Is the ADHD practice of "tossing" a real thing?

In My Humble Opinion
1

It was discussed in the Huff Post, so I guess its real. Just wasn’t aware of such.

“Tossing” is grabbing a DOOM pile and yeeting it in the garbage. People often keep their doom piles in drawers, crates, pillow cases, and trash bags. DOOM = Didn’t organize only moved.

As an ADHDer, I don’t find this urge relatable. I admit I even giggled a little bit when I first read about tossing. I have piles upon piles but I don’t usually keep DOOM piles. I have lots of piles but I usually know what’s in them. I don’t get overwhelmed by the piles I do have. Hell, I’m a modern American who has places to go, people to see, and things to do. I’m not worried about being neat and domestic. No shame about clutter, therefore no urges to get rid of them suddenly out of frustration.

Even if I did keep DOOM piles I couldn’t imagine “tossing”, out of fear of pitching something very important. Bills, forms, and documents. Cash won from the casino before being deposited in the bank. USB sticks with sentimental photos. My ADHD medication. Precious cargo!

The closest I’ve came, I guess, was last week. I spent 10 minutes looking for my wallet and then 40 minutes looking for my phone. I thought both were either in my car trunk or the crate in my back seat. I was so pissed, I started throwing away stuff that I wouldn’t ordinarily throw away: napkins, snacks, water bottles, etc. They were getting in the way of me finding my things. But I didn’t just toss everything! I knew somewhere deep in all of my junk was my go pro camera, Garmin GPS, and my $120 pair of sunglasses.

I don’t know anyone else who has admitted to “tossing”. But I find this idea amusing.

Have any of you guys, ADHD or not, just randomly tossed your shit? Stories? Have you ever regretted it?

Midwest Degenerate Gambler

2

Do you have to have ADHD to see a pile of random and unimportant junk that’s been sitting on your kitchen counter or wherever for months and say to yourself “fuck it, imma toss that crap out right now”?

3

I guess not? Either way, I don’t find such relatable. Too scared I will throw something out that I might need next week, or next year.

And I think the concern, eventhough not necessarily spoken, is that such ADHDers might forget that there’s something important hidden in those piles. Might not be all junk after all. Now it’s gone.

4
  1. If it was cash or my birth certificate it would not be in a random crate.
  2. I often have stacks of newspapers and junk mail by my bed or chair.
    I’ve up and tossed them without any thoughts of a lost coupon or crossword puzzle I wasn’t quite done with. That’s about as important as it could get
  3. My medicine is all located in one place. At all times.

You need to organize your junk.
If you can’t then you probably do have DOOM piles. Of some kind.

They have cleaning services who will do this for you.

And,
People who toss stuff in dumpsters w/o knowledge of what it is, is why we have dumpster divers.

5

This is my go to. BTW, diagnosed last year at 60+ with 2 diagnosed kids as ADHD. Important stuff like a birth certificate is dealt with differently…

Old school as I print out a ton of stuff, edit/markup by hand, read, etc and it all piles up on my desk. When the pile has been there a month or three without me digging through it to find something, then, voila, it goes in the recycle bin.

Sheesh, I know there are some gold veins in the pile that is actually useful. But the calculation of usefulness vs effort just isn’t worth it. If I haven’t “needed” it in 30 or 60 days, I certainly don’t need it in 6 months. It’s a really easy “filing” system. A couple of piles. Naturally evolves into “must have, should have, nice to have” piles, and I toss at least the “nice to have” periodically.

I also attempt to keep the daily everything into a single paper notebook (digitalizing as needed). And I have a couple of years of notebooks on the windowsill that 99% of the time I don’t go back to. Makes me feel better and extremely occasionally is actually useful. I throw the older ones out whenever moving work spaces.

6

The junkiest piled up person I ever knew was not ADHD.
I wish they hadda been. I wouldn’t have felt such evil intent as I helped her Mother clean out her house, one more time.

She was just a slob.

