You walked into the kitchen holding your phone. You opened the fridge to get a drink. You walked out. Five minutes later, you reach into your pocket, and the phone is gone. You spend the next twenty minutes in a frantic, sweaty panic, tearing up cushions and cursing yourself. You finally find it sitting inside the refrigerator next to the milk.
This is the daily reality of the "ADHD Black Hole." Society views losing things as a sign of being scatterbrained or careless. In truth, it is a hardware failure in the brain's memory encoding system. An ADHD brain possesses incredible long-term memory for highly stimulating topics, but its short-term "working memory" for mundane physical tasks is often non-existent.
The concept of "Object Permanence" refers to the understanding that an object still exists even when it cannot be seen. While technically a developmental milestone for infants, ADHD adults experience a functional deficiency in this area. If an object is placed in a drawer, behind a cup, or currently exists in another room, the brain deletes the "tracking file" to save cognitive processing power. It is "out of sight, entirely out of mind."
Moreover, you cannot "retrace your steps" like a neurotypical person because there are no steps to retrace. The action of setting the keys down was performed subconsciously while your conscious mind was fixated on an impending deadline. The video camera was simply turned off. To stop losing things, you must stop relying on your memory entirely and start relying on physics and loud electronics.