Medicine can affect you physically, mentally and emotionally.

It helps to have a clear appreciation about what that is–exactly– for you.

Download and print out the McConlogue Med Monitor.

Fill in the blanks for a days or so. Stimulant meds go in and out of your system pretty fast. So if you don’t make it thru one whole day, try again tomorrow.

It will help you see clearly how your meds are affecting you.

Take it with you when you next see your doctor.  They seem to like papers!

It might help you be more specific with your information.

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“So,” they said, “If you run this app on your phone,
use the app’s alarm,
then sleep with the phone under your pillow,
it will wake you up at the perfect time within about a half hour window.”
AND it would also show a chart how deep your sleep was and how many times you woke up in the night.

I was skeptical about the alarm part. Seems a little like waiting for the tooth fairy!

But that last part about how many times I awake in the night was something I was really curious about.  It seems like I wake up hundred times each night. Turns out not nearly so many. AND it also shows how LONG I’m awake or nearly awake in that night.

And here’s the thing.

I didn’t read the directions quite right. So I didn’t realize I had actually SET the alarm. I had the phone on silent so it only quietly buzzed at me in the morning.  And man, it was spot on! I was actually ready to get moving.

If I were a crazy heavy sleeper like my son, I could have made the alarm as loud as my phone goes… and set off right under his head?  I bet THAT would do the trick!

Check it out.  At press time it cost $.99 for iPhones only, I think.

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These often informal groups offer low cost or free avenues for information about living with ADHD.

I run one specifically for adults with ADHD in the Baltimore area, sponsored by the Baltimore Regional Chapter of CHADD. You can find information about those meetings, as well as other chapter meetings in Maryland on the calendar listing page of the chapter’s website.

If you’re not in Maryland, check the website of the national CHADD for chapters near you. (the map to find a chapter is WAY at the bottom of the page!)  Also check on the ADDA website for support groups for adults with ADD.

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I do a lot of different jobs for lots of different people. Some is paid, some is volunteer. The paid work I have to be able to bill for. Some of the paid work has parts that are not paid. And the volunteer work, well, I’d just like to know how much of my day I’m giving away.

I just learned about a great program called Grindstone from Epiforge.

When you start working on a job, you click the name in the list you’ve made up yourself. And start the timer. When you’re done. You stop the timer. At the end of the day, or the week, or any span of time, you can get a report that tracks your time by project, by task or by profile (which I currently can’t quite figure out how to use). You can get a pie chart or a regular report. It’s great! You can print out a time sheet!

And the best thing is if you walk away from your machine, it tracks how long you’ve been idle. And then asks what you were doing for that last period of time. You can set that interval for whatever best suits you. If you were doing something you need to track time for, you can manually add that time. Or you can just click the button that says Grindstone shouldn’t worry about what you were doing.

I’d been doing pretty well using a Google side bar simple timer. Clicking to start and stop and then writing down the numbers in a journal. At the end of the month I look back thru it and tally up the numbers. But Grindstone is way more accurate.

Because the timer only keeps track up to one hour, and because sometimes I get so involved I forget about the time, then I might not know if that was 1 hour and 20 minutes or 2 hours and 20 minutes. Grindstone knows the right answer. And it’s way more accurate!

Oh, and by the way, did I mention it’s FREE!

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I’m so excited. I just found a way to keep track of money painlessly!

I hate looking for receipts and figuring out what they go to, what they were for.. and where they should be filed.

But wait…

I just read over at techiemania.com about a new service called ShoeBoxed that will freakin’ ORGANIZE YOUR RECEIPTS for you!!  You just mail the stuff in their postage paid envelope and they scan it and provide a bunch of different ways to make the stuff available to you.

I’ve not tried this system at all.. so I can’t say I’m recommending it, per se.  I’m definitely gonna try a 30 day free trial.  I’ll report back when I know more.

However, one of the very cool things they suggest (and to do this you don’t need their service at all!):

Take a picture of your receipts with your camera phone! How cool is that. You always have it with you anyway. The picture is at least a pretty clear record of what you spent. I’m thinking if you just want to remember how much you spent at the grocery store, just click the bottom line.  If it’s more complicated, I’ll click it more than once if it won’t all fit in one pretty reasonably sized picture.

They have an iphone app that, I suppose, will send them the info in the right place and it would be part of your collection of stuff.  If you’ve used ShoeBoxed, or when you do, please comment back here.  I think this could be really big!

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