Losing Things in ADHD: Keys, Glasses, Phone, Wallet

I open the door with the key in my hand. Ten minutes later there is no key.

I do not remember where I put it, because the me who was putting it down was thinking about something else.

My father also always used to look for his keys. As a child I took this for one of his habits; getting angry never even crossed my mind, we laughed. In the years when I was looking for my own keys, I did not laugh. The same thing in me was a character flaw.

Losing things is one of the symptoms clearly listed among the diagnostic criteria (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Learning this loosened the standard I applied to myself a little.

Why it happens

The moment of putting down is not conscious. When you put an item somewhere, if your attention is elsewhere at that moment, the place is not recorded in memory. When you try to remember later, there is no record to be recalled.

This is less a memory weakness than an encoding problem: the information was never recorded in the first place. After learning this I reduced the time I spend searching, because I know that trying to remember will not work. There is nothing to remember.

Working memory is full. The study by Kofler and colleagues (2010) shows that working memory performs more weakly in ADHD. If you have five things in mind as you open the door, the place of the key does not fit in as the sixth. I explained the whole mechanism in the article on working memory and forgetfulness.

Intermediate stops. The item is put not where it belongs but on the nearest horizontal surface. Every intermediate stop means a new place where the item might be found. If a house has six horizontal surfaces, the key can be in six places.

Hurry. If I am rushing as I leave, the chance of the putting-down moment being conscious approaches zero. Being late is the most reliable precursor of losing.

Losing does not mean not remembering. It means never having recorded it.

The entry point rule

This is the single strongest rule in this area, and I saw its effect from the first day.

What: As soon as you enter the house, keys, wallet, cards and phone go to a single place. A bowl, a plate, a hook next to the door.

Why: It removes the decision about where to put things down. If no decision is made, no wrong decision is made either. This has become the common principle in all my systems: reducing the number of decisions is easier than increasing willpower.

Conditions:

• It must be very close to the door. A place three steps away does not get used; I tried, it does not get used.
• It must be a single place. Two points mean two places to search.
• It must be open. Something put into a closed box does not exist for me; the reason is object permanence.

In the glossary it appears as the entry point.

The duplicate rule

Deliberately buying two of the small things you keep losing: scissors, charger, nail clippers, pen, reading glasses.

It sounds wasteful. Once the time spent searching and the stress that searching creates are counted, it remains cheap. In the glossary it appears as the duplicate rule.

An extension of this is the ready bag. A second charger, a second pair of headphones and the necessities stay in the bag all the time, not gathered again at every departure. This is where I gain the most in the mornings; I also mentioned it in the article on the morning routine.

Other things that work

Saying it out loud. Saying "I'm putting the key on the table" as you put something down makes that moment conscious and increases the chance of it being recorded. It feels strange and it works.

Counting three things before leaving. As I walk out of the door I put my hand in my pocket and say "key, phone, wallet." Three words, two seconds. This cut most of my returns; noticing what I have forgotten at the front door is far cheaper than noticing it when I get to work.

Using a tracking device. The small finders attached to a key ring or wallet are the most direct technological solution to this problem. There is no need to see this as a defeat; it is like wearing glasses.

Every category having a home. Instead of deciding every time where an item will stay, deciding once and fixing it.

Storing things visibly. Open shelf, transparent box, hanging on the wall. What goes into a closed cupboard is forgotten. The details are in the article on the visible place system.

Putting what is in your hand where it belongs. Intermediate stops produce both piles and searching. This rule applies to all of the housework; I dealt with it separately in the article on housework.

Stop before you start searching. Searching in a panic ends with looking at the same places again and again. Stopping for thirty seconds and trying to remember the last moment you held it often gives a faster result than searching.

When searching for something lost

• Search in order. Instead of looking at random, go through the rooms in order. Searching in a panic ends with opening the same drawer three times.
• Look at horizontal surfaces. Items mostly sit on the first suitable flat surface.
• Look in pockets. The pockets of clothes are the most often skipped place.
• Think of unusual places. The fridge, the top of the washing machine, next to the rubbish bin. Wherever the item went at the moment your attention was scattered.
• Search out loud. Saying what you are looking for makes the search more orderly and reduces looking at the same place a second time.

Why the system collapses and how it is rebuilt

Setting up the entry point rule is easy. Keeping it up for two months is another job, and it collapsed on me several times.

The collapse always happens in the same way. I come in with my hands full, I cannot put the key in the bowl, I leave it on the table. The next day the same thing happens. On the third day the table becomes the new entry point, but because the table is messy the key gets lost in the mess on the table.

The solution to this was not getting angry with myself. Two things happened.

Moving the bowl to where my hand goes. If the rule does not fit my behavior, I change the rule. Wherever my hand goes, I put the bowl there. A person fighting their own automatic movement loses in the long run.

Not counting the collapse as an event. If the rule did not hold for a week, this does not mean the rule is over. Starting again the next day is enough. Before, when there was a break like this I would throw out the whole system and build a new one. The new system would also collapse from the same place three weeks later.

Today I use a single measure: how many times this week I looked for my keys. I do not expect it to be zero. Going down from five to two is enough for me.

The invisible side of this matter

The cost of losing is not only time.

When I cannot find my keys one morning, the day does not begin with the lost key; it begins with the anger I feel at myself. That anger goes into the meeting, into the text I write, and stays until evening. This is the real cost.

The second cost is shame. When you are late you cannot say why, because the sentence "I was looking for my keys" is not taken seriously. When you do not say it, you invent an excuse, and the lie itself becomes a separate burden.

That is why I do not see the entry point rule as an organizational measure. I see it as a way of protecting my morning. It is the cheapest system I have built, and it has given back the most so far.