Morning Battles to Morning Wins: How AI Saved Our Routine

My daughter has both ADHD and remarkable intelligence. By 18 months, she was already stringing together 3-4 word sentences. We even have this hilarious photo where she's directing my husband to put HER shirt on the cat and then to take a picture of the cat wearing it! While her brilliant mind constantly amazes us, her neurodivergent brain also brings unique challenges to everyday activities that many take for granted.

One challenge in particular, we encountered daily—twice a day actually. 😐 FUN TIMES! With most neurotypical children, routines can be developed—they wake up and automatically brush teeth, get dressed, eat breakfast, pack their bags. With neurodivergent children like mine ALL of that goes out the window. Working memory—nonexistent, time blindness—LOTS of that though. Furthermore what might become automatic for neurotypical children often requires continued conscious effort for those with ADHD.

Enter AI. This time I actually wanted to give ChatGPT a spin, since I hadn’t in a long time. My go-to has always been Claude, but hey, we’re not exclusive 💍, so why not? The thing I actually like more about ChatGPT is its ability to create visuals to go along with whatever I’m working on. And today we are working on 🎉Visual To Do Lists 🎉.

These are the programs/apps I had open and at the ready: Google Sheets, ChatGPT, and my Photos app. So starting in Google Sheets, I just stole the premade “To Do” template from the options—great start, 🏃🏻‍♀️I’m halfway there . Then I deleted the “Date” column, renamed each row its own “to do”, and look, there’s already premade boxes to check off when each “to do” is completed. Looking good! 🙌

Next we needed to tackle the “visual” part of this 👀Visual To Do List🎨. Here’s where ChatGPT comes into play. After I had my list of “to dos”—for us it was all of my daughter’s morning routine: brush teeth, eat breakfast, refill water bottle, etc.—I took a screenshot of that list I had just created in Google Sheets. Dropped that screenshot into ChatGPT. Then asked it to create simple visuals for each item.

First try, it did pretty well, creating simple but clear line drawings of each “to do”. I think the key was in the prompting. When typing it in, I included the detail, “Please make sure these will be legible even at a smaller scale.”

Ok, now I had the little to-do “icons”. In ChatGPT, I saved each one to my Photos app. Then went into Google Sheets and inserted each icon into the row with the corresponding to-do. Pretty easy peasy. Once completed, I printed it out and slapped some clear tape on it (poor-man’s laminator 😏). The new visual to do lists went up on the wall of the kids’ room yesterday (I made one for morning, one for evening), and I’m happy to say my daughter seemed to take to it immediately.

There was no repetitive reminding, no frustration on our part, no push back on her part. I’d say it was a win. BONUS points for it helping to NOT trigger her PDA (Pervasive Drive for Autonomy). A lot of neurodivergent folks struggle with PDA. It’s basically when you were ABOUT to do something and then someone asks you to do it and LOOK AT THAT, NOW you don’t want to do it.

So for now, the morning rush and evening wind down are a little quieter and more focused in our household. We’ve got another tool in our tool belt. This one created in about 20 mins total with a game time assist from AI.

Here’s a look at that simple Visual To Do List.