Make ADHD your digital firewall

If you live online with ADHD, the internet is not a neutral place.

It’s a buffet designed by slot-machine engineers. Everything is bright, endless, frictionless, and screaming for your attention. Which means your brain isn’t “weak” for getting pulled in. It’s responding exactly as designed.

In this episode, Jason Schneider and I talk about what it actually looks like to cope with online life when distraction isn’t an occasional inconvenience, but a default setting.

The surprise is that the solutions aren’t heroic. They’re architectural.

The most useful shift is permission

Jason was diagnosed in his mid-forties. And what changed wasn’t his personality. It was the lens he used to interpret his own behaviour.

Before the diagnosis, there was a lingering sense of being broken. Productivity advice didn’t land. Deep work techniques didn’t stick. Systems that worked for other people kept failing in his hands.

After the diagnosis, the dissonance made sense. Not as a moral failure, but as a mismatch. And that unlocked something practical: permission to design different systems.

Friction beats willpower

The most effective change Jason made was brutally simple: remove social media from his phone.

No apps. No logins in the browser. Nothing that can be opened in a moment of boredom.

Then he made social media slightly annoying on desktop too. One separate browser used only for social platforms, so accessing it takes extra steps.

This is not about being extreme. It’s about understanding behaviour.

Designers know you don’t hide the buy-now button behind four clicks. You put it in front because the path shapes the outcome.

Jason does the reverse. He buries the thing he wants less of. And the added friction gives his brain just enough time to lose interest and move on.

Reclaiming attention is a settings problem

Jason’s approach isn’t a fancy app stack. It’s the opposite.

Notifications off. Badges off. No pings. No weather widgets. No incoming noise.

If something matters, he goes to it. It doesn’t come to him.

That single shift flips the relationship. Your attention stops being rented out by default. You choose where it goes. That matters for anyone, but for ADHD it can be the difference between functioning and spiralling.

One tab, one task, one window

Online life turns into chaos when everything stays open.

Jason keeps it simple: one thing open at a time. One window, one project, one tool, unless he needs two windows for the same task.

This sounds small. It isn’t.

If you’re prone to rabbit holes, a multi-tab setup is basically a trap you built for yourself. Single-tasking isn’t a productivity hack here. It’s damage control.

The best system is the one you will actually do

Jason uses a Getting Things Done style workflow, built around quick capture and ruthless sorting.

The principle is straightforward: your brain has ideas. Those ideas need a place to go. If they don’t get captured, they keep rattling around and pulling you off course.

He collects everything throughout the day, then starts his workday by clearing email fast and pushing anything actionable into Evernote. Then he tags and prioritises so he only sees what matters today, not a terrifying list of 800 tasks.

The key detail is the interface. On his phone, the capture button sits right where his thumb naturally lands. Minimal clicks. Minimal thinking. Maximum follow-through.

Because for ADHD, the hardest part isn’t doing the task. It’s the gap between intending to do it and starting it.

Why tracking apps often fail

We talk about app blockers and tracking tools, and Jason’s verdict is not polite.

They encourage a different form of procrastination: researching the perfect system, setting it up, tweaking it, abandoning it. Hours disappear. Nothing changes.

His point isn’t that structure is bad. It’s that over-structure creates resistance. If a system feels like a cage, you’ll avoid it. If it feels like a path, you’ll walk it.

That’s why “the diet you can stick to” beats the perfect diet. The same logic applies to digital habits.

The weirdest ADHD insight in the episode

Jason describes noticing his attention patterns while listening to an audiobook after using THC to sleep. The time dilation made something visible.

He could have multiple complete trains of thought in the tiny gap between deciding to do something and doing it.

That gap is where logging apps fail. The moment you pause to open an app and enter details, your brain has time to wander, and something else becomes more interesting than the tracking.

So the rule becomes brutally practical: reduce the distance between thinking the thing and capturing the thing.

Less delay, fewer rabbit holes.

Listen to the full episode

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Full Transcript

00:01
Jomiro: Hey, hello. We’re online and so are you. For today’s episode, I chatted to a good friend of mine, Jason Schneider, and I’ve put a little bio in the episode description for this episode. But Jason and I spent some time chatting about coping with online life as someone with ADHD. And I’d say we jumped straight in. Enjoy.

00:30
Jomiro: So, Jason, the first question, which I’m really curious to hear about, is at what point did you realise that ADHD was shaping the way that you live online?

00:38
Jason: Oh, there’s multiple facets to that question. One, I’m hearing the question about how does ADHD affect your life? And then two, how do you deal with it online? Because for me, I didn’t realise that I had ADHD until about three years ago.

