There have been so many folks reaching out to me over the last few days, in support, in solidarity, or in search of some extra advice as they start their own journey. That’s super touching and super rewarding, and it’s fuelled my desire to share more of my own story, and to share some of the things I am finding useful to get through each day.
This is the first of (hopefully) many posts detailing one of the most important things for me during this transition to “new normal”: My ADHD toolkit. It consists of an ever-changing, updating, growing, morphing set of tips, tricks and tools that I use to manage myself day to day. Today I’m going to introduce you to the app that’s helping me become a domestic superhero, Tody.
Okay so maybe “superhero” was a bold choice of word. Tody is helping me become more capable of looking after my own damn self and contributing to keeping our household in order.
TL;DR – Tody gamifies cleaning your house with a daily auto-generated to-do list.
Tody – as far I can figure – is a mashup of the words tidy, to-do and today. The premise is that it generates a daily list of ALL of your regular domestic tasks and allows you to collaboratively attend to them while trying to outdo “Dusty”, a mouthy, messy dust cloud who is trying to undo all of your good work. So simply put: it gamifies cleaning.
It takes a while to set up the app but once you have, it’s a dream to use. You have to set up each of the rooms or zones in your house and then create a list of tasks that you might regularly do in each of those rooms, including the frequency with which you think they should be done. Tody does include some auto-magic in this set up though, and can suggest rooms, tasks and frequencies for you. Don’t panic if you can’t get them ALL set up immediately. I’m about 12 weeks into using the app and I’m still constantly massaging my list.
Once you are sufficiently set up, Tody will generate todays’ to-do list for you, and you simply go about your day checking off the things on your list. For the duration of the current calendar month you will gain points for each of the things you tick off. Dusty will do their level best to run around and mess up the house for you and earn points against you. And therein lies the best trick of all. It becomes a race against an imaginary dust cloud who is actually the one making the mess. It’s not me. It’s not my fault the house is messy. It’s Dusty.
As far as I can figure the friendly gamification is one of the reasons it works so well for me. Generally I see gamification for what it is – a way to grab my attention and keep it. And for the most part I don’t like that in an app. But I also feel like – unlike other gamified apps – Tody is doing it for my own good, and for that I am actually grateful. Making Dusty the cause of all the mess means that it takes away a lot of the shame I feel about not being able to keep my house tidy too. I can mentally separate myself from my clutter and feel more positive about the fact that I’m keeping on top of it.
The weirdest bit is, once I get the motivation to start on my daily list, I find myself looking for other jobs that need doing. Even if they’re not due for another couple of days. One of my tasks is to surface clean my coffee machine. I told Tody I want to do this once a week, but I find myself doing it every two or three days because it’s visually adjacent to my daily kitchen counter wipe task. My kitchen (and my head) love me for it. It’s infectious. And amazingly powerful for an ADHDer looking for that dopamine hit.
I haven’t been an iOS user in forever, but one really cool feature that Android app has is the widget you can place on your home screen. Makes my daily progress suuuuuper visible every time I unlock my phone.
I love it. It’s totally changed my cleaning habits, and that was one of the main drivers for me seeking assessment in the first place.
Full disclaimer: I do share this app with Queen Bee and for that we are paying a NZD$35 per annum subscription.
Download Tody for Android from the Google Play store or for iOS on the App Store.
My ADHD Playlist 
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