I Forget Why I Walked Into the Kitchen

# I Forget Why I Walked Into the Kitchen

I am standing in my kitchen holding the dish soap.

I have been standing here for maybe forty seconds. Long enough for the coffee maker to finish its little death rattle. I came here for a reason. The reason is gone. It is not fuzzy. It is not on the tip of my tongue. It is gone the way a dream is gone at 9am. There is a clean empty slot where a whole intention used to live.

If you know, you know. And if you don't know, this is the article that explains your AuDHD friend, partner, or coworker better than they have ever been able to explain themselves. So stay.

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Fifteen Feet Is a Long Way

The walk from my couch to my kitchen is fifteen feet. I measured it once out of spite. Somewhere around the hallway, my brain drops the reason.

Here is what the world tells you about this moment. You are careless. You are flaky. You would remember if it mattered to you. I have heard versions of that my whole life and I believed them for decades. I thought memory was a moral quality. Some people had character and I had dish soap.

Then I spent two months reading research, because that is what my brain does instead of sleeping, and I found out the scientists have a name for this exact moment. Not a metaphor. An actual studied, measured, replicated name.

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The Doorway Eats Thoughts

Gabriel Radvansky at the University of Notre Dame runs a memory lab, and in 2011 his team published a study called "Walking through doorways causes forgetting." [1] I love this study so much I want to put it on a mug.

Here is what they did. They had people pick up an object from a table and carry it to another table. Sometimes the second table was across the same room. Sometimes it was through a doorway into a different room. Same distance. Same object. Same task.

People forgot significantly more after walking through the doorway. It worked in virtual reality and it worked in real rooms with real boxes. The doorway itself was doing something.

The explanation is called an event boundary. Your brain does not record life as one continuous film. It chops experience into episodes, and a doorway is a natural place to cut. When you cross one, your brain files the old episode away. The couch episode is complete. The kitchen episode is beginning. And the little note that said "get the sponge" was written in the couch episode, in ink that does not transfer.

So first, let this land. Everybody's brain does this. The doorway effect shows up in typical brains, in young adults, in older adults. It is not damage. It is architecture.

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Now Add a Leaky Sticky Note

Here is where I get to info dump about my favorite thing, which is working memory, because this is the part that explains why some of us live inside the doorway effect and other people visit it twice a month.

Working memory is the brain's sticky note. It is the scratch space that holds a goal in mind while you go do it. Get sponge. Reply to Sam. Take the chicken out of the freezer. The note floats in front of everything else you are doing and it is supposed to stay readable until the task is done.

Russell Barkley, who has spent his career mapping ADHD as a disorder of executive function, breaks executive function into pieces, and two of the pieces are nonverbal and verbal working memory. Holding images in mind. Holding your own inner speech in mind. Keeping the goal online. [2] His whole framework says what those of us with the diagnosis already know in our bones. In an ADHD brain, the sticky note leaks. The goal goes offline early. Not because you don't care. Because the system that keeps goals active runs differently.

Now stack the two findings.

A typical brain crosses the doorway with a sticky note that is still mostly legible, and loses a word or two. An AuDHD brain crosses the same doorway with a note that was already fading in the hallway. The event boundary does not have to erase much. It just has to smudge the last legible corner.

This is why it is not "everyone forgets sometimes." Everyone does. The difference is frequency and cost. When it happens to you ten times a day, it stops being a quirk and starts being a tax. You spend a chunk of every day rewalking hallways, reopening tabs, re-entering rooms, trying to trick the reason into coming back. That is time and shame and energy that nobody sees you spending. The invisible labor of having a leaky sticky note.

And before anyone's chest gets tight, no, a blog post cannot tell you whether you have ADHD, and neither can a doorway. This is a pattern, not a diagnosis. If the pattern costs you real things, that is a conversation for an actual clinician. What I can give you here is the mechanism and the workarounds, because those belong to everybody.

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The Advice That Almost Killed Me

The villain in this story is not my brain. My brain is doing exactly what brains do. The villain is a sentence.

