There's an App for That
Productivity tools for neurodivergent creatives
Hey y’all, it’s KimBoo! I’m an author and a podcaster who is also a librarian, text technology historian, and former I.T. project manager. I write about a lot of interesting things, I hope you agree! Please consider supporting me (and my dog!) so I can keep throwing errata & etcetera into the Scriptorium!
One of the best things to happen as technology has advanced is the creation of apps that help people live healthier lives. There are apps to remind you to drink water (Plant Nanny), gamify your habits (Habitica), help you meditate (Mindspace, Insight Timer), simplify grocery shopping and other to-do lists (Remember the Milk) and help you collect, organize, and refer back to a lot of different type of information (Notion, Evernote, OneNote, Obsidian, Joplin).
In my work as a productivity coach, I work more with creatives (authors, photographers, artists) than any other kind of entrepreneur, and a significant number of my clients are neurodiverse (ND). This includes people with at least one of the following: ADHD, autism, traumatic brain injury, dyslexia, bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, and more.
Unfortunately, a lot of the productivity tools and apps out there are not made for ND brains. They are designed for people who have a handle on their executive functioning and who do not experience time-blindness or hyper-fixations, much less processing or perception disorders or mobility impairment.
Fortunately, there are a lot more resources for ND people these days than ever before.
In this post, I’m going over the tools/apps/services that I actually recommend to my ND clients. Yes, I do suggest notetaking apps like OneNote and Joplin and Obsidian, and yes, recommend bog-standard productivity tools like the pomodoro technique and the Eisenhower matrix. However, those are not a one-size-fits-all solution, and especially not when it comes to people with neurospicy brains.
In descending order of popularity, here are my suggestions:
Goblin.tools has improved the lives of many ND people I know and is always my first recommendation. This is a website and app that has several great features, such as the “Magic ToDo” which breaks down tasks into their component steps so you don’t have to; “Judge” analyzes the tone of your writing (friendly? Rude? Antagonistic?) which helps a lot with things like emails and social media posts; “Estimator” which gives you a time estimate on how long a project or task will take. My favorite is “Compiler” which takes your brain dump list and sorts it into a list of tasks. All of these features simplify organization and reduces decision fatigue and overwhelm. I have clients who have used to this to help them plan events, launch a new website, and map out the steps they need to take for a social media campaign.
Freedom is an app I recommend a lot to people who have issues with staying off social media, or tend to get sucked into hyper-focus journeys on YouTube/TikTok. It is a blocker which locks you out of apps and websites for specified amounts of time. If digital distractions are interferring with your creative time, this app can help a lot. It’s not free, but it’s fairly cheap and very customizeable (you can white-list sites, create schedules, and more). It can be used on desktops, tablets, and smartphones.
Tiimo, one of the most popular apps out there right now for ND folk, is a planning app that is design-driven, meaning it is very visually engaging. It has visual task timers, focus session mode, AI-powered checklists that automatically break down tasks into steps (a huge hurdle for a lot of people), and even guided meditation. It has a lot of features so is a great all-in-one app, and they are now also offering body doubling sessions!
4theWords is a fantastic site for writers. It gamifies the writing process by using game mechanics (points, quests, badges, stats, and even team-ups) to inspire writers to keep writing. This is a particularly great tool for ADHD brains that need stimulation to stay focused, and for anyone whose brain needs the promise of a dopamine hit to keep going. It’s great for fiction writers, students, academics, and freelancers.
StimuWrite 2 offers something similar but in a low-key way. Instead of gamifying the writing process, it offers a progress bar, emojis, and even typing sounds to stimulate your brain while you write.
Forest is an app that lets you grow (or kill!) a virtual tree as motivation to stay focused on an activity. Kind of like the old, lamented “write or die!” app but for tasks in general, the goal is to keep you on task no matter what. If you need a sense of impending doom or panic in order to accomplish anything, this is a good choice!
Time Timer, which helps visualize the passage of time to make it more concrete, is something I discovered while I was working in higher education. These innovative timers were developed for K-12 educational settings, but now that many people have grown up using them, they are far more ubiquitous. The actual Time Timer is a physical product (they have many different models) but they also offer a free app for both Apple and Android.
Dubbii is a “body doubling” app by popular vlogging couple Rich and Rox, who run the @adhd_love channels on YouTube and TikTok. They have a library of videos of them doing chores and other tasks that you can watch or play in the background while you do the same or similar tasks. I think this is a great way for ND creatives to fit regular life chores into their schedule by pulling up a video of, for instance, starting a load of laundry and using that as a break from their writing or as a transitioning trick from one big task to another big task.
“______ with Me” videos on YouTube. This is a subgenre of the ASMR genre of videos where people have recorded themselves studying, writing, or working for extended periods of time. They usually incorporate the pomodoro method, which may or may not work for some people, especially if you have trouble with transitioning between tasks. They often have classical of lofi music playing in the background, which I like, but if that annoys you then you can just mute the sound.
So that’s my current stable of apps/tools for ND creatives. If you have one you use and love in your writing life, please mention it in a comment!