External memory: making your home remember for you

You walk into the bedroom and what you came in for has gone.

You stand there in the middle, looking at the bed without seeing it, waiting for it to come back. Sometimes it comes back if you retrace your steps to the door and walk the same way again.

And on the way back down the hallway you trip over the envelope you left on Thursday on top of the laptop keyboard, on its edge, so it couldn't be opened without picking the envelope up.

That one you did do. That one left the house on time.

What this is and what it isn't

This is a mechanism and a way of setting up a house. It's nobody's portrait: recognizing yourself here doesn't mean you have ADHD.

And it has to be said early, because it's the honest part: almost none of what follows has trials behind it. What there is, is one measured mechanism and a very widespread practice that nobody has checked properly.

The head has a small table

To do almost anything you have to hold on to something while you do something else: the number while you look for the pen, the reason while you cross the hallway, the three steps left while you do the first one.

That table where things get held in the meantime is small in everybody. What varies is how much it holds.

That has been measured. In 2005, Willcutt and colleagues pulled together dozens of studies on this kind of operation in ADHD and found clear differences, moderate in size.

The honest part: the conclusion of that same work is that those differences aren't enough to explain every case, and that they don't have to be there every time either. It describes a machine; it doesn't hand out names.

And out of that comes something short and useful: remembering isn't a moral virtue. It's an operation that spends energy, and it doesn't spend the same everywhere.

And if the work has a cost, the cost can be shared out. That's all that comes after this.

Whatever gets put away in its place stops existing

Commonly used.

In a tidy house, everything is where it should be. Put away. Closed. Out of sight.

For a memory that runs tight, that's the same as not having it. What isn't seen doesn't show up in the head at the moment it was needed.

That's why the houses that work for these heads usually look a bit untidy from outside: there are things sitting on top of places. And they aren't there out of neglect. They're there working.

The honest part: this gets said constantly and nobody has trialed it in adult women with ADHD. It's a reasonable idea alongside the mechanism above, not a result.

The house that remembers: five places

None of the five is proven. They're ways of taking the work out of the head and leaving it out in the world, which is the only thing they have in common.

The leaving place

Commonly used.

One point, and only one, that everything leaving the house with you goes through. A chair, a tray, a stretch of countertop.

The rule isn't that it be tidy: it's that nothing that has to go out ends up anywhere else.

The honest part: it has no studies. Its charm is that it asks you to remember nothing, only to pass through one spot.

Leaving it in the way

Commonly used.

Not nearby. In the middle. The trash bag hooked on the inside doorknob, the folder on top of the keyboard, the envelope on its edge where it can't be gone around.

What gets left beside things turns into scenery in two days. What gets in the way doesn't.

The honest part: this hasn't been trialed either. And it has a known limit: put out too much of it and everything is in the way and nothing gives notice.

One single inbox

Commonly used.

One single place where everything you don't want to lose lands, at the moment it turns up. A notebook, a note on your phone, a scrap of paper.

Writing things in ten places is almost the same as not writing them, because afterwards you have to remember which of the ten.

The honest part: it's an organizing idea as old as the hills, with nothing behind it in this population.

The alarm for the switch, not for the hour

Commonly used.

Almost all alarms are set for the time to start something. The one usually missing is the one for letting go of what came before: the one that goes off ten minutes before you have to leave, not once you should already be out.

The honest part: no trials. And with a price: too many alarms and they stop being heard.

The photo as a note

Commonly used.

For what doesn't fit in a notebook: where you parked, how it was put together before you took it apart, the label on the filter, the shelf in the supermarket.

Taking a photo costs two seconds and doesn't ask you to choose words, which is what usually holds up the writing down.

The honest part: it works for concrete, visual things and not for the rest. And the camera roll turns into a pile where nothing can be found either, so it's good for hours or days, not for months.

And then there are the other people living there

This is the part no article about organizing tells, and it's the one that makes these systems fall over.

A house with more people in it has other hands. And other hands tidy: they pick the envelope up off the keyboard and put it with the envelopes, they put away the bag that was on the doorknob, they clear the chair in the hallway because it's a chair.

They do it to help. And from where they're standing, what was there was a mess, because somebody else's scaffolding looks an awful lot like a mess.

The only thing there is here is the obvious, and even so it almost never gets said out loud: that has to be told. That this particular pile isn't a pile. That this one doesn't get touched.

It isn't a small request and it isn't always taken well. And not telling it costs more, because the system falls over and on top of that it looks as though it fell over on its own.

What this doesn't do

It doesn't fix the mechanism. The table is still the size it is.

And it has a social cost almost nobody counts: a house set up like this looks untidy from outside, and someone is going to say so. Explaining that the pile is a system is tiring, and it doesn't always get explained to people who take it well.

What gets explained, and to whom, isn't for an article to decide.

What happens in houses and never gets shown

The third charger, bought because the other two are somewhere in this same house.

The birthday remembered the same day at night, with the message sent at the wrong hour and a short excuse.

The shopping done twice in the same week, and the three identical boxes in the cabinet that no longer fit.

And the most expensive one: having moved a piece of paper out of the way because someone was coming over, and not seeing it again until the notice arrived saying it hadn't been paid.

When this is something else

If the forgetting started recently, if it's clearly getting worse, or if it comes with other things on top, that gets looked at in an appointment and not in an article. Your primary care doctor is a good first place, and telling them what happens and since when is enough.

What holds the house up

That holding things in the head costs more in some heads than in others is measured, and it repeats.

That leaving them outside the head helps makes all the sense in the world alongside that mechanism, and nobody has checked it with adult women.

So if there's a pile on your table that's saving your week, that pile stays. And if none of this holds up for you, that says nothing about you either.

This is educational support, a complement to medical care and never a substitute for therapy or treatment. Nobody is diagnosed here.

And if everything you've been holding up on your own came down on you while you read this, the Map starts by putting it in order. It's free, it takes a few minutes, and it won't tell you what you have: it hands your own tangle back to you, in order.

And one more thing, set apart from everything above. If you find yourself thinking you don't want to be here, that doesn't wait for an appointment: tell someone today, a professional or a crisis or emergency service in your country. And if something is getting away from you, with drink, with food, with whatever it is, that's one to take to a professional too. It isn't that there's no room here for how you're feeling: it's that they can help you better there than here. No talking around it, and nothing to be ashamed of.

Where this comes from

• Willcutt et al. (2005). Biological Psychiatry.