How to START: a tool for ADHD procrastination
Living with undiagnosed ADHD, I used to get so confused about my daily fight with procrastination. I couldn’t work out the patterns! Some days a task would be so easy. Most of the time I’d be drowning in things that I meant to do but didn’t. I was frustrated, anxious, and mad at myself almost every day.
My first creative coaching business was hard because I didn’t know about my adult ADHD. Running a business takes a lot of self-motivation. You have to get yourself to do so much stuff, day after day! A lot of it is admin, and can be boring and repetitive. Some of it is unknown, and there are no clear steps. This is a recipe for getting stuck in ADHD procrastination.
Working with people is always easy for me because it’s a special interest, so my brain wakes up. For everything else, I had only the classic ADHD strategy for desperate people: bullying myself. Ouch! And most of the time, it hardly helped.
After my ADHD diagnosis, and so much learning, I set up my ADHD coaching business. At first, I went through some of the same challenges as before. Finally, six months in, I clicked: I need to do ADHD coaching on myself! I can get interested in finding ADHD strategies that work for me in my business…and what I learn can be useful for other people.
This helped me to look at my patterns with a curious eye. It’s not that I’m broken or lazy (and even if I was, I’d still have to find a way to move forward, so that question doesn’t matter). I set an aim of letting go of the old feelings of guilt, shame, and dread when I got stuck. In their place, I revved up my interest. Guess what I learnt?
Getting started with ADHD
Knowing about my adult ADHD doesn’t make procrastination go away. But it has given me clues on how to get enough tools to be able to get past being stuck, most of the time.
When I want to do a task, here are the parts I often struggle with:
Getting started
Keeping going
Finishing it
Sound familiar? But let’s break it down. When you think about it, even ‘keeping going’ and ‘finishing’ need you to get able to get started, again and again - to find a way to get back to work on the task.
Here’s the thing, honey - I can find it tricky to do almost any task that needs self-motivation, at any moment. Out of the blue. No matter how great I’ve been doing. Surprise!
So the big question is: Right now, today, how can I help myself to get started? This is the question I ask myself, many times a day. (My mind will only give me the answer if I ask for it.)
I can only ask myself this if I first do something that sounds simple - accept that it’s pretty likely that I’ll find it hard to get started. Doesn’t it sound like the most obvious thing in the world, given my version of ADHD and my history of ADHD procrastination?
But lots of the time we do one of these things instead: A) tell ourselves that we’re definitely going to find it easy to get started today, or B) tell ourselves that we SHOULD be able to get started, because we’re grown-ups, so get on with it, buddy.
On the other hand, you can face the reality that you may find it hard to get started on any task at any time. From here, it’s clear that the smart thing to do is Get Ready. Set things up so if you do get stuck, you have things to try that can help you get started. You know what they are, you remember they exist, and you have a few options to choose from (because if one doesn’t work right now, another one might).
Now that we’re clear that it’s okay to find it hard to start sometimes, we can plan to have a bunch of ways to get into a task. It doesn’t matter which one works - just try things until one clicks. You may need to do this many times in a day. That’s fine!
Here’s a tool that helps me get started at the moment. I use it many times a day in my business, to help me get started on writing, on admin, and on planning.
Handy ADHD tool
It’s called the Time Timer. It’s designed for neurodivergent kids in classrooms, and I’m happy to report that it works well for the big kid writing this.
When I’m stuck and want to get started, I walk over to the Time Timer and set it for 10 minutes. Then I do something, anything, on the task I want to work on, till the time is finished.
Once the time is up, I often keep working. But I don’t need to if I don’t feel like it. The main point is for me to ‘touch the task’ - to spend a little time with it. This stops it being the demon my procrastination has been seeing, and becomes a real thing I can puzzle my way into.
I also use the Time Timer to get started on longer stretches of work. I set if for how long I want to work, and can see the time as an amount, because it’s in red. As the time counts down, the red goes away. Why is this motivating? I have no idea. But it truly is.
There’s a feeling of urgency, because it’s counting down, but without pressure that I might then rebel against. There’s a comfort in being able to see clearly that I’m not asking myself to focus for much longer. And because I make sure not to push myself past what I feel okay with, there’s a calm from trusting that I’ll actually work for the time I’ve chosen.
To put it another way, here’s a quote from the Time Timer website: “This innovative tool constantly reinforces the sense of elapsed time in order to promote better time management. You see and "feel" time elapse as the Time Timer’s dial graphically shows you how much time is left.”
If I’m having a spaced-out day, I use my Time Timer at the same time as the Forest app on my phone. (I used to use the free Multitimer app. You may find that setting an alarm on your phone works just as well.) The doubling helps for some reason.
The act of setting the timers seems to be a way to get started that my brain isn’t usually fast enough to reject. I don’t ask myself to start: I ask myself to set the timer. This gets me over the wall, and then the sense of urgency keeps me engaged long enough to get into the task.
The Time Timer was expensive, but for me, it works so well that I really don’t mind. There are apparently other versions that are cheaper. There are also widgets you can get on your device, I believe. I bought my Time Timer at Solutions NZ, and here’s the link if you’re curious:
Here are some other ways I use my timer:
To create a ‘tickable’ action step of moving forward by working on a task for 30 minutes
To show how long it is till I need to leave home in the morning
To show how much longer in a body doubling session
To race to complete an avoided admin task under 5 minutes
Now, in case I’ve talked you into rushing off to buy the Time Timer, I have to say: wait a minute. I don’t want to encourage you to go spend money on another ADHD tool that you don’t use. You can do something similar to this using an oven timer. You could use an hourglass from an old board game, even!
If you try it out with something free, and it works well for you (at least some of the time) for over a month, that’s a good sign. Then, and only then, it might be worth spending money on the fancy version if you feel like it. If not, don’t bother. Try something else!
This is a simple test you can always do before you put money into things to help manage your ADHD. There will be stuff that works, but what works is different for everyone.
Start getting started!
Here are some other ways to get started:
Go somewhere with the aim of doing the task, such as a cafe
Set up a body doubling session (with a friend or through Focusmate)
Break the task down into tiny steps and pick whatever you can stand or looks fun to do
You may also have told yourself that you’re not allowed to rest or have breaks, because you spend so much time being distracted. But you can’t get started unless you stop first! Give yourself time out from tasks and do something totally different (for example, switch from a screen-based task to moving around for your break). This helps your brain to be more willing to go along with getting started again afterwards. (But best stay off your phone, or you may forget you wanted to do anything!)
The Time Timer is one tool that helps me get started and break through ADHD procrastination. I’m going to keep writing about this topic, so if you’d like to hear more, you can click on the tag at the bottom of this post, or sign up for my email newsletter.