Cheatsheet App is the Sticky Note App My ADHD Has Been Looking For.

Ubiquitous reminders are sometimes what it takes.

My working memory is basically shit.

I can be introduced to you and thirty seconds later have not idea as to your name. My partner tells me what kind of breakfast sandwich she’d like, and in the time it takes me to get to the drive-thru I’ve forgotten.

After decades of fighting it and feeling guilty, stupid, and ridiculously inadequate, I learned about my ADHD brain, and things changed.

Most people have a bucket for their memory, I realized. I have a colander.

Once I stopped treating my colander-head like a bucket, things got better. I learned to make up little songs about people’s names (Dan, Dan, the Airplane Man! Oh, Ben, Wa Kenobi!). I didn’t ask my partner to tell me what she wanted; I had her text it to me on the way.

That’s not my hack, nor is it peculiar to ADHD. Everybody forgets things some of the time; that’s the whole reason the sticky-note industry exists.

There’s not enough sticky notes in the world for my ADHD brain, though, and to add to the problem, I work best when I work in multiple locations. So putting a sticky note on my desk won’t be very useful, because I’m only working at my desk about 30% of the time.

Defining the Problem: Easy, Obvious, and Inevitable

In order to find the right system, I needed three things to happen, things that were similar to the Voweling My Habits framework:

1. It needed to be as easy to use as a scribbled piece of paper
2. It needed to be really obvious about what needed to be done (no subtle clues or elaborate color-coding; hit me over the head with a clue-by-four, please).
3. It needed to inevitably show up somewhere that I would see it, no matter where I was working.

That third one had a pretty obvious answer: my watch. It remains the most useful tool to externalize my various executive functions, and it’s something I put on first thing in the morning and don’t take off until I go to bed.

Even better, most “sticky note” apps for the watch also can be mirrored to my phone and sometimes even my desktop; that meant that whatever I was trying to remind myself of would be extra inevitable.

(Yes, I’m aware that inevitable is superlative and therefore can’t be “extra”. Just trust me that this particular use of the term is really, really superlative.)

And there are a whole lot of apps that I can be obvious on: words, formatted text, images, icons, voice memos…

But that’s where the trouble came in: choice is friction. If I had an app that made me choose what format to use, or where to put it, or how often to show it, it was swiftly going to take my brain not only off what I was trying to remind myself to do, but also away from whatever I was doing when that thought occurred to me.

Here’s a short but incomplete list of the candidates I tried and rejected:

• Drafts
• Apple Notes
• The Official Sticky Notes App
• Reminders
• TickTick
• Sticky widgets
• Jot
• Notability

None of those are bad apps. I use some of them every day, for other things. But all of them either were too complex to use easily, or couldn’t show up in the places I needed in the format I needed.

I even spent a large part of an afternoon fiddling with glue, tape, scissors, and sticky notes, trying to create a prototype of a sticky notepad that would mount on my watch wristband.

Finally, though, a little app that wasn’t even supposed to be a “notes” app caught my eye…

Enter Cheatsheet, the Working Memory App.

I should start with a disclaimer: the makers of Cheatsheet have no idea I’m writing about their app, and I don’t get anything for writing it — in fact, I’ve already paid for the app (yes, it’s a yearly subscription, but at the time of this writing it’s $5.99 US, which is a lot cheaper than sticky notes).

Here’s how it works:

1. I set up the complication on my watch, on whatever face I want, but preferably so it is one that will show some text:
   

   

2. I go into the iPhone app or the watch app and set a few “cheats”: maybe information that I often need to look up (like our co-op member number) and various daily habits I’d like to do, such as “log food” or “draw” or something.
   

   

3. These are put in order of priority: what is the next thing I don’t want to forget? This is because of the one killer function of this app: the cheat at the top of the list is the one that shows.
4. It automatically and quickly syncs with my watch, and I can see the next thing:
   

   

5. During the day, when I think of something that needs not just remembering, but doing — like “post my article” — I touch the complication on my watch, and quickly type, scribble, or say the thing into my watch.
   

   

6. If I have time, I can set an icon — but that’s ONLY if I want to. If not, I just hit the little arrow to add to the list (or, because I have it enabled on my watch, a quick double tap).
7. From that point on, until I do the thing, every time I look at my watch (or the widget on my phone or on my desktop) I will be reminded of it.
8. When I do it, it’s again a quick tap-swipe left-tap to delete that sticky note, and whatever’s next on the list goes to the top.
   

   

I know what you’re saying: lots of apps do that, Gray. Yes! They do! Along with notifications and alarms and lists and folders and such.

Which, to be fair, Cheatsheet has. But I don’t need to touch them if I don’t want to, and the interface is dead simple (I’m looking at you, TickTick).

Proof of concept: cat box and trash can

Does it work?

Oh, boy, does it.

Every Thursday my particular household duty is to clean out the cat box. I’ve put a recurring reminder in no less than three separate apps to remind myself of it; yet my record of doing on time is dubious at best.

Two thursdays in a row — including one that was incredibly packed and busy, with meetings, grandkids, and more — it was not only easy to remember, I was early.

Likewise, both my partner and I have trouble remembering the other Thursday chore — taking the trash cans out to the curb. And that Thursday we did forget it — but because “TRASH TO CURB” remained at the top of my Cheatsheet, I got it taken care of the next morning.

It seems like a small thing…but after literally years of trying to find some way to keep the temporary but important things easily in mind, finding something this easy and effective feels like a miracle.

Give it a try — or tell me what works for you? If you have a mind like a steel sieve, how do you plug the leaks?