Helpful Habits & Routines
Dissociation can lead to being very disoriented as people flow in and out of front, or folk are suddenly triggered front and have no idea what was just happening. Improving internal communication helps, but there can still be a loss of sense of time & place, and as individuals in your system may have different habits and thoughts on how to go about things, it really helps to have internal agreements, guidelines or rules for the smaller things in life that can get annoying — or even be dangerous. If everyone agrees to doing some small things in the same way, and making group-entity-wide habits it can make life easier for everyone else too.
Here's some tips for things that have worked in our (Crisses) experience, but please feel free to comment with things that work for you & your system as well!!
Create cheat sheets or index cards with common directions for things that y'all might forget. Such as cooking settings for appliances, or keep the appliance's quick start guide handy. We have a "run book" for server administration tasks that we sometimes only do once or twice a year, and so we forget how to do them. When we do something we know we'll have to do again, we make a list of the steps we did so someone else in here can repeat them.
We use reminder apps with multiple alarms for each appointment. We have alarms start with 2 days before, 1 day before, 2 hours before, 1 hour before, 30 mins before … from there it depends on whether we have to travel or be on a phone appointment. So could be 15 before, 5 or 10 before and at start. This way folk in here can remember and make any mental plans or make sure we don’t plan any conflicts with things in our calendar.
We learned this one while living with an elderly friend: when cooking, turn the fan hood light on as a reminder that the stove, oven, crockpot, toaster oven (etc.) is on.
Also set reminders ("Hey Siri, set a reminder for 20 minutes.") or kitchen timers when things are cooking for the next time you need to check on it, stir it, or when it is finished. Learn how to use the kitchen timer on your microwave, or how to set timers on your cell phone, etc.
Always put things like credit cards, wallet, keys, money/change back where you got it so the next bloke fronting can find it. Same pocket of your coat, jeans, the same compartment of your purse, or the same location in your house. Only move things deliberately, not through carelessness.
We use our phones reminder/checklist app to track shopping lists, things we want to tell or ask our doctors at our next appointment, packing lists for various events (camping, travel, dogsitting appointments, etc), etc.
We use a pill case with the days of the week, so we can tell when we forget to take our supplements/meds or know we have already taken them.
We now (epidemic, 2020) have a plastic shoebox to empty our pockets into when we come in from outside so our keys, glasses (for driving), etc are quarantined in one spot between outside trips and easy to find before we go out.
Don't forget to chime in below — leave us some comments on things that you do to help manage gaps in skills, memory, time-sense, etc.