How I know this

What's research, what's experience, and how to tell which is which.

I built a packing app around ADHD, which means I make claims about how ADHD brains work. You should be able to check them. This page is how.

Three kinds of statement

Everything on this site is one of three things, and I try never to blur them.

Research. A claim about how attention, memory or time perception work, backed by published work. Every one of these lives on the evidence pages with a source you can follow. If I can't source it, it doesn't get stated as research — it gets restated as one of the other two, or cut.

Experience. Mine, and the community's. "I have stared at an empty suitcase for twenty minutes" is not a finding; it's a thing that happened, repeatedly, to me. When other people's words appear, they stay attributed to the people who said them. I don't blend a stranger's sentence into my own voice to make a point land harder.

Design position. A choice I made and will defend, which isn't a scientific claim at all. The app has no alarms or reminders. That's not because research says notifications are bad — it's because an app that interrupts you is an app you mute, and a muted app helps nobody. You're welcome to disagree. It's a position, and I've labeled it as one.

Where the popular word and the research word differ

Sometimes the phrase a community uses isn't the term the literature uses, and the honest thing is to say so rather than quietly borrow the authority of a word that means something else.

The clearest case is object permanence. People with ADHD use it constantly — "out of sight, out of mind," things stop existing once they're zipped into a bag — and it describes the experience exactly. But in the research literature, object permanence is a concept from infant development, and it isn't the mechanism at work here. The closer constructs are prospective memory (remembering to do a thing later) and working-memory maintenance (holding something available while you do something else).

So I use the community phrase where I'm describing the feeling, because that's the word that makes people say "yes, that." And on the evidence page I use the research term, cite the research term, and tell you they're different. Both are true; they're just answering different questions.

What this app is not

Pick, Pack, Go supports strategies that help with ADHD. It does not treat ADHD, diagnose anything, or make any claim about outcomes. I'm not a clinician and this isn't medical advice — I'm someone with ADHD who got tired of a specific recurring failure and built a tool for it.

You'll also notice I don't quote a prevalence statistic anywhere. Early drafts of my own research notes carried one. I couldn't source it, it looked too high against published figures, and a number I can't defend is worse than no number at all. So it's gone.

Checking the app's own claims

Every feature described anywhere on this site was verified against the shipped app, not against a design document. Where a spec and the code disagreed, the code won — several features were reversed during construction, and a few spec documents are still describing things that never shipped.

There's a list of what the app deliberately doesn't do, kept alongside the list of what it does, for the same reason: it's easier to trust a description that tells you where the edges are.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, I want to know — particularly if I've cited something badly or described a mechanism loosely. chum@sillysalmon.co. Corrections get made and noted rather than quietly edited.

The full map of design decisions and what backs each one: Why the app is built this way →