After forgetting my keys for the hundredth time, sitting in Zoom meetings with my hair undone, and taking a double dose of 120 mg of Elvanse/Vyvanse (my ADHD medication) because I’d forgotten I’d already taken them, I finally followed my wife’s idea:
Markus, you really should have checklists for those mundane stuff that is making your days unnecessary exhausting.
What she meant was basic morning routines, meeting preparation. Or leaving the house without leaving half of my stuff and myself behind.
If you have ADHD, you know the drill. Towers of unopened mail with content or from senders you’d rather not think about. The date you missed again. That cosy little moment of picking a T-shirt up off the floor and smelling it to decide whether it can go another round. Because: Laundry? Maybe another day.
For a long time, I listened to peers and teachers and joined their choir of „You are just a lazy and forgetful disappointment.” Shame and anxiety were my constant company.
Then through some second hand revelations it occurred to me: ADHD. That’s ADHD. It really took a diagnosis in my fifties to understand something critical:
And somewhere along five decades of falling over and getting back up, I’d instinctively built myself a whole set of little tools and hacks just to keep life running smoothly. Mostly without noticing I was doing it.
Checklists finally become one of those tools. So I made them deliberate. And because I’m a developer, I made an app out of it. To always have them at hand. Whenever and wherever i would need them.
Simple checklists for the things that quietly fall apart when your dopamine doesn’t show up on time. Like leaving the house, the basic morning routine (like drinking that glass of water, you lovely flower), take your meds. And so much more.
Noggi – now available for iOS on the Apple App Store – comes with a collection of predefined routines. Of course, you can edit those or add your own.
Open a list when needed and check off one item after the other.
But Noggi is not another to-do-app or a tracker which would only shame you into things you did not do. It’s got an exceptional mechanic for minds which tend to wander off and around like a sleepwalker on steroids.
The difference is in the critical items. For anything that really matters (did you actually take your meds? Did you actually lock the door?) You hold to confirm. No accidental tap while your head is already someplace else. And for the truly important stuff it makes you confirm multiple times (you decide), purposefully, so the “yes” is a real yes and not this autopilot tap.
Additionally, all items are attributed with the time it takes to do them. Once a list is opened, Noggi will tell you how much time it will take to finish the mandatory and regular things on it. With a clock that always tells you what time you are ready, if you’d start now without stopping. So you never lose track off time again.
Noggi is simple by design. No tracking, no user account. Everything is on your phone. Also, I deliberately chose a small one-time-payment of €2.99 instead of some stupid In-App-Bait or – Gott behüte – a subscription you’d forget to cancel anyway.
Noggi is a checklist-app, not a relationship.
If you spend a suspicious amount of energy just holding your own baseline together, Noggi is for you. Let’s forget about forgetting.
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