8

The people I know who make random piles of undifferentiated crap do not do this. They usually have anxiety and guilt about their inability to sort and be systematic, which leads to avoiding dealing with it at all. Some are hoarders, so their crap piles up to terrifying amounts, but most just manage to live with their chaos. Unless there is an external stimulus to clean it up, like moving house, they just don’t deal with it. All the people I know with this pattern feel strongly that they would throw out something valuable or needed if they ‘tossed’. In my experience they would be right.

9

I have such a pile or more sometimes. I will typically let it go till one day I feel I need to reclaim some space. I don’t let them build like I used to. I will very quickly scan though the pile, mostly page by page - tossing most, setting aside anything that is important, unless I hit a particularly meaningless group and on rare occasion toss the batch. Usually with the justification that even though I may need that paper, I will most likely not find it, and will seek other ways to accomplish what I need that paper for before I actually find it.

But looking back yes I did do tossing at a time I was drowning in such things. I reasoned that needing to clean up outweighs the value of a paper I may need. There were a few wish I would have kept it along that timeline but even then the conclusion it was far better to have tossed than having those piles to search through.

Yes, when I looked though a quick scan I did find stuff I found valuable enough to file. Also in the line of OHIO (Only Handle It Once), for a number of years I computer scanned anything that may be important and tossed everything (unless I was handling it directly). With that method The paper task would either be done right away, scanned and tossed or tossed. That ended when my scanner bit the dust. While it was working this scanner was very fast and easy for it’s day allowing for this to work. I basically put it in and pressed the button, no computer interface needed.

10

I definitely DOOM pile, and occasionally toss.

Example: sold my car. Mad scramble through it to grab all the items, pieces of paper and actual garbage floating around my car (I want to blame my kids, but they’re only about 66% responsible) and shove it all in a bag to sort “when I have time”; put it in the laundry cupboard and forget it’s there.

18 months later, pull out out, glance in it, decide if there was anything important then I haven’t missed it in 18 months and wouldn’t have known where it was even if I had, so toss the whole bag.

DOOM piles are the beautiful offspring of my perfectionism and procrastination. I don’t have time now to do it properly, so I will shove it out of sight until that fabled time arrives. Tossing happens when my laziness and pragmatism join forces.

11

I have severe ADHD. For me the problem with having someone else clean up my stacks of crap is I’d have to go through the stuff first so I’d know if anything in there is important. This sorta defeats the purpose of paying someone to clean up for you.

My issue becomes I simply can’t face that pile of various crap. I can not confront it at all because of extreme anxiety (caused by the ADHD).

12

Wow. I’m sorry for your suffering.

Seems a terrible simplification, can you take a trip and have a couple of trusted people to organize a big toss out in your absence?

Personally I do have some piles. As an artist I have a sense,(always)maybe, I can use that in a project. I’m a very neat person…so my piles are neat. And I can find what I need. Mostly they are papers I’ve collected or bought. A few pieces of cardboard I thought were interedtinlll

13

@Cazzle, I’ve done the same. Bag or two of random stuff from my old car sits on the porch or a corner in the basement until I have time to “go through it properly.” Years go by.

I also have bags or boxes of other “random loose ends I’ve got to pack up and move” from past homes. I’ve lived in our current place for almost seven years.

Years go by. I will go through a bag/box/pile. Some of it goes into the trash, and some goes into a smaller box/bag/pile that I’ll sort through sometime soon for real, because I got rid of the actual garbage.

I also end up with piles of unopened and/or un-dealt with mail from years gone by (not personal correspondence, but plenty from financial institutions, utilities or other entities I am connected with). This mail eventually goes into the trash unopened, sometimes a decade later.

I’ve gotten much better about keeping up with the mail in recent years… I’d say on a quarterly basis I get myself down to “mailbox zero”.

14

I go through it a few times a year when I just impulsively toss the shit out of anything that looks like I’ll never need again, and don’t think about it too hard. I haven’t regretted a thing yet. And yet I still have about three times as much stuff than I really need. Need to go through another tossing session it seems.

