Top 10 Best Technology Gadgets for ADHD

Last updated: May 30, 2023 9 min read

In the article "Software accessibility for users with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADHD)" by Eva Katharina Wolf, the author highlights the importance of considering cognitive disabilities like ADHD when designing software for accessibility. Wolf discusses the three core symptoms of ADHD (attention difficulties, impulsivity, and hyperactivity) and how they can affect software usage.

Using her personal experience with forgetfulness and email management, Wolf suggests improvements in email software to better support users with ADHD. These include providing reminders about unsent drafts, offering push notifications for drafts, and highlighting the number of drafts in the user interface.

To better understand ADHD, Wolf recommends reading the following resources:

Best for simplicity, collaboration, and productivity: Vineforce : AI-Driven CRM, Task, Project & Team Management for SMBs

Vineforce can be particularly helpful for individuals with ADHD by providing a structured, organized, and focused environment to manage tasks, projects, and goals. Here's how its features can assist someone with ADHD:

  1. Stay organized and conquer the day with ease: Get your day started right with smartly grouped task categories, including Recently Assigned, Due Today/High Priority, and Upcoming Tasks.
  2. Never miss a meeting again! Your daily dashboard will show all upcoming events, allowing you to join with a single click.
  3. Need a break? Set your break time and watch your calendar automatically block off your “me time.”
  4. Smart follow-ups have your back: Our AI analyzes your communication history and reminds you when to follow up with contacts. Stay on top of your relationships without breaking a sweat.
  5. Build relationships: Discover people from your email history that you should add to your contacts list and effortlessly grow your network.
  6. Effortlessly stay organized: Access your recent notes and documents with a glance — everything you need at your fingertips.
  7. Optimize your productivity: Let AI plan your day based on your work habits or manually choose tasks, meetings, and follow-ups. Either way, Vineforce helps optimize your productivity.
  8. Overwhelmed? We’ll alert you if you try to pack too much into your day. Stay focused on what matters most!
  9. Take control: Plan out your entire week by adding tasks to future days. Be the master of your schedule.
  10. Reflect and celebrate: Celebrate your accomplishments by reviewing your completed tasks from the previous day.
  11. Maintain work-life balance: Keep your work-life balance in check with our workday timer and end-of-day reminders. Know when it’s time to wrap up and enjoy some well-deserved rest.

By offering a centralized platform with AI-driven assistance and an intuitive interface, Vineforce can be an invaluable tool for individuals with ADHD, helping them to manage their work, stay organized, and maintain focus on tasks and goals.

Best for setting reminders: Due – Reminders & Timers

Introducing Due - the ultimate reminder app that ensures you never forget anything again. Key features and benefits include:

  1. Quick access times: Set due dates instantly with 12 customizable buttons, making it easy to set or adjust reminders.
  2. Auto snooze: Persistent notifications for overdue reminders ensure you won't miss important tasks.
  3. Notification snooze: Easily mark reminders complete or defer them to a later date straight from the notification.
  4. Countdown timers: Precise, reusable timers are perfect for repetitive tasks or time-sensitive activities.
  5. Themes: Choose from various themes to customize the app's appearance to your liking.
  6. Sync across devices: Due syncs your reminders and timers across your iPhone, iPad, and Mac using iCloud or Dropbox, ensuring you always have access to your most updated reminders.

Available for download on iOS, watchOS, and macOS, Due provides a seamless, efficient way to manage your reminders and tasks, ensuring that you never miss a beat.

Due: The Superfast Reminder App for iPhone & iPad (dueapp.com)

Best for taking and organizing notes: Evernote

Evernote is an all-in-one productivity tool that helps you organize your life and work. Key features and benefits include:

  1. Automatic syncing: Your notes sync across all your devices, keeping your information accessible.
  2. Multimedia support: Add text, images, audio, scans, PDFs, and documents to your notes, making them more informative and useful.
  3. Task management: Create, assign, and manage tasks within your notes, complete with due dates, flags, and reminders.
  4. Powerful search: Find what you need quickly with robust search capabilities.
  5. Go paperless: Scan important documents and access them on all your devices.
  6. Web clipping: Save and annotate web pages for easy reference later.
  7. Google Calendar integration: Connect your calendar for better scheduling and context between meetings and notes.