"Just pay more attention."

You have heard it. I have heard it. It sounds like help and it is actually a trap, and here is why. It says the fix is internal. Try harder to hold the note. Grip the goal tighter. Be the kind of person whose memory works on willpower.

I ran that program for thirty years. Here is the dead solution graveyard it produced. Planners bought in January and abandoned by February because I forgot the planner existed. Apps with one lonely entry from the day I downloaded them. Sticky notes, actual physical ones, which I forgot to look at, stuck to a monitor I forgot to sit at. And the all time champion, promising myself at 11pm that tomorrow I would simply be different.

Every one of those failed for the same reason. They all required the leaky system to fix the leaky system. Remember to check the app. Remember to look at the note. Remember to remember. The loop is broken at the exact point where the loop needs to work.

The reframe that changed my life is stupidly simple. Stop putting the fix inside the memory. Put the fix in the environment.

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Put the Thing Where You Need It

If the sticky note leaks, you stop trusting the sticky note. You build a world that holds the reason for you.

Say the reason out loud while you walk. It feels ridiculous. It works, because now the goal is not only stored in fragile working memory, it is also in your ears and the air and the motor memory of your mouth. You gave the note three copies instead of one.

Carry the anchor with you. This is my favorite one and we will come back to it. If I am going to the kitchen for the sponge, I pick up the dish soap first and carry it. The object is the reminder. My hands remember what my head drops.

Put things at the point of use, not the point of storage. My keys live by the front door because if they live anywhere else, future Oliver does not have keys. My sunglasses live in the visor above the steering wheel because the sun does not care about my intentions. I have to put the thing where I need it, because my brain will not reconstruct the need later. This is not a hack. It is an accommodation, and accommodations are how a divergent brain gets a fair game.

And the big one, the one that became a whole product in my life. Externalize the thread everywhere it matters. Write the plan down before you start, not because you are disorganized, but because the middle of every task is a doorway and you will cross it.

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Why I Built the Thing

This is the part where I tell you the truth about my business, because it is the same truth as the kitchen.

The exact leak that drops my reason between the couch and the kitchen also drops my context in the middle of working with AI. I would be deep in a build, holding the whole project in my head, and one distraction later the thread was gone. Fifteen feet of hallway, except the hallway was a browser tab. I wrote a whole other article about watching my LLM lose the plot the same way I do, and it is here if you want the full story: [Your LLM Is AuDHD](/adhdetours/articles/your-llm-is-audhd).

The short version is that I got tired of rewalking that hallway. So I built [sloppyxbaby.com](https://sloppyxbaby.com), which is the point-of-use principle scaled up to a whole workflow. It takes your messy, half-formed prompt and hands you back a structured version with the context locked in and the constraints written down, so the reason survives the walk from your head into the machine. It exists because my sticky note leaks. That is the entire origin story.

If your note leaks too, it is there. No timer. No pressure. The kitchen will still be here.

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Back in the Kitchen

I am still standing here. The coffee is done. The dish soap is in my hand.

And here is the twist, the one it took me forty seconds and honestly several years to see. I look down at my hand and I start laughing, because I am holding the answer.

I came to the kitchen to wash the pan. The dish soap is the reason. My body picked up the anchor before my brain could drop it. Muscle memory ran the accommodation that working memory could not.

That is the whole article in one image. The reason does not come back because I grip harder. It comes back because some earlier, kinder version of me put the answer in my hand.

Be that kind earlier version of yourself. Put the thing where you need it. Say it out loud on the walk. Carry the soap.

Your brain drops the middle of everything. Fine. Build a life that holds the middle for you.

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Sources

1. Radvansky, G. A., Krawietz, S. A., & Tamplin, A. K. (2011). "Walking through doorways causes forgetting: Further explorations." *Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.* [PubMed listing](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21563019/)
2. Barkley, R. A. "The Important Role of Executive Functioning and Self-Regulation in ADHD." [russellbarkley.org factsheet (PDF)](https://www.russellbarkley.org/factsheets/ADHD_EF_and_SR.pdf)