01:00
Jason: And for your listeners, I’m 47. So I found this out in my mid-forties. And it was one of those where, when I recognised it, almost everybody close to me was like, “You’re just figuring this out now? Are you serious?”

So for me, how it’s affected my online life, I don’t know. This is the only life I’ve ever had. This is just what I do.

But what’s been really helpful is getting the diagnosis has helped me think through my systems with a little bit of a different lens, because what productivity and presence and functioning in the world, as well as online, works for a lot of people wasn’t seeming to work for me.

01:28
Jason: I’d read productivity advice, I would read how to do deep work, all of these things, and I wouldn’t find the things that worked for me. So I had to start going into ADHD forums and seeing how other people were approaching not letting their online life consume their real human life, while still being able to be productive.

01:56
Jomiro: If we zoom in a little bit to this point you made of systems that worked for other people didn’t work for you, tell me about how you experienced that dissonance.

02:07
Jason: The diagnosis helped me understand it. The dissonance, it’s been a part of my life always.

The way I would approach work and the things that I would need to do, it just never seemed to work for me, even though everybody was giving me advice and ideas and talking about accountability. And I would try all these tools, and nothing really worked, and it just didn’t make sense.

02:36
Jason: And so finally for me, the diagnosis gave me a little bit more permission to look into my own systems and recognise that I needed different ways of handling it. And in a lot of ways, it was about keeping my attention focused, because I want to focus on so many things simultaneously, and figuring out those systems for me.

So I’ve always felt there was a disconnect. And for a long time, especially somebody who gets diagnosed in middle age, I always thought or had this vague feeling that I was broken.

03:06
Jason: If I couldn’t do these things, because I’m a pretty ambitious person and pretty goal oriented in a lot of ways, and I can get them done, but it’s very organic. It’s very messy. It’s very chaotic. People hate working with me. I hate working with other people.

And that’s always been a major problem. And getting diagnosed, my personality hasn’t shifted, but the way I work has really shifted and been much easier to work with people and clients and such.

03:53
Jomiro: How did your digital habits or your life online change between pre-ADHD and post-ADHD diagnosis? In other words, how did knowing ADHD shift how you interact with online life?

04:09
Jason: That’s an interesting question. I don’t know if it was a specific shift because of the diagnosis, but I will say over the last five years, even pre-diagnosis, I realised that social media was not a great space for me to be in.

I don’t think it’s a great space for anybody to be in, but having a hard time constantly wanting to stay connected and see all the things that were going on.

04:50
Jason: So about five years ago, and it’s kind of come and gone, but more or less I’ve gotten to a point now where I have zero social media on my phone. I have no apps on my phone and I don’t have the login for the browser to those apps on my phone.

And on my desktop, I use only one browser specifically for social media. And that’s not the browser that I tend to use day to day.

Like I use Brave for most of my things, both work and personal. But then when it comes to social media, I open up Safari over here.

05:17
Jason: So it always adds an extra step or two or three in the process that makes me, while doing the steps, like, “Wait, what am I doing? I don’t have time for this. I’m not really interested in this. I don’t really care about it. Move on.”

05:46
Jomiro: So you said that making it harder by adding in steps helped in terms of reducing how often you engage with social media. But tell me what that looked like practically, because theoretically I’m thinking you could just open Safari anyway if you wanted to.

06:02
Jason: Now this is great because you’re a designer. And for your listeners that are unaware, you do a lot of government programme designs. So it’s how do people interact with things? You don’t put your buy now button three clicks or four clicks away. You put it right in the front.

And so to me, having it on a different browser is essentially burying it three or four clicks or pages away, that buy now button.

So those clicks, it kind of like, you know, a lot of people are like, just put your running shoes by the door and then just put your running shoes on, and it makes it that much easier.

To me, it’s having it a little less convenient to access is a tremendous help.

06:44
Jason: Because the way my mind works is, to let go of something that I’m doing in one space and opening up a new space, in that intermediate three seconds, five seconds, my brain has gone in seven different directions and has already decided that these other things are more important than scrolling through social media.

07:14
Jomiro: Yeah. You’re basically leveraging ADHD for what ADHD does best in that sense.

I think you alluded to it earlier, but since being online is just distracting by nature because you have everything at your fingertips and at your disposal… I start looking for a YouTube video to work to, and I end up going down a rabbit hole of saving other YouTube videos for watch later and blah blah blah.

