You know that important thing you’ve been trying to remember all day? Good news: your brain remembered it. Bad news: you’re driving. Or showering. Or lying in bed. Or listening to your kid’s teacher talk and trying very hard not to pull out your phone.
In this episode of Control Alt Think: Conversations with Neurodivergent Minds, Amy Voros and Megan King talk about the very specific experience of remembering things at exactly the moment you can’t actually do anything about them. Because apparently working memory has a schedule, and it did not consult us.
Megan shares her literal version of “put a pin in it”—pressing her fingernail into her finger and refusing to let go until she can get back to the thought. Amy connects the experience to working memory, task switching, and what happens when our brains finally stop focusing long enough for all those other thoughts to wander back in.
Naturally, this leads to possible scaffolds: notebooks by the bed, digital reminders, morning routines, waterproof paper…and the discovery that children’s bathtub crayons may actually be an executive function tool in disguise. Sometimes there’s a system. Sometimes there’s just, “Ah, it’ll come to me.”
They also get into the dangerous little bargain of, “If it’s really important, I’ll remember it”—followed immediately by Megan’s brain essentially saying, “Challenge accepted.” Because nothing says reliable productivity system quite like remembering the tax thing while driving down the road.
There may not be a brilliant solution in this episode. Mostly, there’s working memory, weird physical reminders, strategic scaffolding, terrible timing, and two neurodivergent people realizing that yes, apparently we all remember The Thing when we are least capable of doing The Thing.
#ADHD #Neurodivergent #WorkingMemory #ExecutiveFunction #ADHDProductivity #ADHDTips