Single-Action Strategy for Organizing Mess: Simplified Approach to Manage Disorder
The One-Touch Rule, a productivity and organization technique, can be a valuable tool for neurodivergent individuals. This method, often used outside of chess, encourages handling tasks or items only once to prevent repetitive dealing with them.
Benefits of the One-Touch Rule for Neurodivergent Individuals
The One-Touch Rule offers several advantages for neurodivergent individuals:
- Reducing Overwhelm and Distraction: By minimizing the repetition of switching focus between tasks or items, the One-Touch Rule helps reduce feelings of overwhelm and distraction.
- Improving Task Completion and Follow-Through: Encouraging immediate action upon first contact, such as filing, responding, or disposing, improves task completion and follow-through.
- Supporting Executive Functioning Challenges: The One-Touch Rule simplifies decision points and reduces procrastination, making it easier for those with executive functioning challenges to manage their tasks.
- Enhancing Organization: Efficiently managing inputs or to-dos prevents backlog accumulation, leading to a more organized work or living space.
- Minimizing Cognitive Fatigue: By reducing the mental load of remembering to come back to the same item repeatedly, the One-Touch Rule helps minimize cognitive fatigue.
Techniques for Implementing the One-Touch Rule
- Setting Up Designated Spots or Containers: Establish specific areas for incoming items/tasks to make quick decisions about their fate, such as filing, acting on, delegating, or discarding.
- Making Immediate Decisions or Small Actions: When encountering mail, emails, or physical items, make decisions or take small actions immediately rather than postponing.
- Time-Boxing Tasks: Allocate brief, focused periods to handle an item fully before moving on.
- Using Reminders or Timers: Support shifting attention quickly and completing the "touch" in one go by setting reminders or timers.
- Combining with Visual or Written Lists: Reduce reliance on memory and clarify priorities during the "touch" by combining the One-Touch Rule with visual or written lists.
- Simplifying the Process: Break tasks into manageable steps that can be addressed in one session or decision point.
While there are no direct references about the One-Touch Rule specifically for neurodivergent people, strategies that support neurodivergent learners, such as structured, clear, and strength-based approaches, align well with the One-Touch Rule.
In summary, the One-Touch Rule fosters streamlined task management and minimizes executive function strain, making it a practical technique especially beneficial for neurodivergent individuals when combined with structured support routines and organizational tools. The goal is to avoid wasting mental energy by handling the same thing over and over.
Additional Tips for Implementing the One-Touch Rule
- Use Checklists: Write out simple checklists for recurring tasks to help with consistency.
- Deal with Perfectionism: To move past perfectionism and keep your momentum, shift focus to progress, set time limits, and break down big goals into smaller steps.
- Manage Time Blindness: Make time visual, schedule "touch tasks", set reminders, and create external supports to overcome time blindness.
- Automate Where Possible: Use tools like automated calendar reminders or smart home devices to help remember important organizing actions.
- Break Tasks into Even Smaller Steps: If touching an item "once" feels too overwhelming, allow yourself to touch it twice-but with structure. For instance, move an item into an "action area" and schedule a specific time for follow-up.
- Accountability Partners: Ask a friend, partner, or family member to help you stay on track with the one-touch rule.
- The One-Touch Rule is about building habits that make things a little easier, one touch at a time. It's not about perfection, but about creating spaces and routines that support how your mind works.
- Use Visual Reminders: Visual reminders like transparent containers and labeled drawers, shelves, or bins can help reduce the mental effort of deciding where to put things.
- Create Sensory-Friendly Solutions: Adjust the system to fit sensory sensitivities. For example, use bins with smooth handles or pair sorting tasks with music you enjoy.
- The One-Touch Rule is a strategy designed to reduce stress, clutter, and repetitive tasks in everyday life.
- Neurodivergent women can benefit greatly from the One-Touch Rule, as it helps reduce anxiety associated with time management and decision-making by minimizing repetitive actions.
- The One-Touch Rule is beneficial for improving focus, productivity, and mental health, as it simplifies routines and promotes a healthier lifestyle both at home and in the garden.
- Science supports the effectiveness of the One-Touch Rule in maintaining organization and reducing cognitive fatigue, making it a valuable tool for neurodivergent individuals who struggle with executive function.
- Fitness-and-exercise, an essential aspect of overall well-being, can be better managed using the One-Touch Rule, enabling individuals to make quick, intentional decisions about workouts and self-care.
- Course creators and educators targeting neurodivergent learners can incorporate the One-Touch Rule into their teaching methodologies to promote a structured, clear, and strength-based approach in the classroom.
- Combining the One-Touch Rule with visual reminders such as labeled bins and transparent containers can create sensory-friendly solutions that cater to neurodivergent people's unique sensory needs.
- To overcome time blindness, neurodivergent individuals can utilize tools like smart home devices and calendar reminders that employ the One-Touch Rule to help manage schedules and tasks more efficiently.
- Creating accountability partnerships with friends, family, or partners can help encourage one another to stick to the One-Touch Rule, fostering a supportive environment for personal growth.
- Breaking down big tasks into manageable steps while implementing the One-Touch Rule can help alleviate perfectionism tendencies common in neurodivergent individuals, promoting progress and productivity.
- Embracing the One-Touch Rule as a lifestyle choice is not about achieving perfection, but rather about building habits that make daily life a little easier for neurodivergent individuals and everyone else.
