Tommy Aliff

Data engineer and developer in Roanoke, VA. CS at Radford University; graduate work in data engineering. AWS and Oracle certified.

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I have ADHD. My problem has never been a shortage of ideas or effort. It’s holding a day together: what’s due, what I’m waiting on, and why I opened that tab twenty minutes ago.

So I use Claude as the scaffolding around my day. It isn’t a chatbot I visit now and then. It’s a system that remembers what’s going on, sorts what comes in, and asks me the right two questions at the end of the day. The point is to offload the work my prefrontal cortex struggles with: planning, sorting, remembering and choosing. That frees my attention for the work itself.

I like thinking about daily tasks in terms of heuristics (heuristic is just a fancy way of saying “rule of thumb.”) - I’m not just trying to sound smart (not just that, LOL). I believe it’s a good paradigm for someone with ADHD, like me: figure out what can be automated and free up the executive part of your mind for the difficult work. A heuristic is a mental shortcut that saves you from working a decision out from scratch every time. Here are eleven heuristics that make my work with Claude smooth and efficient.

(I work on a Mac. Most of these features exist on Windows too, but I can only vouch for the Mac.)

Part 1: Build the scaffolding

1. Keep your brain in files, not in chats. A chat is a conversation, and conversations end. I keep one home document per area of my life inside a Claude Project: a Career Hub, a Personal Hub, a list of post ideas. Claude reads them at the start of a session and updates them at the end. If a chat closes or runs too long, nothing is lost.

2. Open and close every day the same way. My day starts with three words, “start my day,” and ends with two: “wrap up.” Both are saved as skills. A skill is a set of instructions Claude follows the same way every time you call it, so the routine never drifts and starting doesn’t take willpower. For me, that consistency is the most important piece of the whole system. Here’s what’s inside mine:

  • Start my day: check today’s calendar, sort the voice notes from my phone, scan email and messages, and tell me only what needs action today.
  • Wrap up: ask two questions. What got done today? What’s the plan for tomorrow? Anything that needs a decision gets flagged along the way, and then Claude updates the home files.

3. Plan around the attention you actually have. I get about five good hours a day. I don’t fight that; I schedule around it. The focus block goes on the calendar the night before. Inside it, the dull-but-necessary work comes first, and the thing I enjoy comes last as the reward. Errands go in the other half of the day. If I get work done outside the focus block, I consider it a bonus.

4. Capture now, sort later. Ideas arrive at bad times. Claude is the default assistant on my phone, so a voice note lands in an inbox document in seconds. In a session, a line that starts with “IDEA:” gets filed and we go straight back to work. The next morning’s routine sorts the pile. Nothing gets lost, and nothing derails what I’m doing.

5. Connect the tools you already use. Claude now reaches a lot of my world directly: calendar, email and documents through connectors, and websites through my Chrome browser. The browser integration has been the big change. I used to sit and wait while it checked one site at a time. Now it checks several in parallel, gets around them easily, and comes back fast with answers (and questions where appropriate; through its instructions, I encourage Claude to ask questions often). My morning check covers email, Facebook and LinkedIn in a matter of seconds without me opening a single tab (mind you, I’m no influencer, so the boxes are not always overflowing 🙃).

Part 2: Talk to it the way you think

6. Don’t tidy your messages. I think out loud. I have to say a thing before I understand it, and my messages come out as run-ons, especially from my phone. That’s fine. Dump it as it comes, then end with the actual question and say what you want back: a list, a draft, five lines. The more specific, the better. If I don’t know the specifics yet, I say that too, and we work them out together before Claude starts. One more habit that helps: a few words of framing. Is this a rule from now on, or just this once?

7. Give feedback in three parts. What was wrong, what you wanted instead, and whether it’s a rule. “Too long, I skimmed it, give me five lines, always” is a complete piece of feedback. I continuously hone the routine in this way because it’s rarely ever going to be right at first.

8. Say your ideas before it says its own. When I’m brainstorming, I dump everything first, Claude mirrors it back, and only then does it add its own ideas. If it suggests first, I anchor on its polished idea and my half-formed one is gone.

Part 3: Protect your attention

9. Hide what isn’t due. A to-do list that shows everything is a wall, and I stop reading walls. My wrap-up shows only what got done, what needs a decision, and what’s due in the next few days. Everything else carries forward silently, and once a week we prune the full list. My “waiting on” list holds only real asks, like an approval or an answer, not every conversation I’m in.

10. Hand off the admin, keep the judgment. Claude reads my email and calendar, keeps the logs, tracks the dates, and drafts the routine messages. It also makes the small calls that don’t matter much, like which section a paragraph belongs in, because making those costs me more than they’re worth. I make the decisions that matter. Anything that goes out under my name gets read by me first, sounds like me, and has to be true.

11. Match the effort to the job. Most daily work runs fine on the default model and effort setting. I save the biggest model and the highest effort for the single hardest problem of the week, like a design decision or something that has to be exactly right. Running the heavy setting all day just burns through usage limits. Cheap mode for sorting, expensive mode for judgment.

What doesn’t work

It isn’t magic, and pretending otherwise would undo the whole point.

  • It can’t go everywhere. For everything in heuristic 5, there are still gaps. If I’m signed out of a site or haven’t granted it access, it can’t check there. The list of connectors has grown a lot, but my personal Microsoft Outlook account, for example, can’t be connected directly, so Claude goes through my browser instead. Some mornings the inbox check comes back half empty, and I look myself.
  • It will happily make your list longer. A good idea can quickly turn into a fully formulated task that has suddenly taken me off course of where my session was supposed to be going.
  • It can still get things wrong, or leave things out. Blatant made-up answers are less common than they used to be. The subtler problem is what’s missing: a detail it never had, or an answer built on information that has gone out of date, so I read everything before it goes out and tell it when something has changed.
  • Long chats run out of room. That’s why the files exist. When a chat gets long, the work is already saved, and a new chat picks up where it left off.

Start with one thing

Picking just one thing and starting on it is easier said than done with ADHD, so keep it small. Start with a home file and a wrap-up: one document that holds what’s going on, and the two questions from the top of this piece, asked at the end of every day. Everything else in my system grew from there. Save your wrap-up as a skill right away, even if it isn’t right yet. That’s the beauty of it: every time something doesn’t fit, tell Claude and it updates the skill.

Which one thing could you take off your plate?

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