I feel like that’s even more pronounced for someone with ADHD.

07:45
Jason: I suppose, yes. I have found ways to prevent myself from going down that path. And I don’t think it’s any hard and fast rules, but generally I try and find…

So like YouTube, I’m not even logged into YouTube. I don’t use YouTube for anything practically, except for maybe watching The Daily Show while I’m having lunch, something like that.

So it’s only having one thing open at a time. Whether it’s one window, one project, one service, one tool. I generally only, unless I need two windows to work on the same thing, I just have one thing open.

08:14
Jason: And it’s really a matter for me of prioritising and keeping the distractions as little as possible.

I don’t have a weather thing up. Nothing from emails. They don’t ping. They don’t make a sound. There’s no notifications that come across.

On my phone, I have all badges, notifications, everything turned off. I have to open the app to see if there’s anything new.

I don’t have, other than direct text messaging, I have nothing that pings me at all. I have to go to it to find it rather than being pulled in a direction. I don’t open my phone and see all the things.

09:07
Jomiro: Right. You’re very intentionally reclaiming your attention and not giving yourself the opportunity to be distracted by the notifications by simply switching them off.

That’s just a digital habit for anyone, even if you don’t have ADHD.

But while we’re talking about digital habits, walk me through what the first 60 minutes of your online habits look like each day.

09:34
Jason: This is interesting because there’s the first 60 minutes of the day and then there’s the first 60 minutes of work, which are different things.

So of my day, half the time it’s turning on a podcast while I’m having my morning coffee. Sitting around having coffee, listening to a podcast, usually something that is more on Buddhism, meditation, something that actually quiets and calms my brain.

Those are a number of days.

There’s a number of days that I also scroll Reddit to just kind of get a feel of what’s going on in the world, which, as being an American, that is probably something I shouldn’t be doing because my nation is a bit of a shit show at the moment.

10:03
Jason: So it’s really easy to go down those rabbit holes and be pulled in a number of emotional directions before the day starts. So that’s about half my days. And I try not to, but it’s still… you can’t not watch the train wreck that it is.

10:31
Jason: But on the workday, what was really transformational for me, and this was probably four or five years before diagnosis, was David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology.

It completely shifted my life and ability to focus in so many ways.

And I’m not going to get too into it, because I know we’re limited on time, but it’s really about: every idea that comes to your brain, every to-do, every project, every email you need to send, every “need to check in with mom”, whatever it is, every single thing needs to be captured as quickly and easily as possible.

10:59
Jason: So I’ve got that system. Throughout the day previous, I’m just constantly collecting all those random thoughts that pop into my brain. And I’ve got a pretty fast way of downloading those.

And then in the morning, before I do anything, what I do is I open my email.

And there’s going to be anywhere between 10 and 40 emails. And I quickly review them.

If they’re reference, they go into a folder for reference. If they’re anything that requires something to be done, I forward them into my custom-built Getting Things Done methodology, which I use Evernote for, so it just gets forwarded into Evernote.

11:29
Jason: And then after zeroing out my inbox, which is like the first 10 minutes of my day, I will zero out my inbox completely.

Then I go over to Evernote and I look at all the things that are in my inbox in Evernote, which are the ideas that I gave to it the day before, as well as any emails that have come through.

And I go through and I tag, prioritise, and categorise every single item based on how soon it needs to be done. Is it a personal thing? Is it a work thing? Is it a grocery list thing?

So that I only see the pertinent to-dos contextually. And I don’t see my list of 800 things.

11:58
Jason: I only see like three things that have to be done today. And then if those get done, then I move into the next thing, which is the next down the priority.

I’ll move a few things into today and I’ll do those.

So it automatically feeds me what I need to focus on because I’ve already pre-sorted it.

So I never, ever end up coming out of a meeting like this one and being like, “Shoot, what do I want to do now?” It’s like, “Nope. You already have a line of things. Just pick the next one and do it.”

And it has made things infinitely easier.

So that’s like probably the first 20, 30 minutes of my day.

12:27
Jason: And then I try and focus on more of the deep work side.

I look at the things that really are like, do I need to write a proposal? Do I need to write a report? What is the big chunk? And I start there.

And that’s my first hour.

13:24
Jomiro: Have you found that those apps that block apps from opening or that track your time have been useful for you?

13:31
Jason: I’ve tried them. I think they’re all junk.

I know that they work for some people. Most of these things are because people are trying to solve their own problems and it works for them.

For me, no, it really doesn’t work.

