You are not Broken. You are wired differently.
Take what helps, skip what doesn’t, and remember you don’t have to do this alone.

The Observable Signals Tracker

A capacity tracker for ADHD and AuDHD adults that never asks you to rate anything

Danielle Ralston, Master ADHD Coach, MSW, ADHD-CCSP

What this is. Every symptom tracker on the market asks you to rate your fatigue from one to ten. This one asks you to count things that happened. Tasks abandoned. Rooms left. Layers removed. Evenings with nothing in them. Numbers you can write down without having to consult how you feel, because how you feel is the part that goes offline first.

Why the ratings are gone. Interoception is the sense that reports your internal state back to you, and a good deal of research suggests many autistic and ADHD adults find it harder to read. The evidence is mixed on whether the underlying capacity differs, and two meta-analyses disagree with each other. What is consistent is what people report: a gap between knowing a symptom exists and being able to recognise it in yourself in the moment. A tracker built on self-rating assumes the exact ability in question. This one does not.

The seven signals

One tick or one number per day. Nothing here requires an opinion about yourself.

Signal	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat	Sun
1. Tasks abandoned part-way Started, not finished, not returned to
2. Rooms left Times you moved away from noise, light or people
3. Things cancelled or postponed By you, on the day
4. Shutdowns or meltdowns Count them, do not grade them
5. Hours slept The number, not the quality
6. Layers added or removed Temperature, changed how many times
7. Evenings with nothing scheduled Tick if the evening was actually empty

Two more, if they apply to you

Signal	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat	Sun
8. Cycle day Number, or a dash if it has gone irregular
9. Medication taken as usual Tick or leave blank

Reading it back, after four weeks

Four weeks is the minimum. One week is weather, four weeks is a pattern.

Which signal moved the most?

Did rooms left and layers changed move together?

Sensory tolerance and temperature moving as a pair points somewhere different from either one alone.

Did your worst weeks follow your busiest weeks, or arrive unattached to anything?

Following demand points one way. Unattached points at the physiology. This is the same question The Three Recoveries asks, answered with counts instead of memory.

What happened in the weeks that had empty evenings in them?

The one page you take in

Four weeks of counts beats any description of feeling tired. Write the three lines here.

What this is not. It measures nothing clinical and diagnoses nothing. Counting is not the same as knowing why. If the counts are climbing and have been for a while, or if the thought of it not lifting has started to feel like relief, that is a conversation with a person this week rather than another four weeks of data.

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