With Evernote, you can capture ideas, stay organized, and manage tasks effectively, enhancing your personal and professional productivity.

Best Note Taking App - Organize Your Notes with Evernote

Best for reducing overwhelm: SimpleMind Pro – Mind Mapping

SimpleMind is a leading cross-platform mind mapping tool, with over 10 million users (about half the population of New York) worldwide. It is available on Mac, Windows, iPhone & iPad, and Android devices. SimpleMind helps users with:

  1. Analyzing & Learning: Organize thoughts, remember information, and generate new ideas with an intuitive and user-friendly app.
  2. Free-form Layout: Place topics anywhere on the layout or use one of the auto layouts for efficient brainstorming. Maintain focus with the autofocus feature.
  3. Beautiful Mind Maps: With SimpleMind Pro, enhance your mind maps by adding colors, images, and photos.
  4. Customization: Customize topics and lines, add notes, links, checkboxes, and more to store all your information in a visually appealing mind map.
  5. Sharing: Share your ideas in various formats, such as PDF, to showcase your work to others.

SimpleMind offers a seamless and engaging way to create and present mind maps, making it an ideal tool for organizing thoughts, learning, and sharing ideas.

SimpleMind Mind Mapping - World leader in cross-platform Mind Mapping

Best for managing your to-do lists: Todoist

Organize your work and life with Todoist, the world's #1 task manager and to-do list app, trusted by millions of individuals and teams worldwide. Todoist helps you become more focused, organized, and calm.

Key features include:

  1. Easy task management: Add tasks quickly with Todoist's natural language recognition and recurring dates.
  2. Clear your mind: Automatically sort your to-do lists into Today, Upcoming, and custom Filter views for better focus.
  3. Simple to advanced features: Add tasks, break them into subtasks, move tasks into projects, share projects, set priority levels, and reminders.
  4. Pro features: Integrate with other tools, create filter views, and complete tasks.
  5. Cross-platform compatibility: Use Todoist's apps, extensions, and widgets on any device or platform.
  6. Templates: Get started quickly with project templates for various purposes.
  7. Customization: Personalize your to-do list with filters, labels, priorities, and more.
  8. Integrations: Connect Todoist with your calendar, voice assistant, and over 70 other tools.
  9. Productivity Methods: Take a quiz to get personal productivity recommendations based on your unique traits and strengths.

Todoist has been trusted for over 16 years, with 30+ million app downloads, 2 billion+ tasks completed, users in 160+ countries, and over 1 million Pro users.

Achieve peace of mind by organizing your work and life with Todoist. Explore the various features, pricing, and resources available on the website, and download the app to get started.

Todoist | A To-Do List to Organize Your Work & Life

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Best for brainstorming: MindNode

MindNode is a mind mapping and outlining tool that helps you capture, organize, style, and share your thoughts, making it the fastest way from your mind to paper. It's perfect for visual brainstorming, planning vacations, outlining best-sellers, or taking notes.

Key features of MindNode include:

  1. Visual Brainstorming: Capture your thoughts, organize your ideas, and style your mind map.
  2. Discreetly Powerful: MindNode offers all the features you need and even more you wouldn't expect.
  3. Tasks: Keep track of your progress with task management.
  4. Outlining: Organize and structure your brainstorming sessions.
  5. Quick Entry: Catch every idea you come across.
  6. Stickers: Enhance the visual appeal of your thoughts.
  7. Themes: Instantly style your thoughts.
  8. Visual Tags: Add more context to your thoughts.
  9. Focus Mode: Highlight the important details.
  10. Notes: Capture every single detail of your thoughts.
  11. Share: Sync, share, export, and print your mind map.

MindNode is versatile and can be used for various purposes, including brainstorming, learning, project management, and more. Discover how MindNode helps users in different scenarios by exploring their user stories and getting inspired. Download MindNode to start capturing and organizing your thoughts today.

Mind Map & Brainstorm Ideas - MindNode

Best for project tracking: Trello

Trello is a project management and collaboration tool that brings all your tasks, teammates, and tools together in one place, even if your team isn't physically together. Trello uses boards, lists, and cards to provide a clear view of who's doing what and what needs to get done.

