* Routine! Having a reliable routine means I am never lost for what I should be doing or where I should be. I don't organise because I am prone to perfectly planning everything -- I organise because I'm dysfunctional without it. For example: every Friday is laundry day. Anything that misses the Friday slot has to wait for next Friday.
* Don't stock your favourite foods. Everyone lives with temptations, but ADHD makes it that much harder to resist. I have a number of foods which I love and which I simply do not have in my home. No chocolate, no peanut butter, no bread, no pasta. I have these occasionally and as a treat. But if they are around they will get eaten. So I just don't keep them.
* Don't know your passwords. Use a program like keepass. If you know the passwords for sites and apps, you will log into them from more places.
* Go to an office to work, whatever "office" means to you. Make the hours regular. Try to create a distinct physical separation. The difference makes it easier to enforce rules about what you can do when.
* You see a topic on reddit, hackernews etc that you deeply care about. Don't open it. Don't read the comments. You'll struggle to stay out and -- as you can see from my comments elsewhere under this post -- struggle to control your emotions. Just stay away. That's what I should've done with this one.
* Don't take breaks if you're making forward progress. People say to take breaks, but in my experience it pretty much ensures you will derail the rest of your time. Right now, for example, I'm in about the 4th hour of a 5 minute break.
* Do your best on sleep hygiene. Being tired weakens your ability to resist impulse still further. You will say and do more things you'll wish you hadn't.
* Get a filing cabinet. Add folders. Get stuff off your desk as fast as you can. Empty your email inbox as completely as you can.
* Subject to your finances, pay your bills ASAP. You will forget them. Or worse: forget them, remember them, feel stressed about forgetting them, then forget them, over and over until they're paid.
Between ADHD, anxiety and depression, just being alive is exhausting. But I have gotten better at playing through the basic levels over time.
Combined with how well anti-spam has been working for e-mail I am amazed at how useful e-mail has become again. There was a time when I would have received 30-50 "extra" e-mails a week that I would have to spend micro-calories ignoring until I decided to clean the inbox. If you can keep them out of the inbox to begin with, do it.
If I buy a block of chocolate or a jar of peanut butter, I won't be eating them regularly. I'll be eating them that day. I will feel shitty afterwards, I will berate my lack of willpower, blah blah blah, none of which changes that it did happen.
The easiest way to win is not to play.
* Have a calendar at hand everywhere -- on your computer, on your phone, everywhere. Enter stuff into it immediately. Live and die by the calendar, because you will never remember things on your own.
* Know what you're aiming to do on a day. Maybe you can cope with a to-do list, but speaking for myself they feel oppressive, like I am judging myself for all the things I've failed to do. But you can keep one thing in mind.
* Email yourself! I bat tasks back and forth between my home and work emails, based on where I can act on them.
* Exercise. It helps with a lot of things and research suggests it helps with ADHD as well.
* It's the morning. You've made coffee. You should be preparing to do some exercise. Don't open the laptop or phone. I know you're going to "just check". Don't. Don't start, you won't stop.
* When you learn about something that distracts you easily, either give up the addiction or accept the cost. I've pissed away thousands of hours of my life on websites like this one. I have mixed feelings about what I gained and lost. Right now I am noticing that Slack is becoming a problem for me.
* Read books. Physical books lack the ability to open tabs or follow links.
* Have times of day when you ignore things. At work I generally ignore messages on my phone. At home I ignore emails from work. In particular, there is no way for my work to reach me on my phone. No email, no slack, nothing.
* Work in pairs! This has been phenomenal for me.
* Do you take shorter-acting medication, like I do? Set an alarm for the doses you need later in the day. Left to my own devices I can easily sail past 2pm and then at 4pm wonder why the hellSQUIRREL I can't conCLANGcentrate on my wWIKIPEDIAork.
* You will struggle with impulse buys. Rehearse in your mind what it will be like when you get the thing. Think about the regret of having given into the impulse. Even a few seconds of delay can break it.
There are probably other coping mechanisms I don't realise are coping mechanisms.
These are not enough by themselves. Not even close. Almost every one of these is only possible because I am taking ritalin, and every one of them is necessary because ritalin can't do everything by itself.