I can spend an impressive amount of time not doing something I genuinely want to do.
Not taxes. Not cleaning out a junk drawer. Something I actually picked. A book I want to read. A hobby I bought supplies for. A show I’ve been excited to watch. Even getting in the shower when I know I’ll feel approximately 40% more like a person afterward.
I’ll have the time. I’ll want to do it. I may have been talking about doing it all day. And then I’m still sitting there.
This used to make no sense to me because I thought motivation was supposed to be the hard part. If I wanted to do something, shouldn’t that be enough to get me moving?
Apparently my brain would like to see a more detailed project plan.
What finally helped was separating wanting to do the thing from starting the thing. Starting can mean stopping whatever I’m already doing, switching attention, figuring out the first action, holding it in mind long enough to do it, and ignoring the phone that’s currently offering something much easier and more immediate.
Those processes fall under executive functioning. Adults with ADHD do show differences in areas including executive control, attention, set shifting, and reward processing, although the research is much less tidy than the internet sometimes makes it sound. There isn’t one rule where ADHD brains simply “can’t do boring things” or “only work when interested.” This review of executive-function findings in adults with ADHD is a useful overview.
The part I recognize is much simpler: sometimes I’m not avoiding the thing. I’m stuck in the transition into it.
The task usually has a bunch of invisible tasks inside it
“Read my book” sounds like one thing. It isn’t one thing.
I have to stop what I’m doing, find the book, remember where I left off, put my phone somewhere that doesn’t immediately reclaim my attention, get comfortable, and switch my brain into reading mode. None of that is difficult enough to justify avoiding the book for 45 minutes. And yet.
“Work on the presentation” can quietly contain even more: open laptop, find the file, remember what I was doing, reread enough to get back into it, decide what needs attention first, and avoid becoming fascinated by a completely unrelated part of the deck.
This is why “just start” has never been especially useful advice for me. I know I need to start. The useful question is what my body actually has to do first.
What would starting actually look like?
For cleaning the kitchen, maybe it’s putting the cups on the counter into the dishwasher. For working out, maybe it’s putting shoes on. For the email I’ve been mentally dragging around for two days, maybe it’s opening it and rereading what the person actually asked me for.
I don’t need to turn the whole task into a 17-step checklist. That can become its own hobby. I just need a first action specific enough that there’s nothing left to decide.
I have better luck when the decision happens before the moment
This is one of those places where something researchers gave a very academic name turns out to be suspiciously practical.
Implementation intentions are basically if-then plans: deciding ahead of time what you’ll do when a specific cue happens. When I finish dinner, I’ll open the document. When I put my coffee down, I’ll send the email. When I get home, I’ll change into workout clothes before I sit down.
Research across different populations has found that these plans can improve follow-through because some of the deciding has already happened before the moment you’re supposed to act. This meta-analysis goes deeper into the evidence.
This makes an annoying amount of sense to me because “I’ll do it later” leaves Later Me with every single decision. Later Me is already overbooked.
Wanting it more hasn’t been a particularly successful strategy
When I’m stuck, I still have a tendency to make it a character issue. Maybe I don’t want it badly enough. Maybe I’m being lazy. Maybe I need more discipline. Maybe tomorrow I’ll wake up with an entirely different personality and become a person who just begins things.
So far, tomorrow has declined to provide that service.
Trouble starting something isn’t automatically ADHD either. Stress, anxiety, depression, lack of sleep, overwhelm, and plenty of normal human circumstances can make this harder too. I just know that for me, asking “why don’t I want this enough?” usually sends me nowhere useful.
Asking for the first physical action gets me much closer. Sometimes the thing I’ve been avoiding turns out to be surprisingly small once I stop calling it by the name of the entire project.
And sometimes I still sit there for 20 minutes first. Improvement, not a personality transplant.