What My ADHD Coaching Notes Taught Me About Solving Problems

For most of my twenty-year corporate career, I took copious notes in meetings. I always had a notebook or legal pad in front of me, and I wrote constantly. People noticed it. More than once, someone commented on the sheer volume of notes I took. At the time, I assumed I was simply a person who took very thorough notes.

Looking back, I think something else was happening too. I think writing was a stim, a small piece of executive function support. It gave my hands something to do while I listened. It helped me stay engaged with what was happening in the room. Writing things down gave some of my attention somewhere to go, which made it easier for the rest of my attention to remain with the conversation. I was certainly recording information, but information gathering wasn't the only purpose the writing was serving.

The problem was that I didn't understand that distinction. I treated the paper produced by my note-taking as if all of it had been created for the purpose of retaining information. At the end of a meeting, I would walk away with several pages of notes, most of which I would never need again. Somewhere in those pages, however, might be an important decision, something I needed to follow up on, a useful piece of context, or a detail I really did need to remember.

So I kept the paper.

When Note-Taking and Information Gathering Aren't the Same Thing

This distinction between note-taking as regulation and note-taking as information gathering seems obvious to me now, but it never occurred to me during all those years of working in offices. If writing helps me listen, then taking a lot of notes isn't necessarily a problem I need to solve. I don't need to train myself to write down only the most important things while I'm trying to listen to someone. That would require me to simultaneously listen, process, regulate my attention, evaluate the relative importance of everything being said, and predict what Future Amy might need to know.

What I actually needed was a second step.

The initial notes could be expansive and messy because they were serving me in the moment. Afterward, I needed a way to extract the information that deserved to survive. What was the decision? What did I need to do? What context would matter later? What did I want to remember? Once I had captured those things somewhere useful, the original pages could have served their purpose and disappeared.

Instead, I spent years accumulating paper. This created a particularly unhelpful ADHD problem because I had a hard time distinguishing important paper from unimportant paper. A page might contain 90 percent information I would never need again and 10 percent information that mattered. As long as I wasn't sure which was which, throwing the page away felt risky. The result was an ever-growing collection of artifacts that theoretically contained useful information but wasn't organized in a way that made that information particularly accessible.

I had been very good at capturing and very bad at extracting.

How I Solved This (By Accident) in My ADHD Coaching Practice

I still take handwritten notes when I'm coaching. I don't want to stop. Writing while I listen works for me, and I don't need to turn that into a problem simply because another person might prefer to listen without taking notes.

What I do differently now is that I don't expect my handwritten notes to function as my long-term record of the ADHD coaching relationship. I have a spreadsheet for that. Each client has a structured place where I track the things I want to be able to follow over time: their goal, what happened with the previous week's experiment, outcomes, success measures, relevant context, items to be addressed or resolved, perspectives, new awareness, fieldwork for the coming week, and general notes.

I don't fill every box every week. Some contain a few words. Some contain more. Some stay empty because there is nothing useful to put there. I'm not trying to create a transcript or prove that a coaching session occurred. I'm trying to preserve the thread.

The structure also makes the information remarkably easy for me to use. I can scan across a client's record and very quickly reconstruct the larger picture. I can see what we have been working toward, what they have tried, what happened, what they have learned, what keeps recurring, and what we haven't returned to yet. Instead of searching through pages of chronological notes, I can see the shape of the work.

Once I have transferred what matters into the spreadsheet, I shred or burn the handwritten notes. They were temporary. They helped me listen and think during the session, and then I extracted the information I actually wanted to retain. Their job is over.

It took me decades to figure out that those could be two different things.

Unfortunately, the Missing Step Is Yellow

There is one problem with this otherwise excellent system: I hate reconciling the notes.

I currently do it once a week. It isn't difficult. It isn't even particularly unpleasant once I start doing it. But I dread it. It nags at me.

