How I get myself to get going and stay on track

This isn’t the post I was planning to write but when inspiration strikes (and the accompanying thoughts can vanish in a blink) I go with it!

So, here are five ways I help myself to do things that I’m struggling to get on with.

I allow myself productive procrastination time

We have a cordless vacuum cleaner whose battery lasts about 20 minutes. This is enough time to vacuum most of the house but not enough that I think I have to spend hours cleaning the whole house or get hacked off/worn out by hours of cleaning. If the floors don’t need a vacuum I’ll clean one room like the bathroom. Again, I’m not putting loads of time and energy into cleaning so it wipes me out for the thing I’m really meant to be doing.

What these household chores give me is not only a slightly cleaner home but also a sense of accomplishment and with it a dopamine hit. Increasing our dopamine levels helps us not only to feel good but also feel more motivated. So you might find that doing something else that ups your dopamine, like dancing round the kitchen, going for a walk or completing Wordle (yes, it’s still a thing!) gives you a positive boost and makes cracking on with a task more doable.

I change my situation

Some days the thought of sitting at my desk or even indoors if it’s a sunny day is enough to completely kill any desire I have to work. It’s not about the work itself but the environment in which I’m trying to do the work. When it comes to creative work it will feel like a slog to me (and make it infinitely harder to start on the slog) if I have zero desire to do it.

I know that on a warm, sunny day (which we’re having a lot of at the moment in my patch of the UK) I really struggle to get started and to focus indoors. However, sitting outside in the shade it’s a completely different story. My surroundings don’t distract me but instead actually allow me to concentrate on the task at hand.

Currently we have no garden to be in as it’s being landscaped. Essentially our outside space is a building site. So, a friend across the road is kindly letting me work in her garden (that’s where I typed this).

I realise that I’m lucky to have a garden at all (let alone that it’s being landscaped) and that I’m self-employed so have some flexibility in my working location (ie when I’m not on Zoom or need the internet). So if you don’t have outside space attached to your home and you’d like to work outdoors think about how you might be able to inject a little fresh air and nature into your work time. Does your workplace have a rooftop space? Could you have a plant or two in your work space? Is there a park nearby?

If your work requires you to be indoors can you take your lunch break in nature? (When I worked in publishing I searched out spots of nature near the various offices I worked in where I could spend ten minutes at lunchtime to give me a nature boost and soothe my nervous system.)

While I live in a rural area there are no public picnic tables to sit at in my village. However, in my local town the library has picnic benches in its garden and so I plan to work there too.

Changing your physical space can change your mental space too

Which brings me on to an indoor location outside my home I find super helpful in getting my brain into focus mode – the library. A couple of times I took my laptop to my local library just because I fancied working somewhere different. I like working in cafes too but there’s a limit on how many slices of cake and pots of tea I can consume.

What I’ve discovered is that my brain associates the library with focusing on work. The WIFI doesn’t seem to work for me so that’s a big distraction removed. I think it must remind my brain of studying in libraries for school and university exams decades ago – there’s a Pavlov’s dog reaction happening.

At any rate, if my procrastination is reaching epic levels I take myself off to the library and work gets done. For you it might be that your open plan office makes concentrating hellish but you find it much easier to work in a meeting room. Or maybe setting yourself up in a corner of the canteen helps you to get going on a task.

Is there a location that you associate (in a good way) with focus, productivity and accomplishment?

I gamify the task

As ADHDers we have an interest-based nervous system rather than an importance-based nervous system. This means that to feel motivated and focus on a task it needs to tick at least one of these boxes – interest, novel, competition or urgent.

Changing the location of where I work can tick the novel box as I’m not yet completely accustomed to working outside or at the library. Urgency can play a role if I’m getting close to a deadline. Most of my work is interesting to me because I’ve chosen what my work is and the business I’ve created (there’s still boring stuff like admin or accounts of course).

The one of those four criteria that is the most fun to me, and can make any task more enjoyable, is competition, also known as gamifying. While I’ve never been keen on competing with other people, competing with myself is something I’ve done all my life without really realising it.

So to help myself get going on a task and keep going with it I set myself little challenges. For example, how much of the task I can get done (without scrimping) in a specific amount of time? Or I only need to focus for X amount of time and then I can take a break or do something fun.

I use reward cards to give me a visual record of my progress with the accompanying dopamine hits, and to incentivise me to win my reward when I meet whatever target I set myself.

I use body-doubling sessions

The reason I offer two hour-long body-doubling sessions (Tuesdays 10-11am, Thursdays 2-3pm) every week in the Quiet ADHD Club is not just for members’ benefit – they’re hugely helpful to me too! Plus it’s lovely to have time with the lovely Club members who join me for them.

Being in the presence of other people (yes, on screen works) helps us focus and stops us getting distracted and that’s why body-doubling sessions can be so powerful for ADHD brains.

If I’ve been putting something off I often schedule it for one of our body-doubling sessions because then I know I’ll make a start or even complete it.

I give myself compassion

Oof, this is a tricky one. Because we need to beat ourselves around the head with a virtual stick to make ourselves knuckle down, right?! Wrong. Well, that can work to a point-ish, sort of, but not really because we’ll feel pretty crappy about ourselves before, during and after we’ve done the thing.

I get frustrated with myself when there’s something I need or even want to do but I’m just not getting on with it. I wish I could just click my fingers and become motivated, focused and productive instantly. But that’s not me and I’m guessing it’s not you a lot of the time too. Because we’re human. And we’re humans with differently wired brains. Which means that motivation and focus can be hard to come by NOT because we’re rubbish or failing or not trying enough or crap but because our brain chemistry makes it hard.

My struggle (and yours) to start, stick with and complete tasks sometimes (because there’s also hyper focus of course) is not a character flaw or a moral failing. And verbally beating myself up about it is not going to help and is going to make me feel bad about myself (and reinforce negative messages taken on in the past).

So, when I notice my frustration (or before if I’m lucky) I stop, close my eyes, feel my feet pressing into the ground and take three slow breaths in and out.

I tell myself:

“This is frustrating, it’s hard and it hacks me off. There are plenty of other people who feel like this too and who struggle like this too. This is not about me being crap it’s about my brain needing me to give it some help. From the handful of things that I know can help me to feel better and move forward, what shall I try now?”

Then I decide on something like one of the strategies I’ve shared above and off I go, making use of more than one if needed.

This is not an exhaustive list of how I help myself to do things that I’m struggling to get on with but it’s a few that I find personally powerful to me. We explore much more about overcoming procrastination as well as finding focus and dropping distraction in The Quiet ADHD Club.

What helps you to get going on a task and stay focused on it? I’d love to hear in the comments below.