Colour-coding tasks for ADHD: simpler than projects and tags

Most to-do apps want you to organise. Projects, sub-projects, tags, labels, priority levels, due dates, sections. If you have ADHD you've probably set all of that up at least once, enjoyed it for a fortnight, and then stopped because keeping it tidy became a job in itself.

Colour-coding is the alternative that survives. It works because it asks almost nothing of you.

Why structure fails and colour doesn't

Every organisational feature has a maintenance cost. A project needs tasks filed into it. A tag needs applying consistently or it's useless. A priority level needs re-evaluating as things change. Each of those is a small decision, and small decisions are exactly what ADHD makes expensive. CHADD's guide to to-do lists starts from the right place: a list is somewhere to write things down so you don't have to hold them in your head. Everything you add on top of that has to earn its keep.

Colour is different for a few reasons:

• It's one tap. Pick a colour when you add a task, or don't. Nothing breaks either way.
• It's visible without reading. You can see the shape of your day before you've read a single word. A screen that's mostly blue tells you something. A screen with one red item tells you something else.
• It doesn't need to be correct. A task in the "wrong" colour costs nothing. A task in the wrong project is lost.
• There's a hard limit. Five colours means you can't build a taxonomy. That's a feature.

Pick a small number and give each one a rough meaning

Four or five colours is plenty. More than that and you'll be back to a system you have to remember. Here are two ways to assign them. Pick one, don't mix them.

By area of life

This is the one most people settle on:

• Blue for work.
• Rose for people: messages, birthdays, things you owe someone.
• Tangerine for home and errands.
• Violet for admin: bills, forms, appointments.
• Sun for yourself: exercise, hobbies, the thing you keep saying you'll do.

The point isn't the exact mapping. It's that when you glance at the list, similar things cluster together without you having to file them.

By energy

Some people find this more useful, especially if work and life are already separated by where they are:

• One colour for needs a clear head.
• One for can do half asleep.
• One for needs another person (calls, meetings, asking someone).
• One for quick, under five minutes.

This lets you match tasks to how you actually feel. Bad morning? Scan for the "half asleep" colour and do three of those.

Don't use colour for priority

It's tempting to make red mean urgent. Resist it. Priority changes constantly, which means you'd be re-colouring things all day, and you won't. Within a week everything urgent has drifted back to its default colour and the whole scheme means nothing.

Priority belongs somewhere else: a "now" spot for the single thing you're doing next. Colour is for the stable stuff. What kind of thing is this? That rarely changes.

Let it be messy

Some rules that make colour-coding sustainable:

• Uncoloured is allowed. If you add a task in a hurry and don't pick a colour, that's fine. It'll get one later, or it won't.
• Don't audit. Never sit down to "fix" the colours. That's the maintenance trap in a new outfit.
• Change the meaning if it stops working. If you notice violet has quietly become "things I'm avoiding", that's information. Go with it.

Colour as a scanning tool

Where colour really earns its place is when you're choosing what to do next. With a text-only list you have to read every line. With colour you can ask a question and let your eyes answer it:

• "I've got twenty minutes before a call" → scan for the quick colour.
• "I'm at home this evening" → scan for the home colour.
• "I haven't done anything for myself this week" → is there any yellow at all?

That last one is underrated. A list with no "you" colour on it for a fortnight is a quiet signal that's easy to miss in words and hard to miss in colour.

Combine it with one other thing, then stop

Colour on its own organises the list. One more piece organises your day: a single spot for the thing you're doing right now. Colour tells you what kind of task something is. The now-spot tells you which one. That's the whole system, and it has no maintenance step.

A note on colour vision

If you have any form of colour vision deficiency, pick colours you can reliably tell apart rather than following anyone's suggested palette, and lean on position too: keep the "you" tasks at the bottom, say. Two or three colours you can always distinguish beat five you sometimes can't. The principle is the same either way. Make the list readable at a glance without having to read it.

How OneList does it

OneList has no projects, tags or folders at all. Every task gets one of five colours: rose, tangerine, blue, violet and sun. Tasks group by colour in the list, and when you start a focus timer on a task the countdown is shown in that task's colour, so the whole screen tells you what you're working on. Star a task to move it into the Now section at the top.

It's free, works in a phone browser, and you can try it without an account. If you've abandoned a few tagging systems, try five colours instead.