable is not a nice trait. If you stick to your deadlines, you can be proud of yourself.

First, think about what you want to enter as an appointment. For me, it’s everything: I write down when I get up when I eat when I study and write when I go out and do sports when I finish work. These detailed entries may seem exaggerated at first, but this way you always have an overview of when you want to do what and whether you have time to talk to your family or roommate, whether you can spontaneously take an extended lunch break or prefer the movie night today or should take place tomorrow. Never underestimate the power of a well-kept diary.

Tip #2: Develop a Planning Routine

Life is always changing, and your daily planning needs to reflect that. Therefore, you should develop a planning routine. Your schedule will change throughout the day or week. Your best friend asked if you wanted to call tomorrow and you said yes and entered the appointment directly. An online lecture is canceled, and you consider whether you should either sleep in or start studying earlier so that you have the evening free.

All of these reflections, shifts, and rearrangements should be viewed at a set time of the day. Have you thought of everything or do two appointments overlap? Do you have to postpone something, can you cancel something? Does this change your weekly schedule? Set aside ten minutes for this in the evening. It’s best to tie your planning routine to an action you do each night. For example, right after brushing your teeth, before bed, after dinner… The main thing is that you develop a planning routine.

Tip #3: Set Yourself Deadlines

Deadlines are incredibly useful pain points. They force you to do everything you can to complete a specific task by a fixed time. Some deadlines are set externally – most homework has to be handed in at the end of the semester, exams take place on fixed dates and bureaucratic actions such as re-registration for the next semester also have a deadline. Missing such deadlines ends either with a “fail” in the case of homework, tests, and exams or has financial consequences, such as late re-registration.

The motivation to meet a deadline increases as you approach it – you can use this especially for learning with ADHD in the home office! Set yourself lots of small deadlines. If you have a term paper that needs to be handed in in two months, set the first deadline for next week. For example, this could be: “Document must be formatted”.

A week later the research is completed, then you take three weeks to write the first draft of your research paper and so on. With the help of deadlines, you constantly create incentives to keep working on a big task and to complete it piece by piece. In this way, a huge mountain of tasks never accumulates, and you are not completely overwhelmed all of a sudden. Write the deadlines in your diary so that you always have them in mind.

Tip #4: Find an Accountability Buddy

Every day after getting up I write a WhatsApp. Actually, you shouldn’t answer your cell phone right away, but for me, it’s not about surfing, social media consumption, or anything like that. No, I’m writing with my accountability buddy. We write what we want to do that day, what goals we have, and how we are doing. In the evening (or the next morning) we talk about whether we managed everything and if not, why.

These mutual queries spur us on to do our best and to work in a concentrated and focused manner throughout the day – because neither of us wants to have to write in the evening: “Well, I didn’t get anything done today and I feel kind of lazy.”

This concept of the Accountability Buddy can be applied to many areas of life – including learning with ADHD in the home office. It doesn’t matter whether you know your Accountability Buddy personally or not, whether he or she is also studying or already working. The main task of such a “partnership” is to keep each other up to date and to keep asking questions. If it helps you, you can also agree with your Accountability Buddy on penalties that you have to take if you don’t reach a goal or don’t complete a task – that increases motivation!

Conclusion

You don’t have to use all tips at the same time – every single one is already a win. You can then gradually integrate all of them into your everyday life. These strategies form an excellent basis for productive learning in the home office with ADHD.

If you would like to get even more help for your everyday learning with ADHD, then you should definitely take a look at residency personal statement editing – a service where professionals can help with papers on any topic!