15

I’m afraid it just doesn’t work like that for me. It’s not the physical labor or anything like that. It’s that it’d be so hard to deal with people throwing any of my shit out unless I knew exactly what it was. Which just gets back to the beginning–I’d need to sort it and:

A: If I could sort it I’d certainly have no problem throwing out stuff I don’t want

B: I have a whole lot of trouble with sorting.

Deciding how to “deal” with an item (be it concrete or abstract) is very difficult for me. So I always just put it off. Forever.

16

I have piles of stuff that can just be tossed because there’s nothing that must be saved in the pile. It probably has stuff I’d like to save, but nothing that I couldn’t replace. Other piles contain almost all stuff to save that just needs putting away. Eventually I toss the former pile, likely keep adding to the latter.

17

I’m so glad you explained because I had one of those “I speak the language, but do not understand this sentence” moments…

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I did a vacation carrying only a small backpack (my kid’s bag from middle school, in fact). I always think back to that and say to myself “If that’s all I really needed to be happy, why don’t I toss almost everything else?”

My problem is that an hour into cleaning out my workshop I’m still thinking of scenarios where I might need this pad of metric graph paper from that 99 Yen Store in Kyoto, or my grandpa’s pipe wrench, and that Boba Fett PEZ dispenser might be worth something someday…

I need someone who isn’t easily distractible, and isn’t emotionally attached to it (like my kids!), to just go “all medieval” on my crap.

Oh, yeah, I’d have to have someone toss my stuff while I was out of the house, and the “lack of control over my things” would be tough emotionally.

And I accept the fact that I would find myself saying “I WISH I still had that verbleflitzer…”, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world.

I did do a deep clean during a rainy week, where I made myself toss one garbage bag a day. And, yes, I later discovered things I needed that I’d tossed… but only one or two, and I went and got new ones.

It felt empowering.

18

You can easily get more graph paper, unlikely a Boba Fett will ever be valuable enough to care about because so many of them were made, but it’s not as easy to get a new grandpa with a pipe wrench. And it’s a tool. If you throw away a tool you throw away everything that could have been built with that tool. And if you use the tool to make another tool all the things that could have been built with that tool too, which could be more tools.

19

I’ve always suspected I have ADHD and reading this thread makes me think that even more.

I don’t necessarily toss entire piles, but if the pile or box hasn’t been touched in two years, when I finally get to it, I go through fairly quickly and toss most. It’s a bit like ripping off the bandaid. And it is a relief to get through. We moved a year ago, and I still have several boxes/bins to go through and I know a lot of it can be tossed. Maybe this winter…

20

Ah, but I’ve got wrenches that aren’t rusty. I don’t NEED Grandpa’s. If I’m going to have a working workbench, I need to be less sentimental about my… well, junk.

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That way lies madness… and a mess.

I used to make large assemblages of artsy crap (as collage-y covers for a magazine that a friend was editing).
The magazine went 100% online with minimal art, and I was relieved. I got to toss tons of metal, wood, vintage plumbing fixtures, stained glass and “Ironic Americana”.

So now I just draw in sketchbooks. No hoarding of Potentially Artsy Stuff (no, no, you don’t need to see that drawer full of 200 Sakura Pigma Micron pens…)

21

My DOOM pile(s) mostly consist of clothes that I will be able to wear again some day when I lose weight. This last weekend, I finally took them and put them away in a guest bedroom closet instead of on top of my chest of drawers. But this was so that I could move stuff around enough to repaint my bedroom.

Other doom piles (i.e., boxes) consist of gaming materials, but not the games themselves. I mean bits and pieces of miniatures and gaming terrain that I will totally use to make stuff with but haven’t since the late 80’s. I consolidated a lot of these into a single large box a month ago and took it to the game store for anyone who wanted it. Now it lives on anew as someone else’s doom pile. And I was able to clear up enough space to put away much fresher doom boxes.

Also got the initiative to take a big box of paints to the County hazardous materials drop-off.

I’m not sure if any of this counts as tossing, since it was cause by outside events like the very limited hours of the drop-off facility or the repainting of various rooms. Also, it’s the cause of good feelings instead of resulting from bad ones.

Now I need to dig into my old receipt and bill boxes to see what’s ripe enough to toss.