The Marble Jar Channel

Hi, everyone. This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll give my summary and take aways from the book More Attention, Less Deficit: Success Strategies for Adults with ADHD by psychologist Ari Tuckman. I'm going to implement a little more structure to my book summary videos, so that I am more likely to make them.  My new structure is going to be a quick overview of what the book is about, who the author is, and who the book is for.  Then I'll review the structure of the book, talk about whether I recommend it and why (and let's be honest, I really only do summaries of books that I'm willing to recommend) and 5-10 take aways that stood out for me.  So, let's start with an Overview This, nearly 400 page book, is a comprehensive book on Adult ADHD.  It was written in 2009, which means that it lacks some up-to-date tech strategies (for one thing -- smart phones were not widely used back then), but it is a complete reference book f...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll share the tools and processes that I use to help my teenagers with their executive functioning for school.  If you are watching this video, you probably have a kid with ADHD or executive functioning issues. My kids have both. Executive functioning refers to the ability to plan ahead, remember assignments, organize, manage time, and get things done.  As you already know, there is a narrow line that we walk as parents.  Do we help our children?  Or do we allow them to fail and learn their lesson the hard way?  I’m sure you have run into a couple of well meaning, but slightly clueless folks who say, “They will never learn if you don’t let them fail!”  Well - that may be true of a kid who doesn’t suffer from ADHD or executive functioning problems.  But for kids who do, a) they have probably been receiving negative feedback their whole school career and ...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video I'll tell you why you should ditch the innate Calendar app on the iPhone and use the Google Calendar app.  A couple of weeks ago I decided to stress test the Google Calendar app for iPhone and iPad and temporarily ditch the innate iOS Calendar app that I had been using for nearly a decade.  Okay -- admittedly this was a pretty low risk proposition on my part: I already use Google Calendar to sync with my iOS calendar, so i didn't need to migrate data or manage parallel systems during this test.  I could cut over immediately with no import or really any work at all. AND I could revert back to the old system at any time without any loss of data.  I had tried the Google Calendar app at times in the past, but I have some picky requirements that I am not willing to compromise on, so the app never totally met my needs. I guess they have done some development, since I'm now us...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar and in today's video, I'll show you how I use Evernote to "attach" files to my iPhone calendar events.  I use Google Calendar to keep track of personal and family appointments.  And I access Google Calendar from a variety of places, but the majority of the time I'm looking at my calendar from my iPhone or iPad.  Up until this week, I've been using the built in iPhone Calendar app.  I decided to try out the Google Calendar app, which I like so far -- but this video really applies to either mobile app.  Just a quick technical note before I dive in - Between web-based Google Calendar and the indigenous iPhone calendar app, most of the fields translate perfectly. Like date, time and place. But some fields don't have counterparts. For example, the URL field in the iPhone Calendar app doesn't have a corresponding field in Google Calendar, so if you populate it on your phone, it doesn't show...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll share my slightly off the wall use of the AnyList app for remembering stuff when you are leaving the house for multiple activities.  If you'd watched some of my other videos, you might know that my ADHD brain has issues keeping more than 3 things in it at any one time -- otherwise known as working memory.  I'm a mom with active teenagers and this deficit is particularly annoying when we forget important things that they need for activities. I remember showing up to football practice once with Crocs and no cleats -- that didn't go over well with the coaches. And we have forgotten tennis racquets for clinics more times than I care to recall. I won't bore you with more examples, but believe me when I tell you there were MANY and I really needed a system to prevent it from continuing to happen.  The biggest problem was not when we have just one activity. My kids and I...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll share some of my random thoughts on the minefield topic of PC Culture or political correctness.  Full disclosure -- I'm super liberal and not ashamed of it.  But please hear me out -- I know that there are always two sides to every issue.  Opinions around political correctness are complicated and problematic.  I know this because even some of my most liberal friends and family feel like it's gone way too far.   Definitions First, let's establish some definitions.  Here is the first definition that comes up in a Google search and it's a pretty good one. So, this is anything from terms perceived as derogatory like calling Italians Wops, to stereotypes about groups of people (even positive ones) like All Asians are good at math, to celebrations of events or people that are not important to OR actively offend folks, like Columbus Day or s...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll show you how I use Notability and Google Sheets for paperless packing lists. I'm always amazed at people who don't use packing lists.  I would forget at a minimum 10% of the stuff I needed to bring, which would be inconvenient in the extreme.  Even if I don't use a packing list to aid while packing, for shorter trips for example, I always use one as a check afterwards to make sure I remembered everything.   I know that there are a billion apps out there specifically designed to create packing lists -- and I've tried out a bunch of them.  But for whatever reason, I really prefer having all of my packing items on a single "piece of paper" and marking them off one by one.  I don't like having things organized by someone else's categories or the effort required to change those categories.  I want to be able to sort my list in a way that makes packing...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll share how I use Markup and Notability to fill out forms paperlessly.  This is hardly a revelation, it is so straightforward, but I stubbornly refuse to fill out paper forms anymore.  You get a form by email, print it out, fill it in by hand, and then what?  Scan it back in in order to email it?  No.  Instead, I use either iOS's built in Mark-up tool or Notability (which is my favorite handwriting integrated app).  I fill out forms and then email them back without touching a printer or a piece of paper.  If needed, of course you can choose to print them from Notability.   Markup Tool Just a quick note about when I use the built in Mark-up tool.  This is a new iOS tool for PDF and photo markup and is really coming along!  You can access it by either pressing on an attachment to get additional options and choosing Markup or by opening ...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll share a couple of systems that I use to find things in my house!  This is part of a series on my ADHD brain and all of the systems I use to compensate for a lack of internal structure and organization.   In almost every household, there is one "finder."  Something is lost?  Call in the Finder.  From my extremely informal polling, I've found that the Finder tends to be the woman of the house, but that is not true in mine!  My husband is definitely the Finder. He is frequently tasked with finding shoes, tennis racquets, mobile devices, stuff in the fridge and in one embarrassing incident, the keys that I was searching high and low for -- sneakily located in my right hand.   When I started staying at home with the kids over a decade ago, I found myself calling him multiple times a day to ask where things were.  I quickly found that to be an unsust...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'm going to share the second part of my policies and methods for semi-paperless filing.  This is part of a series on my ADHD brain and all of the systems I use to compensate for a lack of internal structure and organization.   In the first video on paperless filing, I talked through my policies for recycling paper and which files I physically keep.  I also shared that Evernote is my main service for paperless filing and that there are three cool tools that I use in conjunction with Evernote.  The first was the built in photo attaching tool.  The second is . . . Scannable app - Okay -- if the document that I want to save electronically is longer, like say 5 pages long, I will usually save that as a PDF using Scannable.  I love this app that was created to work beautifully with Evernote.  You don't even need to snap the picture, just hover over the d...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'm going to share Part 1 of my policies and methods for semi-paperless filing.  This is part of a series on my ADHD brain and all of the systems I use to compensate for a lack of internal structure and organization.   Okay -- when I say that I'm paperless, I'm not talking about being an over-the-top nut job about it.  I do not scan everything that comes into my house. That would be time consuming and crazy.  But -- if I think I may want to have access to that piece of information when I'm out and about -- I store it electronically.  So, really I have 3 options, pitch, physically file or electronically file.  Let's go through each.  Pitch I come from a family who, let's just say, keeps things, so the advent of the  Internet has really helped me get rid of things.  My basic policy is -- if I can access it online easily, I get rid of it. That p...