Out of sight, out of mind
For a lot of ADHD brains, something you can't see is something that has stopped existing. The friend you didn't text back, the bill in the drawer, the task you closed the tab on. It's not that you don't care. It dropped out of view, and out of view is the same as gone.
The usual coping strategy is to never let anything leave your sight. Sticky notes around the monitor. Every container clear or open so you can see what's inside. Forty browser tabs held open as a memory of things to deal with. The whole to-do list visible at all times, because the moment it scrolls off the screen it scrolls out of your head.
It works, a little, which is why everyone does it. But look at what it costs. To keep everything visible you have to keep everything visible all the time, and a brain looking at everything at once is a brain looking at nothing in particular. The sticky notes blur into wallpaper. The forty tabs become a wall you stop reading. The always-on list, the one thing keeping your tasks alive, is also a constant low alarm you can never switch off. You've solved forgetting by never being allowed to rest.
Surfacing beats storing
The trap is in the goal. You're trying to store everything in view, when what you actually need is for the right thing to show up at the right moment.
Those are different jobs. Storing means everything is present at once, forever, and you do the work of scanning it. Surfacing means most things stay quietly out of the way, and the one that's due steps forward when it's time, and then it too steps back. You don't have to hold it. You just have to meet it when it arrives.
Surfacing is the calmer version, and it's the one a tool can actually do for you. A pile of sticky notes can only store. Software can keep track in the background and bring each thing up exactly when you meant to deal with it.
How Willow keeps things alive without keeping them in your face
You tell Willow what matters, and it doesn't hand the whole pile back to you to babysit. It schedules each thing into your real day and then surfaces it at the time you meant to do it. Out of sight, but not out of mind, because something other than your memory is holding it.
When it's not that task's turn, it isn't sitting in front of you flashing for attention. Nothing's overdue in red, nothing's demanding to be looked at. The thing comes forward when it's time, you do it, it steps back. Your attention gets to point at one thing instead of guarding all of them at once.
You don't have to choose between forgetting things and never being allowed to relax. That was always a false trade. The job was never to keep everything in view. It was to make sure the right thing finds you.