Practical tips for working with your ADHD brain, not against it.
Tell yourself you only have to do something for a couple of minutes. No pressure to finish, no commitment to keep going, just touch it for a bit. Sounds too simple, but it works because your brain refuses to start things that feel big or ambiguous. A couple of minutes feels like nothing. Most of the time, once you are looking at it you will keep going, because starting was the whole problem.
When you are drained, do not tell yourself you will work on the project. Tell yourself you will open it and look at it. No pressure to build anything, just look. Sometimes that is all you do and you close it, and that is fine. But more often your brain goes oh I could just fix this one small thing and suddenly you are working without having forced yourself.
Most habit apps punish you with broken streaks and guilt when you miss a day. But the real skill is not consistency, it is how easy it is to start again after you fall off. Reframe it: instead of building a streak, practice restarting. Miss a day? Fine. The win is opening it again tomorrow without the shame spiral.
Your brain sees the task as this huge mountain. But once you are actually doing it, it is usually fine. The hard part was never the work itself, it was the starting. That is why tricks that make starting feel like nothing work better than motivation or discipline. Lower the barrier to begin, the rest often follows.
Most productivity advice assumes you have 90 minute focus blocks to protect. You probably do not. Instead of fighting for time you do not have, accept you will work in fragments. Fifteen minutes here, ten minutes there. Plan for it. Accepting you will not have long focus blocks is weirdly more productive than fighting for them.
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