In Tamara Rosier's Solve-It Grid, this is a Yellow task. Nobody is waiting for it. Nobody knows whether I did it. There is no deadline and very little immediate reward. If I skip it today, absolutely nothing happens. I can skip it tomorrow too. The consequences are delayed, which means there is always an argument for doing something else first.

But if I continue not doing it, eventually I have a problem. The pile gets bigger. My memory of the sessions becomes less immediate. The reconciliation becomes more time-consuming. Most importantly, the quality of the system begins to deteriorate.

This is one of the frustrating things about ADHD for me. Sometimes the system that works still contains a task I don't want to do. The goal isn't necessarily to devise a sufficiently ingenious system that I will suddenly enjoy every component of maintaining it. Sometimes I have to recognize that I have found something worth doing and then figure out how to support myself in actually doing it.

This week, somewhat randomly, I put on a Spotify playlist of jungle sounds while catching up on my notes. It turned out to be exactly the kind of stimulation my brain wanted for this task. I have no idea whether jungle sounds would do anything for another ADHD person, and that isn't particularly interesting to me. They did something for me. That is useful information.

Why My Spreadsheet Matters

I've occasionally wondered whether all of this is busywork. Nobody requires me to keep my coaching notes this way. There isn't a person checking my spreadsheet to make sure I have updated all the appropriate cells.

But when I think about what happens because I maintain it, I don't think it is busywork at all.

My clients respond strongly to being remembered. I can follow the thread of their lives. I can remember something they told me weeks ago and recognize when it connects to what they are telling me now. I can remind them of an insight they had and subsequently forgot. I can remember what they wanted to try, what happened when they tried it, what mattered to them at the beginning of our work, and how their thinking has changed since then.

This matters to me because I know what it feels like not to be remembered by someone I've opened up to. I've had experiences where I could tell the person on the other end didn't really retain what I'd shared. I don't know what was happening from their perspective, but I know what it felt like from mine. It made me wonder whether they cared. I hated the feeling that I was continually supplying information about myself that disappeared into the ether as soon as we were done talking.

I am determined not to create that experience for my clients.

I want someone I coach to experience continuity. I want to know where we have been together. When something happening now connects to something they told me two months ago, I want to have a reasonable chance of recognizing it. I don't need to remember every detail anyone has ever told me. What I need is enough external support for my memory to stay connected to the larger story.

The spreadsheet helps me do that. The spreadsheet itself isn't the value. The relationship is the value.

Solving for My Actual Brain

I don't think the lesson here is that ADHD people should take handwritten notes and transfer them into spreadsheets. That is my system. Someone else might hate it.

What interests me is the process by which I eventually arrived at it. For years, I could have identified the problem as taking too many notes. If I had tried to solve that problem, I might have eliminated something that was actually helping me. The physical act of writing was supporting my attention. The problem was what happened afterward.

Once I separated those two functions, I could preserve what worked and solve for what didn't. I could take as many handwritten notes as I wanted without creating a permanent mountain of ambiguous paper. I could let the handwritten notes support me during the conversation and use a completely different structure to support my memory afterward.

Even that solution isn't finished. I still have to contend with the Yellow task of maintaining the system. So I keep solving. I do it weekly so the pile doesn't become overwhelming. I use a framework so I don't have to decide from scratch what kinds of information matter. I leave cells blank when there is nothing worth recording. And, apparently, I listen to jungle sounds because for whatever reason my brain finds them extremely pleasing while I do this particular kind of work.

This is what solving problems with ADHD often looks like for me. I pay attention to what I'm actually doing, including the things that seem strange or inefficient. I try to understand what function a behavior is serving before deciding that I need to eliminate it. I look for the point where the system is actually breaking down. Then I experiment with ways to solve that particular problem while leaving the parts that already work alone.

My old problem wasn't that I took too many notes. It was that I didn't have a reliable way to decide what deserved to survive them.

Now I do. I just have to keep doing the stupid Yellow task.