Social Media
Tracker

ADHD Executive Function Tools

A weekly log for distinguishing purposeful social media use
from impulsive use - and building awareness of both.

Where This Tool Helps

Social media is designed for impulsive use. The architecture is built around variable rewards, infinite scroll, and notifications engineered to interrupt whatever else you were doing. For someone with ADHD, who already has less resistance to impulsive behavior and stronger pull toward immediate rewards, the defaults are especially hard to work against.

The most useful distinction this tracker makes is the last column: was the use intentional? That single question is where the coaching value is. It’s not about reducing social media to zero, or judging the time spent. It’s about separating the times you opened an app because you decided to from the times you found yourself already scrolling without knowing how you got there. Those are very different experiences, and they respond to different strategies.

Most people, when they first start tracking, discover that the intentional-to-unintentional ratio is more skewed than they expected. That data is more useful than any estimate, and it points directly to where intervention makes sense.

The entries below are most accurate when recorded the same day - or at most the following morning.

How to Use This Tracker

Log each day separately. If you use social media on multiple platforms in one day, note each one. The goal is specificity, not summary.
Estimate time honestly. “I scrolled for a while” usually means longer than you think. Check your phone’s screen time data if available - it’s often more accurate than recollection.
Describe what you were doing. “Scrolling” is a starting point. “Watching cooking videos to decompress after a meeting” is different. The what-I-was-doing column tells you whether the use had a function.
Note how you felt after. Many people with ADHD report that time on social media feels like rest but produces more restlessness. That pattern, once visible, is hard to unsee.
Set your daily target based on what you want, not what you think you should want. A realistic target you’ll keep is more useful than an aspirational one you’ll ignore.