Clean desk, dirty mind? And pillbox process.

[azurelunatic]

Desk cleaning/tidying goes in stages. First I worked on the left side wing. Then I worked on the main desk, and shuffled some things off to the left side wing. Then I worked on the right return, and things from there went both onto the main section and onto the left side wing. In order to get the main section clear enough to replace the soft plastic desk pad, things from there went back to the right return.

Currently I have some stacks of roughly organized containers to my left, a set of pill boxes all over my keyboard protection shelves, pill bottles on my main desk to left, center, and right; on my right return we have papers in need of filing/scanning/shredding/recycling/conversion to notepaper, main desk items shuffled into the organizers that also have my bedtime pills, my paper guillotine, and a box with a few random items and more desk things.

Notably, the pill boxes are set up so that Morning Me can commence with filling the boxes without fear of losing track where we are. Left hand is morning-only pills (and the one pill that's morning/bedtime). Middle is AM/PM pills. Right hand is PM pills and AM/PM pills where I've already distributed the AM set. The pills that I've finished dealing with for this round are back in the drawer where they live.

The new editions of everything are in a sack and I can probably put my hands on something if I run out from the current bottle. All the bottles have a color-coded legend in Sharpie: time of day and which order (before or after meal), how many per each category if it's more than one, and the expiration date. AM is red. PM and bedtime is navy blue. As needed is purple. Expiration is black. I've recently started adding a note about whether a bottle is open or not, because I should use those first regardless of whether I've got a preceding date suddenly.

The ADHD meds live in their bottle, for reasons.

Comments

[the_wanlorn]

Hell. Yeah! Desk organizing/cleaning/redoing! High five us for being great at it o/

[azurelunatic]

I have both skill and enthusiasm! The skill grows every time I do it, and the enthusiasm grows the longer it's been since I've had to do it.

High five! \o

[senmut]

GOOD LUCK with the organization. I don't have many meds, but I did just have to flip the order they were in because I could not cope with the fatigue level I was getting right after work, aka me time.

[azurelunatic]

I'm glad you're working out some better timing for yours!

[mdlbear]

I do something similar, using a pair of 7-compartment pill organizers for AM and PM, and a plastic bin full of bottles with color-coded lids. Fortunately my mail-order pharmacy ships meds in small plastic bottles with the same size lid as most vitamin supplements. I use green for am, yellow for pm, and white for both. As-needed meds stay in their bottles and live on a shelf in the medicine cabinet.

Colleen had a set of seven daily organizers (AM, noon, PM, bedtime IIRC), and a lot more meds. I sorted the bottles in alphabetical order and made a table of dose times, which also gave her something to hand to health-care providers.

[azurelunatic]

I use the pill organizers for most of everything, but the filling part takes a few hours if I put it off until I'm filling seven or eight weeks at once. Between medications and supplements, I'm taking 12-14 pills in the evening, 6-7 at bedtime (plus the skittle candy that goes in the bedtime pillbox to fulfil the "with food" suggestion for the one med), and an intimidating 23 in the morning. Plus the ritalin.

The pharmacy sends me any old size of bottle, so the lid thing sounds less practical of me. I would love to be able to do something like that.

[mdlbear]

Ugh -- yeah, that sounds like a regular pain in the tail. Sympathy.