Local ADHD Coach Publishes Kids Book, Debuts Task Management App

BRYN MAWR, PA — A Main Line ADHD and executive functioning skills coach has released two new tools for people with ADHD and other executive function disparities to better navigate life.

Hannah Bookbinder, of Penn Valley, recently published her first book and launched an app with the same goal.

Bookbinder — who earned her masters in social services at Bryn Mawr and her masters in elementary education at Cabrini — is the author of "Unlock Your Inner Superhero" and the creator of the My TOAD App.

The book aims to assist neurodivergent students, particularly those with ADHD, in managing the daily obstacles encountered in school, at home, and in life. It combines clinically-proven strategies with relatable success narratives to enable readers to gain control over their time, responsibilities, and overall lives.

"Books don't speak a lot to the validation process," she told Patch. "I want parents to have a better understanding of what their kids are going through."

While most parents are patient and compassionate with their children who have diagnoses such as ADHD, sometimes they just do not understand their neurodivergent minds.

"This handbook for them will be very valuable," she said. "Some [parents] are having aha moments when they learn why things are happening."

Through the book, parents have come to appreciate their kids and realized they are superheroes, Bookbinder said.

The book is written to be ADHD friendly, namely in that it eschews the typical chapter layout and employs a bullet-point style delivery of the information provided.

"A traditional chapter book wouldn’t work with people who have trouble focusing," she said. "I have learned to cut to the chase and get to the point."

Bookbinder also included sections that task the reader with reflecting on the topics they just read about to better retain the information.

"I want them to feel like they're in the office with me," she said.

She teamed up with illustrator Annika Winkleman for the artwork and self-published through Amazon and IngramSpark.

"Annika is so talented and adept at taking what I was described and translating it to images," she said. "It was fun to see what you think in your head taking formation outside of it."

Bookbinder and her team of editors, marketing professionals, and narrators for the audiobook spent about three years to release the book.

And while she was working on the book, she was developing the My TOAD App.

"TOAD" is an acronym that represents time management, organization, accountability, and dialing in.

While the book is aimed at young people who struggle with executive functions, the app is designed to be useful to everyone. Executive functions are a set of cognitive skills and mental processes that enable individuals to plan, organize, regulate their thoughts and actions, and achieve goals.

Each letter of TOAD has a suite of skills tied to it in the app, and they are all integrated with one another, setting it apart from reminder and notes applications, she said.

For example, the task manager suite allows users to develop a sense of time about a task. They're asked to provide a start date and time for the task at hand, and also asked how they feel about the task: will it be easy, medium, or hard to complete.

When choosing "hard," the app suggests users consider reaching out to an "SOS contact," someone who can help the user reach their end goal for the task. The app integrates contacts in phones and lets users organize them into categories, such as family, medial, academic, and more.

The app helps users create a prefabricated outgoing message to the SOS contact that can say, "I'm working on something," and Bookbinder said that message alone can be enough to get people motivated to do the task.

And if that's not enough, the message can say "I'm working on something, and I need you to check in on me at a certain time or date."

"It's about trying to lower the labor that's involved," she said.

Users can enter all task-related information into the manager, press on task when they are ready to start, and time the task to see how accurate they were with time estimation.

When the task is complete, users can press the stop button and get points of reflection, to learn what worked and what didn't during the execution of the task. And those points are stored in app, so they can be referenced for future tasks.

The app also allows users to color code tasks and offer an AI-informed tool that can troubleshoot questions such as what to make for dinner, planning research papers, and preparing pitches for bosses or clients.

It can also break down long term tasks over the course of time.

"This stops users from spinning out about tasks," she said.

The app took about two years to develop and release, with bookbinder working with a team of developers to create more than a dozen versions before it was made available online.

So far, about 150 people have downloaded the app. Some users are people she has worked with at her private practice, academic coaching center AcademicAlly in Berwyn, but she has seen downloads from other states, as well.

"People are finding it very helpful," she said. "They don't have to think as hard, it's user-friendly, and has a help center aspect that shows videos for each tool right in the app."

Writing the book and developing the app felt like "tending to twins," she said, while still managing an "older sibling" in the form of AcademicAlly.

She credits the support of her husband, two sons, her parents, and her in laws for helping her through the publishing and development processes.

"It was really a team effort," she said. "My older son has been in charge of doing the website, my younger was helping with marketing, and my husband was doing a bit of everything."

Bookbinder hopes the book and app empowers people and helps them realized while they might have a condition such as ADHD, ADHD doesn't have them.

"It doesn't have to consume you or define who you are," she said. "We all have challenges and baggage we carry around with us. We have the ability to decide what to do with it."