How People with ADHD Use Glasp to Stay Focused While Reading

Last updated: August 2026

Over the years, we have noticed something about Glasp's most active users: a surprising number of them mention that they have ADHD. It comes up in interviews, support emails, and community threads, often with the same story. Reading on the web used to feel like a losing battle against distraction, and highlighting changed how it feels.

This post is not medical advice, and Glasp is not a treatment for anything. It is a collection of patterns we have seen from real users with ADHD, in their words and ours, plus a look at what cognitive research says about why these patterns make sense. Highlighting turns out to help in ways we did not originally design for.

What reading online can feel like with ADHD

The people who wrote to us describe a familiar loop:

• You open an article, get pulled away by a notification or a stray thought, and come back to a wall of text with no idea where you were.

• You re-read the same paragraphs again and again, because nothing marks what you already processed.

• You keep twenty tabs open as a to-read list, because closing a tab feels like losing the idea forever.

• Your read-it-later app becomes a graveyard. Saving is easy, but returning is hard, and the list itself becomes overwhelming.

None of this is about intelligence or effort. It is about working memory and attention being asked to do jobs they are bad at: holding your place, holding your intentions, and holding your ideas, all at once, in an environment engineered to interrupt you.

What the research says about ADHD and reading

The experiences above are well documented in the research literature, and the mechanisms behind them are fairly well understood.

Working memory carries more of the reading load than we notice. A meta-analysis of 26 studies by Martinussen and colleagues (2005), published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, found that children with ADHD show deficits across multiple components of working memory, and that these deficits are independent of language problems or general intellectual ability. Working memory is exactly the system that holds "where was I, and what did I just read?" while your eyes move down a page. When it is overloaded, your place in the text is one of the first things to go.

Comprehension difficulties depend on what the task demands. A 2022 scoping review by Parks and colleagues in the Journal of Attention Disorders, titled "The Task Matters," looked across studies of reading comprehension in ADHD and found that difficulties show up most on tasks that lean hardest on sustained attention and working memory, such as longer passages and questions that require holding earlier parts of a text in mind. In other words, the problem is not decoding words. It is everything a long, unstructured page asks your memory to do in the background.

The drifting is not a choice. Seli, Smallwood, Cheyne, and Smilek (2015) drew an important distinction in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review between deliberate mind wandering, where you choose to think about something else, and spontaneous mind wandering, where your attention leaves without asking. Across more than 1,300 participants plus a clinically diagnosed sample, ADHD symptoms were clearly associated with the spontaneous kind, not the deliberate kind. If your attention exits a page on its own schedule, a tool cannot stop that. What a tool can do is make the return trip cheap.

Offloading memory onto the world is a legitimate strategy. Cognitive scientists call it cognitive offloading: using physical action to reduce the demands on your own memory, like tilting your head to read rotated text or writing a note instead of rehearsing a fact. Risko and Gilbert (2016), writing in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, describe how offloading lets people bypass the limits of internal memory. A highlight is offloading in its purest form. The page itself now stores what mattered and where you were, so your working memory does not have to.

One honest caveat. In a widely cited review of learning techniques, Dunlosky and colleagues (2013) rated highlighting as a low-utility technique for improving retention, because passively marking text does little for later test performance. We think that finding is correct, and it is worth being clear about what it does and does not say. The users in this post are not describing highlighting as a memorization trick. They are describing it as a place-keeper, a capture tool, and an external memory, which is exactly the offloading function the retention studies were not measuring. If you highlight and never think again, you will not magically remember more. If highlighting is what keeps you on the page and gives your ideas somewhere to live, it is doing a different job, and doing it well.

Highlights are visual anchors, so you never lose your place

The single most common thing users with ADHD tell us is this: when they reopen a page they were reading, their highlights are still there, painted on the page.

That changes the experience of returning to an article. Instead of a wall of undifferentiated text, you see exactly what you already read and what you found important. Your eyes snap to the last highlight, and you continue from there. The page itself remembers your place, so your brain does not have to.

This also works mid-reading. When a distraction pulls you away for thirty seconds, the highlights act like trail markers. You are never dropped back at the top of the page, mentally starting over. Several users have told us this is the difference between finishing articles and abandoning them.

Notice how directly this maps onto the research above. Spontaneous mind wandering will happen, so the cost of each exit is what you can actually control. A highlighted page turns "start over and re-read" into "find the last yellow line and continue," which is a working memory job handed off to the page.

