I need to tell somebody about the mail, and the people in my life are tired of hearing about the mail, so you're getting it instead. For six weeks — six! — I have opened the mail the same day it arrives. No pile. No dread-drawer. No mystery envelope from October that I'm scared to open because it's probably a bill I forgot about.
If you don't have an ADHD brain, this might sound like the smallest possible thing to be proud of. If you do have one, you already know: the mail pile is never really about the mail. It's about the way small, boring, undramatic tasks have no built-in urgency, so they just... don't happen, and then they compound into a physical monument to everything you're behind on, and then the monument itself becomes too overwhelming to approach, so it grows a little more. I have thrown away unopened mail before out of pure avoidance. I'm not proud of that. I'm telling you because the small win only means something next to the real problem it solved.
Attach a new habit to something you already do every day without fail — mine is coffee. The existing habit becomes the reminder so you don't need to rely on memory.
What actually worked: I stopped trying to build a "mail habit" in the abstract and instead stapled it to something that already happens automatically — I open the mail while the kettle boils, every single day, because the kettle boils every single day whether I remember to or not. The external trigger did the remembering so my brain didn't have to. I put a little tray by the door so there's exactly one place mail is allowed to land, which means there's no decision-making involved, which means there's one less place for my brain to bail on the task halfway through.
Six weeks of open mail is not a personality change. It's one system, applied consistently, that happened to work. But I am going to sit in this small, slightly ridiculous victory for the rest of the day, because in recovery and in ADHD life alike, the small wins are not the consolation prize. They're the actual prize. They're the whole game.