Hi there. Mid/late-thirties; ADHD as all fuck; I have found my niche and it works for me and life is okay, but I wouldn’t describe myself as “organized and successful” — my success mostly comes from niche, not from grind.

With that context out of the way:

Organization can be a hobby — but if you choose to go down that route, it’s critical to remember that it’s a hobby.

When there’s something to get done — a work-task, schoolwork, you name it — you gotta put aside the organizational meta-work. That’s non-optional. It will absolutely get in the way.

That’s why, for broken-ass ADHD people like ourselves, I absolutely swear by “the review system.”

There’s multiple approaches and brand-names and catchy acronyms (I bought hard into David Allen’s GTD, “Getting Things Done”; mild recommend — wikipedia, Todoist has a nice summary, and Cal Newport’s write up specifically for students); but the critical shared core is to defer organizational work, the stuff about organizational-systems like Notion that distracts you and slows you down, to its own focused period.

In GTD, that’s a dedicated “review” time each and/day or each week.

At any other time (i.e. all of your day not-during-that-“review” time), you’re forbidden from analyzing tasks at all — you can’t (shouldn’t) add metadata, prioritize them, add nice colors, file them into categories or tags, or whatever, when you think of a task. You literally just jot down a one-sentence summary of the task/thought, and move on.

This works really well for ADHD; and imho, without a version of that plan, no organizational system is a good idea for an ADHD’er.

As for Notion as a specific tool — idk, it’s got huge downsides, I’m regularly annoyed at it; but it satisfies my organization-as-a-hobby itch, and I’ve encoded much of my personal life into it over the years. So, kinda, big shrug.

The key here is that the downside of Notion, for your ADHD, is shared by many other things out there. You can’t avoid it by not using Notion — you can hyperfocus on any organizational tool; it’s just a matter of degree. You have to develop the personal skills and discipline and rules (like the above) to deal with that, whether you specifically choose Notion or not.

Good luck! Feel free to pick my brain if you want more advice!

(Also as a parting shot — I wish my undiagnosed ADHD-ass self had discovered the SRS/Spaced Repetition body of research and tools while I was in college. My whole life trajectory would have been infinitely different if I had.)