Capture without breaking your flow

For many people with ADHD, the moment of switching tools is where focus dies. Copying a quote into a notes app means leaving the page, finding the right note, pasting, and then trying to remember what you were doing.

Highlighting with Glasp is one gesture: select the sentence, click a color. You never leave the page, and the thought is captured before it evaporates.

Agata Chmielewska, a CX specialist we interviewed on the blog, put it this way:

"I have ADHD so you can imagine how many things I want to do, read, know… I keep opening tabs on my desktop. [...] When I'm reading articles and find an important sentence, I highlight it with Glasp. I can highlight it without any disturbance, so I like it."

You can read the full conversation in our interview with Agata.

One library instead of twenty tabs

Every highlight you make is automatically collected in your Glasp home, organized by page and source. That gives the tab-hoarding instinct somewhere safer to go: once the important sentences from a page are highlighted, closing the tab no longer means losing the idea. The idea is already saved, with a link back to the exact page if you ever want the full context.

The same library holds more than articles:

• YouTube videos. Glasp shows the transcript next to the video, and you can highlight lines from it just like text on a page. Talks and podcasts stop being sixty-minute commitments you have to re-watch to find one quote.

• Kindle books. You can import your Kindle highlights, so book notes live in the same place as web notes.

• PDFs. Papers and reports work the same way as web pages.

Instead of ideas scattered across open tabs, screenshots, and half-finished notes apps, there is one place to look. For people who describe "out of sight, out of mind" as their default mode, having a single predictable location matters more than any organizing system.

Deciding what deserves your full attention

Not every page is worth a fight for focus. Users tell us they use Glasp's AI summaries as a triage step: skim the summary first, and only commit real attention to the pieces that earn it. On YouTube, scanning the transcript serves the same purpose. This turns "I should read all of this someday" into a quick keep-or-close decision, which shrinks the open-tab pile at the source.

This is also where the task-demands finding from the research becomes practical. If long, unstructured reading is the hardest format, a summary or transcript is a way of shortening the task before you start it, and of deciding whether the long version deserves your working memory at all.

A simple way to start

If any of this sounds familiar, here is the lightest possible version of the workflow, with nothing to configure:

1. Install the Glasp extension and keep reading the way you already do.

2. When a sentence matters, highlight it. That is the entire habit.

3. When you drift away and come back, look for your last highlight and continue from there. When you are done with a page, close the tab. Your highlights are already in your Glasp home.

No folder structure, no tagging system, no daily review ritual. Those can come later if you want them, but they are optional. The value starts with the first highlight.

Frequently asked questions

Is highlighting scientifically proven to help people with ADHD?

Not directly, and we will not pretend otherwise. The retention research (Dunlosky et al., 2013) actually rates highlighting as a weak memorization technique. What the research does support is the underlying mechanism our users describe: ADHD involves working memory deficits (Martinussen et al., 2005) and spontaneous mind wandering (Seli et al., 2015), and offloading memory demands onto the environment is an effective general strategy (Risko & Gilbert, 2016). Highlights as place-keepers and external memory fit that mechanism. Whether it helps you is something you can test in an afternoon for free.

Do I need to build a tagging or folder system first?

No. The workflows in this post came from users who mostly do not organize anything. Highlights are collected automatically, and search covers the rest. If a system helps you later, add it later.

Does this replace treatment, medication, or coaching?

No. Glasp is a reading tool, not a treatment. Everything here is about making one specific activity, reading online, less costly. Decisions about ADHD treatment belong with you and your clinician.

Does it work on mobile?

Yes. The Glasp mobile app for iOS and Android includes the same library, and highlights sync across devices, so a sentence captured at your desk is still there when you are on your phone.

The bottom line

Reading online asks your working memory to hold your place, your intentions, and your ideas all at once, and ADHD makes exactly those jobs harder. The research says the drifting is not a choice, and that handing memory jobs to the environment is a sound strategy, not a crutch. That is what a highlight is: the page remembering for you.

This post exists because users with ADHD told us how they actually use Glasp, and their workflows taught us things we did not know about our own product. If you have ADHD and Glasp fits into your reading in a way we did not cover here, we would genuinely like to hear about it. Reach out on X or email us at hi [at] glasp.co.

Focus is hard enough. Your tools should hold your place, hold your ideas, and stay out of your way.