The ADHD To-Do List Strategy You’re Missing

By /

If you’ve ever come back to your to-do list and had absolutely no idea what a note meant, even though it made perfect sense when you wrote it, you’re in the right place. For those of us with ADHD, this happens more than we’d like. Our working memory performs differently than most neurotypical brains, which means the context that made a note make sense often doesn’t survive the gap between when we wrote it and when we return to it. And without that context, even a well-intentioned to-do list can leave us stranded.

Woman stressed over cluttered desk with to-do list and sticky notes

In this episode, we’re talking about a strategy I call “leaving breadcrumbs,” little pieces of context and detail that guide us back to the work without having to reconstruct everything from scratch, or rely on anxiety and panic to keep things front of mind.

Listen to the episode above or stream it on your favorite podcasting app. Prefer to read? No problem. Keep scrolling for a summary of key takeaways.

In Episode 363, we’re exploring:

  • Why ADHD working memory causes our notes and to-do lists to lose meaning over time
  • Three types of breadcrumbs that help us pick up where we left off
  • How to start using this approach this week

Why Your ADHD To-Do List Loses Its Meaning

Here’s a story that might sound familiar. At the end of May, I had a company coming to power wash the siding of my house and clean the outside windows. When the reminder popped up the night before they were scheduled to arrive, it said one word.

Squeegee.

That was it. One word, sitting there in my reminders: squeegee. I stood there looking at my phone, thinking, what does this mean? Do I need to buy a squeegee? Am I supposed to squeegee something? I had absolutely no context for it. Luckily, early the next morning I got a text from the company Squeegee Magic, which had completely fallen out of my head from when I scheduled the appointment back in February, saying they were on their way. Their backup reminder text saved the day, because if that text hadn’t come through, I would not have been ready for them at all.

And honestly, even if I had written “Squeegee Magic” instead of just “squeegee,” I still would have been missing important context. Did I need to move anything before they arrived? Was there anything I wanted to flag for them? Had I even turned the outside water back on from winter?

I think a lot of us do some version of this with our to-do lists all the time. We jot down just enough to feel like we’ve captured the thing, tell ourselves we’ll remember what it meant, and move on. Then, when we come back, sometimes hours later, sometimes days, sometimes weeks or months we’re essentially reading someone else’s shorthand.

Why ADHD Working Memory Makes This Harder

For those of us with ADHD, our working memory performs differently than most neurotypical brains. While we can hold something in mind in the moment, the context often doesn’t survive the gap between when we wrote the note and when we return to it. And even if we do remember what a task means generally, we might not remember why we put it on the list that particular day.

“Clean the kitchen” applies on any given day. So why did we write it down on Tuesday specifically? Was someone coming over? Was something time-sensitive about it? Without that context, the task just sits there looking like every other cleaning task we’ve ever needed to do, and our brains don’t find it especially compelling.

The Anxiety Connection: Why That Old System Eventually Stops Working

Something I often hear from new clients is a version of: “I used to be able to remember before. I could always rely on anxiety and worry to keep things front of mind. It wasn’t awesome… but it worked.”

For many of us, the system we’ve relied on to remember things — to keep tasks front of mind — has been anxiety. Things stay on our radar because we keep them as open loops, worrying about them without any real plan of when we’ll deal with them. And as I’ve talked about in the Zeigarnik Effect episode, that whole cycle is exhausting.

But in a way, it worked. We usually didn’t forget the thing because our nervous system was on high alert, doing the holding for us.

The challenge is that as life gets fuller — more responsibilities, commitments, projects, kids — that old system of low-grade vigilance spreads to more and more things. The things that used to stay front of mind through worry start to slip out. Or our nervous system has been holding those anxious states for so long that it can’t hold anymore, and we find ourselves in some stage of ADHD burnout.

If you want to learn more about ADHD and burnout, here are a few places to start:

So whether you’re spread so thin that anxiety just isn’t reliable anymore, or your nervous system is already running on fumes, or you’re proactively looking for a way to support your working memory that feels better than living from panic — that’s what we’re talking about next.

What Are Breadcrumbs?

I was inspired by the Brothers Grimm fairy tale Hansel and Gretel, where two children go into the forest and leave themselves a trail of breadcrumbs so they can find their way back out. (Spoiler: it doesn’t end well for the breadcrumbs. The birds eat them. The kids get lost. It’s a whole thing.)