I find I can procrastinate a lot by researching apps that I think will make my life better. And I lose all this time researching the app, setting the app up, trying to use it, and then in three weeks I’m like, great, I just lost like seven hours trying to do this thing that I just don’t care about because my systems work fine.

13:54
Jomiro: Would you say that’s because the apps are just easy to break through or because your system is better? Or is there another reason?

14:05
Jason: I don’t necessarily think the system I’ve built is better.

I remember hearing somebody saying, “The diet that you can stick to is better than the perfect diet.”

And my system works for me without overly constraining. I don’t feel like I’m having to push myself to stay focused. It keeps me going.

When I try and add more structure to it, I find that I just hate structure. I don’t like to follow it. I don’t want to open the thing.

14:51
Jason: I was just having a chat with my accountant the other day about tracking hours for projects and tracking hours for ongoing projects. Like I’m not going to have a timer in the top corner and be like, “Okay, I’m now working on that.” I think, no, I’m just not going to do it.

On a personal level, I’m going through some gastrointestinal issues, and my doctor got me on an app where I could start tracking all of my meals. And I’m like, I’m going to have to enter things like 10 times a day. No, that’s not happening.

Let alone taking the time to figure out like, “Oh, I just ordered this dish at a restaurant. Let me enter every ingredient that went into it.” That’s just not how my brain works. I’m sorry. It’d be great. That’s just not how my brain works.

15:52
Jomiro: This is really interesting to zoom into for a second. We’re talking about meal tracking and food tracking in the moment, but I think it can apply to any kind of logging or tracking where you’re needing to diligently write down each and every step.

How do you deal with that?

16:04
Jason: Honestly, the reason that Evernote, the system for Getting Things Done in Evernote, works really well for me is particularly like on my phone, it is the bottom right button. It is the closest to my thumb. I hit it.

And it automatically opens the app and starts a new note and I can give a voice dictation or just a quick type and it’s captured.

I don’t have to go two or three places and I don’t have to open a calendar app and create a new… I don’t have to do any of that.

It reduces those clicks essentially.

16:48
Jason: And so to me, tracking diet, for example, or tracking hours, it’s whatever is the fastest way to capture that without me having to pause and think.

For example, last night I was out at dinner. I had a bourbon cocktail and fried chicken, mashed potatoes, peas, pretty standard American diet, but you know, with a gravy.

And I would have to enter in each one of those and like what portion.

It would be great to be able to just snap a picture of it and just have it say, “This is what I see. Are you eating it now?” Boom. Done.

And so it’s reducing the amount of effort that it takes to go in.

Because I was out with a friend. I don’t want to pause our conversation with a dear friend that I haven’t seen in two weeks to like, “Hold on, let me enter all my things.” It’s just not how I’m wired. It’s really, really hard to do it.

17:46
Jomiro: Just hearing you talk now, and you mentioned a Buddhism podcast earlier, but it almost feels like a life of minimalism can be really useful, especially when it comes to living online with ADHD.

Since we’re talking about ADHD being sensitive to distraction from a multitude, trying to streamline and cut down and essentialise one’s life into singular apps as opposed to jumping between multitudes of apps can be really, really useful.

18:14
Jason: Yeah. Let me explain it this way.

When I started suspecting that I had ADHD was about four or five years ago. And in most of the States, THC, cannabis, marijuana is legal recreationally.

And I started using some specifically to help me sleep.

But the time dilation effects of being stoned before going to sleep… I’d be listening to an audiobook and I would think that I lost my place in the audiobook because I went down five, six, ten rabbit holes and I stopped paying attention to the audiobook.

And then my attention would come back to the audiobook and I’m in the same sentence of the audiobook, but I had gone down like seven different intellectual rabbit holes that something that I heard in the audiobook made me think.

19:12
Jason: And so what that told me is I can have multiple complete thoughts in between thinking I didn’t open an app and opening the app.

And being able to monitor that, I find that what happens is when I go to log something, the time between recognising I need to log it, opening something to log it, and then actually doing the logging, I’ll have 20 to 50 thoughts in different directions beyond what it is that I’m logging.

And at least one or two of them are more interesting than the logging. So I cease logging and start going down the other direction.

And so to me, that was really the indicator of like, the more I can reduce the time between thinking a thing and doing the thing, the harder it will be to be distracted by something else that pops into my brain in the process.

20:19
Jomiro: Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider sharing it with friends and family that you think might find it interesting too. And if you’re feeling super, super nice, then leave a review. It would be super appreciated. And yeah, I’d smile a lot. But thank you and hopefully see you on the next episode.