Breaking down instructions nonvisually with ADHD

I’ve been very open about the fact that I am both blind and have ADHD, and as a result I seem to be the go to person for non-visual ADHD strategies. I’ve been thinking of putting a post together for a long time where I share these strategies but the irony of having ADHD is that I keep forgetting to do it.

Why nonvisual strategies?

Many people with ADHD find it helpful to use colour and other visual cues to remind them of things they have inevitably forgotten. If you look up a list of ADHD management tools and strategies, the majority of them will be highly visual. This is because people with ADHD do tend to be visual learners, we are also very forgetful, and so if things are Visually obvious, you are more likely to remember them. This does not work when you are blind. Therefore, other strategies are needed to mitigate for you having both disabilities.

Many of the strategies that work for me are things I have had to come up with by myself. I say this so that you understand that they are likely not perfect. Some of them could certainly do with refining, and there are times where I still feel very frustrated that I don’t know a simple way of doing something, when I know that such a way exists visually.

I have learnt so many things, so I’m going to try and dedicate a blog post to each strategy, or for a group of related strategies when they are less complex. As the title indicated, this post looks at how to break down information, particularly instructions.

Breaking down information.

People with ADHD have difficulties with working memory. This means we cannot hold information in our head like neurotypical people can. We forget things we have only just been told, and if we are completing a task, we will forget crucial steps. It is therefore really important to be able to break down information into manageable chunks so that you can access it more easily and follow instructions.

One thing I find very difficult is large paragraphs of text. I can read long pieces of text if I am reading for pleasure or if I am reading something like a journal article, but I struggle to understand instructions that are written in this format. Unlike neurotypical people who may not find it ideal but can work with it, I easily get lost.

Break it down into steps.

If I am sent a paragraph of information that I need to turn into a workable set of instructions, the first thing I do is add a blank line in between every sentence. This helps me to break down the information into a format that I can already manage more easily. I then go through it line by line, working out which lines are useful and which are just filler. I remove the lines that aren’t critical, and then review what I have left. I can also re-order the lines at this point, if I’m in a situation where the person has mentioned something at the end that needs doing first. The last thing I do is condense each point so that it’s more concise and easier to work with.

Let us use the paragraph above as an example.

Stage 1, add a line in between each sentence:

If I am sent a paragraph of information that I need to turn into a workable set of instructions, the first thing I do is add a blank line in between every sentence.

This helps me to break down the information into a format that I can already manage more easily.

I then go through it line by line, working out which lines are useful and which are just filler.

I remove the lines that aren’t critical, and then review what I have left.

I can also re-order the lines at this point, if I’m in a situation where the person has mentioned something at the end that needs doing first.

The last thing I do is condense each point so that it’s more concise and easier to work with.

Stage 2, remove filler text.

If I am sent a paragraph of information that I need to turn into a workable set of instructions, the first thing I do is add a blank line in between every sentence.

I remove the lines that aren’t critical, and then review what I have left.

I can also re-order the lines at this point, if I’m in a situation where the person has mentioned something at the end that needs doing first.

The last thing I do is condense each point so that it’s more concise and easier to work with.

Stage 3, re-order and condense

• Add a blank line in between every sentence.
• Read through and remove filler text.
• Re-order instructions if necessary.
• Condense into more concise points.

Here are four short bullet points which started off as a large paragraph of instructions. These are much easier to work with in future, as it does not require you to try and synthesise all of that information and convert it into a set of instructions that are in a logical order. A sighted person might just highlight the key points, but we can’t do that. So we need to develop ways of turning it into a format that is going to work for us.

I feel like these sorts of skills are really important for the ADHD brain. There are definitely days when it’s easier and days when it’s harder, and of course it depends on the complexity of the text in the first place. But this is a strategy that I’ve had a lot of success with.

Breaking it down line by line allows me to handle one point at a time, rather than feeling overwhelmed by the amount of text in front of me. I don’t have to hold every other bit of information in my head, because I’m just dealing with one thing at once.

Could I just feed the text into something like ChatGPT and get it to do the work for me? Probably. Lets see what it comes up with when I ask it to turn this paragraph into brief bullet point instructions.

• Add a blank line between each sentence of the paragraph.
• Review each line to identify useful information and discard filler.
• Remove non-critical lines.
• Re-order the remaining lines if necessary, ensuring proper sequence.
• Condense each point for clarity and brevity.

As you can see, it came up with a pretty similar set of results to those that I created, although with an extra step and slightly different wording. It’s up to you whether you do this bit of the work yourself or outsource it to an LLM. I generally choose to do it myself to ensure that I’m not missing anything and that I’m identifying the points that are most useful for me. At the end of the day, if ChatGPT missed out something important and I hadn’t fully read the text, I wouldn’t know. But everyone will feel differently about this.

I apologise for writing such a long post on a fairly simple strategy. I hope that someone finds it helpful!