We’re going to use smarter, inedible breadcrumbs. Little pieces of context and detail that guide us back to the work — to the task, to what past us was thinking — without having to reconstruct everything from scratch or rely exclusively on anxiety to ensure we don’t forget.

There are three types of breadcrumbs I find especially useful. I call them the Scene-Setter, the Handoff, and the Look-Ahead.

The Scene-Setter: Give Your Future Self the Full Picture

The Scene-Setter is what we’re building when we write a task into our ADHD to-do list and, instead of writing the bare minimum, we give our future selves the full picture.

So instead of “call doctor,” it becomes: “Call the specialist’s office. Ask whether they have the test results, what the follow-up process looks like, and whether I need to reach back out or if the office will contact me.”

Instead of “schedule haircut,” it becomes: “Schedule haircut with Natalia on the 14th. Group photo is on the 15th, and I want to be blown out and ready. Call the salon at 555-123-4567.”

One of my clients described this as one of the biggest shifts in her own ADHD toolkit. Instead of writing a 2-3-word task, she gives herself the what, the why, the when, the who, and any details that might matter when the time comes. That way, when she comes back to her list, the task has already done the heavy lifting. She can focus all her energy on generating the energy to start — which, for our brains, is often one of the hardest parts. When we do the orienting work in advance, we take that cognitive load off future us. That’s a meaningful gift.

👉 Ready to apply these Concepts to your life? 

Here’s how we can work together:

Scene-Setters for Multi-Step Tasks

Another client had a savings account that qualified for a company match — for every dollar she put in, the company would match a certain percentage. But it was a multi-step process: make the deposit, wait for the match to come through, then contact her financial advisor to tell her how to invest it. She didn’t want to contact him too early, because then she’d just have to contact him again.

So instead of one vague task, she broke the whole thing into steps with the why at each one: “Put in $1,000 this month. If I don’t do it this month, I miss the match window. Then check the account weekly until the match appears. Once the match arrives, contact Cynthia so she can advise on how to invest it.”

That Scene-Setter holds the whole sequence for her. It tells her what she’s watching for, what triggers the next step, and why it matters.

The Scene-Setter is especially valuable when a task has both emotional weight and unclear next steps — things like medical follow-ups, financial paperwork, insurance forms, legal documents, job applications, school enrollment. These are the tasks where our brains are most likely to feel flooded and the whole process slips out of mind. A well-written Scene-Setter changes that. When the task already says “Follow up with the doctor’s office. Do they have the results? What are the next steps? Will they contact me or do I need to reach out?” — there’s no ambiguity. Future us opens the task and knows exactly what to do.

Yes, it’ll feel like overkill when you write it. I promise it won’t feel that way when you come back to it.

The Handoff: Make It Easier to Step Away Mid-Project

The Handoff is specifically for those moments when we have to step away from a project before we’ve reached a natural stopping point.

We’ve all been there. You finally get into flow on something you’ve been circling for days — you’re in it, you’re making progress — and then you hit a hard stop. And if you’re like me, every part of you resists this switch. One of the reasons there’s so much resistance is the fear that once you stop, you won’t be able to get back in. So either you push through past your natural stopping point, making yourself late for the next thing, or you finally stop and then dread returning so much that days or weeks go by before you open the file again.

The Handoff is what changes that.

When you reach a stopping point — even an uncomfortable, mid-thought one — you take just sixty seconds to write yourself a note. It can live right in the document you’re working on, in a task, in a separate note. And it starts with:

This is where I left off. Here’s where I’m going next.

Then you write down what you were in the middle of, what you were thinking about, what the next two or three steps look like. Bullet points work great. Full sentences work too. Whatever gets it out of your head and into a place where future you can find it.

I learned this from my mentor in grad school — he mentioned in passing that’s how he always did his writing. He intentionally left an unfinished sentence so when he came back to the work, he could start by finishing the sentence and build up momentum immediately. It worked for my brain too, and I’ve been using it for 15+ years.

The Handoff in Practice

When I was building my course, Overwhelm to Action, the process happened in sprints. During slower seasons in my business, I’d have stretches of focused time to work on the material. Then something would pick up, and I’d have to set it aside entirely.

When I’d come back without a Handoff note, it felt like climbing a flat wall with no hand holds. I’d open the files and feel a wave of overwhelm — which is ironic, given I was creating a course on overwhelm — combined with disorientation. Where was I? What was I building toward? All of that orientation work took energy, and it made returning feel like such a lift that I’d sometimes avoid opening the project at all.