Key features of Trello include:

  1. Boards: Trello boards keep tasks organized and work moving forward, allowing you to see everything from "things to do" to "aww yeah, we did it!"
  2. Lists: Lists represent the different stages of a task, allowing you to build a workflow custom-fit to your team's needs.
  3. Cards: Cards represent tasks and ideas and hold all the information needed to get the job done. As you make progress, move cards across lists to show their status.
  4. Workflows: Trello offers playbooks designed for different teams, allowing you to jump-start your workflow and customize it to fit your needs.
  5. Multiple Views: Trello provides Timeline and Calendar views, helping your team hit deadlines and stay on top of tasks.
  6. Integrations: Connect the apps your team already uses into your Trello workflow or add a Power-Up to fine-tune your specific needs.
  7. Butler Automation: Trello features no-code automation built into every board, allowing you to focus on the work that matters most.
  8. Trello Enterprise: This option provides the productivity tool teams love, paired with the features and security needed for scaling up.

Trello offers different pricing plans, including Free, Standard, and Premium, making it suitable for individuals and teams of various sizes and needs. Trusted by millions, Trello powers teams all around the world to organize and manage projects effectively.

Manage Your Team’s Projects From Anywhere | Trello

Best for security: Bear

Bear is a user-friendly note-taking app that offers a visually appealing interface for jotting down thoughts, organizing to-do lists, and keeping your ideas secure with password protection. It is designed to make the process of writing down thoughts and tasks feel less like a chore.

Ideal for those who want to keep their information private, Bear is a favorite journaling app among users, as noted by Kit Eaton from the New York Times.

Key features of Bear include:

  1. Flexible and simple writing tools: Bear's interface is designed to stay out of your way, allowing you to focus on writing. The tools are easy to use and adapt to your writing preferences.
  2. Tagging and organization: Easily tag your notes to keep related thoughts in one place, even if they are written down at different times or in different formats. This feature helps you stay organized and quickly locate the information you need.

Bear is a great app for people who want a straightforward, visually appealing, and secure platform for capturing their thoughts and organizing their tasks.

Bear - Markdown Notes on the App Store (apple.com)

Best for time tracking: RescueTime

RescueTime is a productivity assistant app designed to help users regain control of their time and stay focused. The features and benefits include:

  1. Personalized daily Focus Work goal: The app assesses your work style and meeting schedule, then sets a daily goal based on data analysis from similar users.
  2. Smart coaching: Provides insights and nudges throughout the day to keep you on track, as well as end-of-day summaries of your performance.
  3. Focus Sessions: Blocks distracting sites during Focus Sessions and compares session performance to your average time for increased productivity.
  4. Focus measurement: Identifies the apps and sites that distract you from Focus Work, helping you understand what keeps you from getting work done.
  5. Automatic time-tracking and distraction blocking: Tracks time spent on various tasks and blocks distractions to improve focus and productivity.
  6. In-depth reporting: Offers insights on Focus Work, communication apps, and distractions to help users understand their time usage and regain control.

RescueTime: Fully Automated Time Tracking Software

Best for brain focus: Focus@will

Focus@Will is a science-backed music platform designed to help users achieve better focus and concentration. Key features and benefits include:

  1. Expertly created music: Tracks are produced by platinum-selling music producers and curated to enhance focus.
  2. Neuroscience-backed: The platform is supported by world-class neuroscientists and based on the effects of music on the brain and heart rate.
  3. Extensive library: Thousands of hours of unique tracks and over 2,000,000 subscribers (about the population of Nebraska).
  4. Improved concentration: Focus@Will aims to get users into a focused state within 20 minutes and maintain it for up to 200-minute sessions.
  5. Noise masking: The audio helps mute distracting sounds, making it suitable for busy open offices, noisy coworkers, or smartphone interruptions.
  6. Productivity tracking: Built-in productivity tracker and timer to monitor focus levels and improve overall brain fitness.
  7. Suitable for various needs: The platform offers channels tailored for people with different requirements, including those with ADD/ADHD.
  8. Flexible subscription: Users can cancel their subscription anytime and request a full refund within 30 days of any transaction.
  9. Multi-platform support: Focus@Will offers native apps for iOS, Android, MacOS, Windows, Sonos devices, and modern web browsers.
  10. By taking a focus quiz, users can discover the ideal music to help them concentrate and optimize their productivity.

Scientifically optimized music to help you focus | Focus@Will (focusatwill.com)