I used to be so overwhelmed by my kitchen. It’s embarrassing to say, but it seemed impossible for me to keep it clean and mildew-y dishes in the sink became a regular occurrence. When friends came over unexpectedly, I was mortified.
It’s one of the hardest rooms in the house to keep clean. Everyone is in and out of the kitchen all the time, so of course it is! Plus, prepping food and cooking it dirties up so many dishes and we have to do it so much… UHG! Then, because we have to do all of this 3 times a day, it very, very quickly becomes too overwhelming.
So, in my hour of desperate need for relief, I turned to the “common wisdom” for organizing the kitchen. I tried the cute storage containers they recommend, and the organizers, and the ‘cleaning schedule.’ But my efforts seemed to stall or fall apart in seconds almost.
Everyone else seemed to be able to keep their kitchen clean. Why couldn’t I?
Neurotypical Strategies don’t work for ADHD Organization…
I tried to do the stuff my mom did. Her kitchen was always clean. I just didn’t get that particular gene from here, apparently.
Just do a little bit every day, people told me. Then it’s never overwhelming! But I tried that. I just couldn’t maintain it for longer than a day or two.
Store your food in stackable containers! It looks pretty and keeps you organized! Okay, I started doing that but when it came time to refill the containers, it fell apart.
It was so frustrating because it seemed that by following the “wisdom” my kitchen became an even bigger wreck. It was just cereal boxes everywhere. But then it became cereal boxes everywhere and the unfilled container I bought to house the cereal that I stopped using. The spice bottles and the cutesy containers I spotted putting the spices in. It was a disaster.
We Need ADHD Friendly Organization Methods!
One day, I just got sick of it and started over. This came after my ADHD diagnosis and I had been cultivating ways to work with my brain instead of against in other areas of my life. Why not here, too?
After some trial and error, I found strategies that actually helped. A LOT. Even though I still hate doing dishes, I haven’t had a mildewed dish in years. For me, that was a huge accomplishment that told me, heck yes! This is verifiably working.
When I went through some hard times and really struggled to get myself to clean anything, I expected the entire house to fall apart, especially the kitchen. It always did before, even when I was on my game, so why wouldn’t it now? What ended up happening shocked me.
You see, the strategies I had put in place kept my kitchen from ever getting to the place of complete overwhelm. You know the kind. There’s the overwhelm of just doing dishes because it sucks to do dishes and there’s the overwhelm of every dish in the house being dirty with at least half of them covered in mold and mildew from sitting in the sink for a week. The first kind of overwhelm was still there, but the second kind wasn’t. The strategies I had put in place forced me to deal with the first kind of overwhelm before it could progress into the second.
So even though I was struggling to do much of anything, my kitchen didn’t fall apart. My strategies meant that it took longer for it to get dirty, it limited how dirty it could get, and it forced me to have to deal with the kitchen more regularly even though I wanted to do it even less than usual.
So I developed it into a guide: The ADHD Kitchen Organization Guide, to be exact.
In the guide, you’ll find:
That proved to me that I had discovered something special and that I had to share it.
- Step by step to do lists for getting rid of stuff in the kitchen and the pantry and how to determine what to keep
- A guide for how to keep the counters clean and another for organizing your cabinets with worksheets included for both
- Another step by step to do list for whipping your kitchen organization into shape
- Tips to keep the fridge cleaned out
- Ways to organize your pantry in a way that works better for you with another step by step to do list to help you do it
One of the best things about this guide, in my totally biased opinion, is the to do lists. Print them out and put them up in the kitchen so that when you finish a task on the list, you can check it off. This does a few things for us. It keeps us from having to try to figure out what we did yesterday in order to know what to start working on today. And the guide shows exactly what we need to do next so we don’t have to waste our mental space trying to decide. Plus, seeing up on the wall is a visual cue to remind us to do something on the list when we walk in the room.
The worksheets walk you through how to apply certain tips for your specific needs because, let’s face, no two kitchens are the same, right? And the guides explain why certain strategies help us so that you can be learning the ‘why’ behind ADHD strategies that work.
Buy Now!If you are:
👉 Overwhelmed by a kitchen that seems out of control
👉 Have struggled to find solutions that work for you
👉And ready for something that works for the ADHD brain
Then the ADHD Kitchen Organization Guide is for YOU. It’s created by an ADHD brain, for other ADHD brains.
Ready to get started? Let’s do this!
