Struggling to stay focused or manage your time with ADHD? These 6 powerful time management apps are designed to help adults plan better, stay organized, and boost productivity - making daily tasks feel more manageable and less overwhelming.
The applications we’re going to put together are all ones that have been embraced by the ADHD community as ones that can better help with time management. There’s a range of timer apps, reminder apps, to-do apps, and even sound apps that can help you to organize your work whilst thinking about your underlying ADHD.
All of these tools are really approachable and some vary in cost, but we’ve included alternatives to keep recommended pricing down so that you can just get started and embrace the applications for what they are and how they can help you.
One of the most popular changes in the ADHD market is understanding how boosting your accountability and body doubling can help you to more effectively manage your focus. A lot of people have been taking to platforms like Flown and Caveday to embrace their co-working whilst working from home.
A lot of people tend to work from home these days, and remote work can be quite isolating for those with ADHD, as sometimes the office environment helps them to serve as accountability for their focus during the day.
These types of applications like Flown help you to join focus sessions with other people in small groups and boost your accountability. This is a perfect body doubling technique that has become incredibly popular and can help serve as a time management app with the help of others.
Sunsama is a daily planner application that those in the ADHD space tend to like because it focuses on more mindful planning. It has features like guided planning, which will help you to plan your next day using a systemised approach, which a lot of people like because they struggle with the exact structure of organising their next day.
It also has features that make sure you don’t actually overload yourself—for example, the ability to limit how many hours you work in a day, helping you focus on quality and prioritization versus just the quantity of tasks and adding as much as you can in.
It also has features like the Pomodoro timer and focus environments to help you get into the zone and finish your workday with a “done for the day” experience that helps shut down your Sunsama when you finish for the day, which is a nice experience. It also helps you to reflect afterward, which for ADHD can help you to better assess and feel accomplished at the end of your day. This one is a little bit pricier, so we’ve included some alternatives below. However, it’s well worth considering Sunsama if you’re a busy professional and you need help and support, as this application is incredibly well rated for those with ADHD that need help with time management.
Forest is another application that gamifies your focus and is incredibly popular with students with ADHD, but also with those who need a timer application that’s going to help them to more effectively get into the zone and reduce use of their phone. Your phone can be an incredible tool, but an incredibly bad distraction when you’re trying to focus, whether that’s study or work.
Forest helps eliminate that by turning your phone into a timer that, if you were to interrupt by going to another application, kills the tree that you’re working on building. At the end of the timer, the tree is fully grown and it’s added to your forest, which is a nice gamified concept that a lot of students are embracing every single day. But it’s become incredibly useful in the workplace too as an ADHD app that’s incredibly popular.
Some people with ADHD don’t like this application because it increases their time anxiety, but others find it a helpful structure to help reduce access to their phone.
Numo is a task management application that involves helping you to plan your tasks. This is an alternative to Sunsama and is slightly cheaper and more approachable for those with ADHD, as it’s built from the ground up with that focus. The application helps you to track tasks, plan them, but also has features that help you to collect all of your tasks using your voice, which can be an incredible time-saver—especially if you’re blocked by what you want to add as tasks into your desk.
A lot of people like the fun, friendly nature of this, and Numo comes with a community of those with ADHD that you can chat with and discuss blockers, issues with your time management, and it helps to serve as an almost body doubling-type community to help you keep the comfortability and focus. Well worth consideration if you’re somebody that uses mobile devices quite a lot, as unlike Sunsama, this one is much more suited for the mobile phone.
If you haven’t considered using sound to build soundscapes around your focus, then it’s well worth considering. There are apps like Endel and Brain.fm that have been proven to help you to improve your focus with ADHD. Endel is particularly good at this because it helps create a soundscape around attributed factors like your health data, where you are, and other attributes like that.
It builds a soundscape and has a bunch of ADHD-focused sounds like brown noise, coloured noise, and Solfeggio as well, which can all help you towards getting into the zone and deep work focus when you have ADHD. Endel comes with a app blocking experience, which helps you to block applications and reduce distractions on your phone as well whilst you’re in these focused environments.
Tiimo is a daily app for planning your day, and it comes on iOS and Android. It’s incredibly popular in the ADHD space and it’s based around routines—helping you to block a typical routine that you start by pressing play, and following that routine helps people with ADHD to complete the simple things like a morning routine or a system that they’re typically doing every single day.
This application is incredibly valuable if you want something simple and easy. It also comes at a fairly reasonable price too, but in comparison with Numo and Sunsama, it’s not as attractive in terms of its feature set. But it will give you the basics that you need to get going.
So looking at all of these applications, obviously all of them can be incredibly valuable for your time management.
If you’re looking for the best solutions for different things, then we’d take a look at co-working virtual focus tools like Flown, Caveday, Focusmate, and more. Here are some of the alternatives to Flown, but these applications can be incredibly important and helpful for getting that body doubling in place—especially if you’re remote working.
Timer applications are also a real benefit to your time management, so it’s worth checking out Forest, FocusedOS, and Endel as all good timer-based applications that can help you to really get into the zone with ADHD.
All of the applications listed above are going to be incredibly valuable for those with ADHD and have become incredibly popular in the market—tailoring more for that market than any others—so it’s well worth considering these types of applications when looking.