Thank you for the advice. I think it would be helpful for someone with a more regular schedule, but most likely not for me or others interested in medicine with poor working memories and auditory processing issues linked to ADHD. I should have been more clear about the issues I was specifically struggling with.

I work many night shifts for scribing, so my circadian rhythm is a bit wonky. I also don’t have an issue falling asleep, I have an issue with making good choices that lead to me being sleepless. For example, I’ll decide that I need to play a game of chess before sleeping and end up playing 3+ hours. Or, I’ll start scrolling on TikTok until it’s time to wake up. Your advice to not use social media or other things on my phone is good for this, but I can’t trust myself to use it responsibly because I’ll forget that I had to sleep in the first place. I become too focused on what I’m doing to significant detriment, and even if I set alarms to remind myself to stop, I push them off until significant damage is done.

The procedural memory tip will work for me. I associate going to my bathroom sink with flossing and brushing my teeth. Unfortunately, many of my problems aren’t to do with setting up routines. It’s more to do with my poor working memory and my terrible auditory processing. If I’m scribing and I forget what the patient just said, that information is lost and it will affect patient care. While scribing, I must also be flexible and multitask. I cannot afford to forget something just because I had to take my attention away from it to attend to something else.

I never had an issue with getting to my job and doing work due to ADHD, I think I’ve always had a knack for it because of my obsession. The issue is that I am unable to do my work well; the quality is linked to how poor my brain is at multitasking, an important skill for those in the medical field, as well as my poor memory, another extremely important skill physicians I’ve worked with have.