But when I left myself a good Handoff — where I was, what I was thinking about, the next three small things to tackle — returning even months later felt manageable. The note was like a warm welcome back into the work, one that said: you already know what you’re doing here, and here’s the reminder of what comes next.

What I love most about the Handoff is that it actually makes it easier to stop. When we know we’ve left ourselves a trail back in, we don’t have to white-knuckle through to the finish in one sitting. We can step away, rest, come back, and the work will be right there waiting — with a warm on-ramp instead of a wall.

Discover Your ADHD Overwhelm Type!

TAKE THE QUIZ HERE!

In less than a minute, you’ll discover your primary overwhelm pattern, understand the obstacles it creates, and get tailored strategies designed for your brain’s natural response style.

The Look-Ahead: Leave Notes for a Future Version of You

The Look-Ahead is about leaving notes in the months ahead — for a future version of us who will thank us for it.

That same client who uses the Scene-Setter also has a monthly workflow she does at the beginning of each month — a review and reset she finds really helpful. But for a while, it kept sliding off her radar. So she created a full-day recurring event in her Google Calendar on the first of every month, with all the steps of her monthly review written out in the event details.

She shared a detail worth noting: it has to be a full-day event. A small one-hour block at 8am requires clicking to expand — which creates friction, and she just won’t do it. A full-day event is big enough to read all the steps on her phone without clicking anything. That visibility is what makes it work.

The recurring invite holds her standing monthly workflow. But she also edits individual instances. If she knows something specific is coming up in August — a trip, a deadline, a task she wants to remember — she goes ahead to August’s first-of-the-month event and leaves a note there. When August arrives, it’s already waiting for her.

I do something similar in my own task manager, where I keep running lists for each month. I leave myself breadcrumbs ahead of time — things that tend to come up in certain seasons, links to recipes I make every Thanksgiving, notes like “only make a serving of twelve, the portions are giant.” And future reminders like “Book a May appointment to pressure wash the house and windows with Squeegee Magic” left in March, so when March rolls around, it’s already there.

These are Look-Aheads: little notes planted in a future month, waiting to be found. They take the pressure off our current brains to remember. When something occurs to us — a thing we’ll need in three months, a task that belongs in a future season — we don’t have to trust our memory to hold it. We go to that month and put it there. We let it go. And when we get there, it’s already handled.

How to Start This Week

We have three types of breadcrumbs for better ADHD task management:

  • The Scene-Setter for individual to-do list items
  • The Handoff for mid-project pauses
  • The Look-Ahead for future months

I invite you to try one of them this week. And if you’re not sure where to start, I’d say the Handoff.

Specifically: the next time you’re in flow on a project and you feel that pull of “I can’t stop now or I’ll never get back in” — that’s your moment. Instead of pushing through past your natural stopping point, or stepping away and dreading the return, I encourage you to pause, set a timer for sixty seconds, and leave yourself a note. Write down where you are, what you were thinking, and what comes next. Then give yourself permission to step away.

The Handoff is a practice in trusting future you. It’s how we build projects over time, in the actual increments of time we have available, without needing to do it all in one sitting. And over time, I think you’ll find that it shifts your whole relationship with returning to the work — because the return will feel like a warm on-ramp rather than a wall you have to scale before you can even begin.

In Episode 363, You Will Discover:

  • Why ADHD working memory causes our notes and to-do lists to lose meaning over time
  • Three types of breadcrumbs that help us pick up where we left off
  • How to start using this approach this week

Work With Me:

Resources From This Episode:

More ADHD Resources:

Leave IBBA A Rating & Review!

If you enjoy the podcast, would you be a rockstar and leave a review? Doing so helps others find the show and spreads these tools to even more people.

  1. Go to Apple Podcasts
  2. Click on the I’m Busy Being Awesome podcast
  3. Scroll down to the bottom of the page, where you see the reviews.
  4. Simply tap five stars; that’s it!
  5. Bonus points if you’re willing to leave a few sentences sharing what you enjoy about the podcast or a key takeaway from the episode you just heard. Thanks, friend!
Paula Engebretson - ADHD Coach and Pdacster

About Paula Engebretson

ADHD COACH | PODCASTER

I spent the first 31 years of my life thinking I just needed to “try harder” while dealing with crushing self-doubt, perfectionism, and imposter syndrome. Then I was diagnosed with ADHD.

Finally understanding the missing puzzle piece, I discovered how to work with my brain, build upon my strengths, and take back control of my life.

Now I help others with ADHD do the same. Learn more.

Scroll to Top