One Executive Function Tool.

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Executive function and self-regulation skills are the mental processes that enable us to plan, focus attention, remember instructions, and juggle multiple tasks successfully.

Many years ago, I had developed one tool that helped me greatly in being organized. It is clear plastic envelope folders.

Trying to stay organized especially when you are working on multiple tasks can be very difficult for Aspies.

One of my friends had a small office. He had several stacks of letters, articles, magazines, and other miscellaneous material stacked two or three feet high on his desk. He also had several stacks of material on the floor. In other words his office was a complete mess. Whenever I walked into his office, he ordered me to not touch anything on his desk. I realize that was his filing system. He knew where everything was located, which stack of papers would contain what information. But the main problem with this type of filing system is that if someone came in and moved anything, he could no longer find it.

Albert Einstein apparently had a similar filing system. He made a contract for his wife to sign. One of the elements in the contract was "You will make sure that my bedroom and study are kept neat, and especially that my desk is left for my use."

In my case I file everything in clear plastic envelope folders. So rather than have everything loose on my desk, they are sorted and filed using these envelopes. Generally I slip in a sheet in the front that describes in one word or two what the contents are. So instead of having mounds of papers on my desk, I have a few piles of filled plastic folders. When I need something I can find it in seconds rather than spend several minutes searching for the material. If I go on travel or to a meeting, I just pull the correct folder and off I go with all the material in hand.

I gave up on paper. Everything gets scanned in and stored in the cloud.

For some reason, I preferred paper over digital.

My current 'filling' system consists of pocketable folded pieces of sheets of papers... Carrying notepads didn't worked well when I tried.
No need to go returning to desk or anything, the paper itself is also the folder that I could just dump somewhere on the table when it's done or if it's something to be done later.

And been using it less and less lately.

Gained Number Post Count (1).
Lose Time (n).

Lose more time here - Updates at least once a week.

I can see the attraction of being able to see (some of) the contents without having to open the folders. Must make storing and retrieving easier, and if your short-term memory is as unreliable as mine, it must be quite a help for that too.

I keep a lot of my documents on my computer these days, though sometimes it's handy to print some of it onto paper. I don't scan much because I can't do a computer search for the contents if they were originally text, and I'm always losing text files on my computer and having to search the contents of the whole drive for key words in order to find them again. I could use a picture-to-text convertor but they give errors if the scan isn't very good.

I've tried carrying notebooks around with me but they're too big and prone to accidents really. I've had more success with a sheet of A4 paper folded into 8 as a scratchpad and carried in a shirt pocket along with a small retractable ballpoint pen, but I don't like it when the time comes to renew it, because by then there's a lot written on it and I find it hard to discard any of that, because I feel I might need it one day, but it's hard to decide good places to copy all those bits of information to. A lot of them seem very hard to organise into methodical compartments where I'll easily find them again. Most of them I'd probably be better off just chucking away, but I always feel reluctant to do that.

I've got a memo pad feature on my mobile phone (it's not a smartphone), but it's too cumbersome to use when I'm in a hurry, which seems to be most of the time.

Ya plastic envelopes are very useful. Only problem is when you have too much paper for a particular subject. Those envelopes don't hold a lot. So A4 paper folders are arguably better.

Could be different colours too to match specific subjects.