I grew up with one of those moms who relentlessly cared for the house. As the youngest of five kids, I can honestly say her efforts to keep after all of us are mind boggling to me now. I live alone and can barely keep up with the dishes and the laundry. If I was chasing after five kids, it’s highly likely the house would just always look like Chernobyl in 1986.

Like a lot of women, I got my ADHD diagnosis because of the pandemic.

Well, not exactly because of the pandemic, but because the pandemic forced me to stay home and look at the how I’d been living all this time without realizing it. My ADHD collided with my second Big Depression Episode and a CPTSD diagnosis… let’s just say it was looking like Chernobyl in 1986 for a while.

Slowly, I started climbing out of my hole and learning how to live with all this new information. The number one thing that helped me was learning to be nicer to myself about everything, but most obviously, my living conditions. If you’ve ever found yourself living inside a pile of clothes and dirty dishes, it can feel like there are monsters also living inside those piles whispering what a failure and f*ck up you are every time clock the squalor you’re living in. So, number one: give yourself a break. You’re doing your best.

The second best thing I learned was that a baseline understanding of physics can help you live with ADHD more easily. If I’m honest, Mr. Shellenberger’s 11th grade physics class ruined physics for me. He made it unnecessarily complicated, and also he was a mean old man (may he rest in peace though).

But, when I started exploring how to live with my ADHD, I couldn’t believe how much physics helped me make sense of what I thought were personal failings.

Objects in motion stay in motion. Objects at rest stay at rest. And one of the most powerful ones— friction. ADHD creates a lot of friction.

In the event that you had your own Mr. Shellenberger, let’s do a quick recap on friction. It’s the resistance force that makes it hard for things to move. It's what happens when you try to run in the sand. In a nutshell, ADHD is one giant experience of friction and resistance.

The concept of friction made me realize that easy and simple are not the same thing.

It might be easy to do my dishes, but it is far from a simple task most days… because friction. It’s messy, it’s clunky, it’s boring, and I hate it. Friction will often manifest as overthinking, overanalyzing and overwhelm. With all this in mind, I started exploring how I could reduce friction with things that felt difficult. I started with the most obvious high friction experience: my home environment.

Since I spend a lot of time at home, I can clearly see how much it serves me to have a clean and functional home. It helps me think better, I feel more creative, and it makes me more likely to invite friends over. When my space is clear, my mind feels clear. It’s an undeniable yet inconvenient truth for me… so it brings me back to friction.

Things that reduce friction in my home:

👕 I don’t fold my clothes

As much as I love Marie Kondo’s method of neatly rolling clothes so that they’re easy to pull out of a drawer, there’s just way too much friction with the entire process of laundry. KC Davis’s book How to Keep House While Drowning was a revelation for many of us, and one of the best things I got from her was to use bins instead of dresser drawers. No more folding??? Hallelujah!!! TBH, everything tends to end up on the clothes chair anyway, so why not just toss them into bins that live our of sight on a closet shelf?

🚫 I don’t use a top sheet

My first encounter with this was from a boyfriend in my 20s. While men in their 20s are not exactly known for sophisticated sleeping arrangements, this one changed my life forever. It helped me see that, for whatever reason, that top sheet creates an enormous amount of friction around making my bed… so just like him, I stopped using top sheets. If you sleep with a quilt that’s not easy to wash, I can see the argument to use them, but I use a duvet cover that I wash every week, so top sheets are now relegated to the realm of beach blankets and drop cloths.

🍏 I zoned my refrigerator

Feeding myself is… a journey. I often forget to eat or wait until I’m hangry, which is no good for anyone and makes decision making nearly impossible. And in a surprising turn of events, I learned that my ADHD feels less oppressive when I’m properly fed. I started thinking about my safe foods, foods I’m usually in the mood to eat and evaluating how they’re assembled. Here’s the formula I came up with: Protein + carb + sauce + vegetables. I’m always in the mood for something that takes that shape. So, I zoned off my refrigerator in that order and labeled the areas right to left, top to bottom (like I’m reading a book) — and voilà.

Suddenly, it solved two problems:

1. It became easier to assemble a meal because I just had to “read” my refrigerator.

2. It became obvious what I needed to restock at the store — if the protein zone is empty, I know I need to get more protein.

☣️ Send in FEMA for the ADHD tornado

I could feel badly about how messy my space is, or I could follow a time and structure to deal with it every week. I block off 2 hours every Saturday morning, follow the same path (start laundry, do dishes, wipe down the countertops, etc.), kick it off with the same podcast (Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me!), set the timer, and that’s just what it is. Initially, I felt friction around starting this process, but now accept that it makes everything easier in the long run.

🧤 Rubber gloves for doing dishes

I stumbled into this one when I started getting my nails done. I just wanted the manicure to last loner, but it actually made the sensory nightmare of dirty dishes way easier.

🧽 Duplicate cleaning products in multiple spaces

I just measured it, and it takes 17 steps to go from my kitchen to my bathroom, but there’s too much friction if I have to carry my cleaning products back and forth. So, I staeted keeping duplicates of the paper towel roll, the disinfectant, and the Bar Keeper’s friend in both the kitchen and the bathroom. The aforementioned ADHD Tornado cleanup moves a lot more smoothly as a result. Less friction.

🏃‍♀️ All black workout clothes

This one is giving Steve Job’s not wasting energy deciding what to wear every day. I found friction with getting to the gym when I had to make a decision about what to wear. I decided to slowly acquire my new workout clothes only in black. Way less friction when you don’t have to decide what matches your floral legging. I’m not gonna say this will get you to the gym every time, but I can confirm that it won’t work against you.

There are a ton more great tips on the TikTok I posted about this, including a new one I’m implementing stat: keep makeup remover wipes by the couch, so I can do it while I watch Love Island instead of falling asleep on the couch in my makeup yet again and wondering about the long term implications this will have on my face.

For more incrdible ideas, the Reddit hive-mind does it again with this thread I found while writing this article. Wishing you a whole lot less friction in the future. May all your annoying tasks become smoother to execute.