The answer to forgetting, losing things, laundry chaos, and food going mouldy in the fridge isn't to simply try harder
In this solo episode, Callie (a neuroinclusion specialist and coach) takes you inside the practical neurodivergent home systems her family uses to reduce cognitive load, support executive dysfunction, and make a multi-brained household easier to live in. You don’t need a perfectly organised, picture-perfect home, it’s about systemic changes in your environment so your brain doesn't have to work so hard.
Drawing on her background in systems thinking, behavioural insights, and neurodivergence, Callie explains how small environmental tweaks can reduce your reliance on working memory, help with task initiation, and smooth out daily transitions.
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In This Episode:
Takeaway: When a routine repeatedly fails, start asking whether the environment or system can be redesigned to better support the humans using it.
Timestamps
00:00 - Episode introduction: Callie flying solo
00:40 - Inside a neurodivergent household
07:00 - Identifying friction points and designing new systems
10:02 - Making your environment do the remembering
10:38 - Labels, storage, and giving items a home
14:06 - Managing clutter, visual load, and disappearing Post-it notes
18:03 - The three-minute Nike rule
19:48 - Putting the solution exactly where the task happens
20:03 - Laundry baskets, SOCKMAGEDDON, and natural consequences
23:00 - The coat hanger hack for clothing management
25:27 - The receipt drawer: Delaying decisions until they matter
26:45 - Transition spots and attaching tasks to existing journeys
27:52 - Out of sight, out of mind: The fridge drawer problem
29:19 - Garage zones, storage categories, and dancing skeletons
30:06 - Designing rooms around activities
31:34 - Sensory lighting and Callie's controversial love of the big light
33:12 - Meet the Octo-pissoff-opus
34:20 - Charging cables as household infrastructure
36:33 - Landing zones and handling systems that only partly work
38:04 - Externalising time to manage executive dysfunction
38:36 - Weekly planners, meal planning, and shared shopping lists
40:54 - Annual planning and the bigger picture
41:51 - Should Callie come back for Part 2?
Share Your Systems With Us!
Do you have a home system that genuinely changed your life, or a friction point you just can't seem to figure out? We want to hear about it!
We talk about neurodivergence from our own lived and professional experiences. Neurodivergent people are not a monolith, a system that works brilliantly for one person might be useless for another. Use what helps, ignore what doesn't, and change the system when it stops serving you.
We acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the lands on which we live, work, and record, including the Ngunnawal, Wadawurrung, and Dja Dja Wurrung peoples. We pay our respects to Elders past and present and recognise that sovereignty was never ceded.
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