• Never just wait in the kitchen. When something is boiling/cooking/idle use that time to clean.

  I’m going to preface this one by saying I have a messy kitchen most of the time. We just take plates there and leave them on the counter. feeding ourselves is hard enough without having to cleanup right after. Then there is some cooking task that requires a but of idle time, I use that time to clean while I wait. This has two advantages: it makes waiting easier (before I did this I regularly undercooked food), and it makes me not leave the kitchen while the stove is on. That is a big no no for me.

• Modify instant meals

  When feeding myself is hard, I like to modify instant/freezer meals. I always have shelf stable meals ready and a few plans to easily add to them. I find that most of them are a bit lacking in the protein department, so I have some easy ways to add some meat to them (canned sausages, tunna, cheese, peas).

• Having a smartwatch with a voice assistant is a godsend

  I bought a used galaxy watch 4 and I love it. I set timers and reminders on it all the time, the only time it’s not on my wrist is when it’s charging. I set timers for the oven, for the washing machine, and in general for something I need to get back to after some time. I set more descriptive reminders to a bunch of things. It finds my phone when I loose it, and it also helped me track my heart rate once I started medication

Thanks for the reply, it hasn’t fully clicked yet, but I’ll get there once I think about it some more.

Happy to help! Now what I don’t get under this knowledge is double and triple rainbows. If anyone can explain that to me I would be very grateful.

You’re almost there. It has to do with the angle of the sun and the water drops relating to the view point. Rainbows only show when the sun is behind you, and if you imagine a cone going out from the viewpoint outwards you get the possible paths of the rainbow (different radius different wavelength and therefore color)

A similar concept happens in certain reflective surfaces (metal pots and pans, car hoods and much more). You always see the tiny scratches in circles, but if you alter the angle in any way you keep seeing different scratch circles. This is because the circle you see in any given angle is the exactly the scratches that are turned just perfectly to reflect the light in the perfect way. It does not mean that the scratches you see at any given moment are the only ones. It means there are plenty, and only a few more visible at a time.

To me, playing around with the second concept (much easier to manipulate yourself and see) made me understand rainbows much better.

The way I’ve explained it before is that it’s like the autocomplete on your phone. Your phone doesn’t know what you’re going to write, but it can predict that after word A, it is likelly word B will appear, so it suggests it. LLMs are just the same as that, but much more powerful and trained on the writing of thousands of people. The LLM predicts that after prompt X the most likelly set of characters to follow it is set Y. No comprehension required, just prediction based on previous data.

Depending on the reason I’m feeling crappy, watch a comedy movie/series/video, listen to upbeat music, or play video games.

Perry the helicopter?!

I’m going to be an outlier here, since I got a boyfriend at 16 I was single for about 6 months. I dated that boyfriend for 6 years, spent some time single and then started dating my now husband. We were friends before I broke up with my ex, the breakup wasn’t related at all.

I’m not perfect at it, but what helps me is that I genuinely love to learn and I like to take the opportunity to learn from people when I meet them. I just need to find an entry point (job, hobby, something the person is knowledgeable about) and then I start asking questions, and applying the limited knowledge I might already have on the subject.

With short interactions with people that are working (supermarket, bank, restaurant, phone assistance) I usually go for empathy, and overall just being nice. When one comes to me I go for a joke to brighten their day a bit.

For the Sims 20th anniversary we got a free hot tub in the Sims 4 base game. It was ugly, and before the aniversary the hot tub as a selling point for a paid pack, so the people who spent money to get hot tubs got kinda mad.

Check your local library, some have dvds and Blu-ray disks available to borrow.

I don’t think “A watched pot never boils” was ever meant to be taken literally. The way I see it its more in the sense that if you just stand there looking at it the time it takes to boil will feel like forever.

I’d love to know too, I tried googling it a few times, no results.

I don’t know if this counts, but when hold my kindle and phone together and I click the unlock button on my phone the kindle turns on too. Doesn’t happen the other way around, I have no clue how it happens

To me a formal diagnosis gives you access to try medication if you want. Even if you’re not interested or ready for medication, a diagnosis (formal or not) can make it easier to find strategies and tools that work for you. Lots of general productivity advice just don’t work for ND folks, and looking for specialized tips makes a big difference.

To me having and accepting my diagnosis helped me accept me as I am and stop thinking I’ll magically be better next week or next month or next year. I now put systems in place to help me with my weaker points and that’s OK.

I’m not much for siting sideways, more for putting my knees up and my feet on the seat, whitch I can luckily get away with without it showing on camera

I work full remote, so I can’t give you options for in office specific stuff. For myself I always have a notebook and post it notes to replace short term memory. Also, silent fidget toys help me sit though meetings.

Working from home itself helps me work because I can control the environment around me to have less distractions. Also I can get up and sit weird and fidget in my seat without fear of getting called out or judged for it.

To me waiting mode is caused by not trusting myself to not loose track of time if I start doing something else. So I count back the time it will take me to be ready and in the right location and put a bunch of reminders/alarms.

For example, I need to be at the dentist at 4pm. I check Google maps on the time estimate for me to get there (I even put in the arrive time to account for traffic), then I add the time for me to be ready to leave, to park my car, to be there early, adding a bit of a buffer on every step. Then depending on what I want to do before the dentist I put in alarms. If I can stop any time I put an alarm for the time I need to get ready. If I need a bit of a buffer to finish something I put one half an hour early and one at the time to get ready.

Adding some extra times to the estimate is good because we are notoriously bad at estimating times. You get better the more you do it

I need some more info on this. So you have uncooked rice and put it with with water in the microwave to cook it?

Quick disclaimer, I don’t have a tidy house at all, and I get lots of help to keep it livable.

With that said, one thing that helped me be better is to just embrace the randomness and half finished tasks.

When moving from the living room to the kitchen I look around for stuff that belongs in the kitchen and take what I can carry. Once in the kitchen I just set it down and do what I meant to do in the kitchen (if I remember what it was!).

During idle times in the kitchen (waiting for the microwave, water to boil, stuff to cook) I start putting away the stuff that is there already. I can stop whenever I’m done with the main task, but at least some progress is made.

When going back to the living room I take stuff from the kitchen that belongs there if I can carry it.

Just a few examples, I know it doesn’t work with every household task, I use podcasts and my husband for the tasks that don’t fit into this.