Help For When I Don't Have the Capacity to Type

There are some periods in which my autism and ADHD really limit what I can do because my available capacity is just way too low.  In other words I'm just plain out of spoons. During these periods even basic things like typing feel almost impossible. Late this afternoon was one of those periods. My autism has had enough such that the prospect of sitting and typing at a keyboard might as well be climbing Mount Everest. It's just not going to happen.

But my ADHD brain is so full of ideas and concepts that I'm desperate to get them on paper before I forget them. So on the one side my ADHD is a turbo charged idea machine and on the other side my autism is an exhausted sloth. Ordinarily in this situation I would simply end up watching Youtube videos or doomscrolling. Otherwise I might go and do some other low energy activity all the while annoyed at the fact I wasn't able to achieve what I wanted to. 

But today I tried something different and it worked. I was watching Youtube shorts on my beanbag when I thought: I just updated my iPhone so maybe the transcription of audio recordings is better now. I'm already on my beanbag so why not talk instead of watch. So I proceeded to do a big brain dump where I got out all of the ideas my ADHD brain was generating into one big audio recording.

With that done I used the transcript feature in the iPhones Voice Memos app to get a text transcript of my brain dump which I copied into a Google doc. Previously this was of little help because I still had to spend ages fixing up the horrendous transcript text, this prospect was what stopped me even bothering in the first place.

So this time I asked DeepSeek to clean up the text for me. For this to be effective I realised I needed to provide some context for DeepSeek so it would have a fighting chance of making sense of the transcript. Having done that I let it rip and much to my amazement the end result was really good and completely usable for my purposes. It even divided the text up correctly into sections, created the headings and used bullet points where it made sense.  The end result far exceeded my expectations.

This new work flow for my low spoon periods gives me the ability to at least get something done that I really wanted to where in the past I couldn't. I am now a very much happier autistic chappy and hope this helps someone else.