Avoiding Toxic Productivity Advice for ADHD

hey my name is jesse j anderson it's great to be here with you today i'm really excited to talk about toxic productivity and specifically how toxic productivity affects our adhd brains so for me i didn't find out i had adhd until just a few years ago as an adult probably like a lot of you but i knew something was different about my brain early on i knew that things were working a little bit differently and i was having trouble getting stuff done and i didn't really know what to do about it what i found was

that all my teachers knew that i wasn't reaching my potential they didn't really tell me what my potential was or what i could do to reach that potential but i knew i was not living up to whatever they thought i should be living up to and the only thing i could really think of to try and live up to that was to try harder and man did that not work trying harder is not a solution when you have adhd it just doesn't like trying harder isn't more effective it we're still struggling just the same in

fact even more so most people with adhd are trying harder than most because we're just desperate for a solution and we have these really good intentions and we're just not able to make them connect with our actual action so trying harder is really just kind of terrible advice for people with adhd even though that's what we naturally go to because we're just trying to make it work but the real problem is the systems weren't built for us they weren't built with our brains in mind there's a specific quote from hamilton the musical that i really

love and it really just sort of resonates with me and it's right at the beginning hamilton says he looked at me like i was stupid i'm not stupid and man did this connect with me this is so much how i felt in school i i knew i wasn't stupid i knew that i was smart and i was really clever at figuring things out i was a great problem solver i was great at brainstorming and i had great ideas and things like that i knew that i was smart and i would ace tests too but things

weren't connecting somehow and people would say that they thought it was stupid or all the other labels that people that adhd get you know being lazy unmotivated messy all that sort of stuff was just piled onto me and i didn't know why and i didn't really know what to do with it i never really did find a solution in school i survived it because i was good at testing and so i would end up with you know c's and d's enough to pass because i would ace my tests and then i would just refuse to

do any homework but a little while after i got out of school i discovered the getting things done movement which was started when david allen released his book getting things done and then shortly after that the blog 43 folders came out by merlin mann and though that really started the movement of productivity of getting things done in the early 2000s you know things were kind of revolutionary at the time like email was becoming really important to our lives and so there's this whole new movement of how to get things done and i thought this was

finally going to be the solution for me there was all these great strategies and tips and i ate it all up i loved it i was going to do all the things i did the getting things done inbox and i used the context i even built a hipster pda which if you don't know is basically just a bunch of index cards kind of clipped together i also tried kickless gtd which was sort of the predecessor to omnifocus and they did inbox zero the whole idea being that never touch an email more than once once you

see it act on it and get it out of your inbox so you have nothing in your inbox anymore i did all these systems for years i tried to make them work i would spend weekends building up what i thought was going to be the perfect solution i thought this was the one this will be the solution i'd spend a whole weekend and it would work for maybe a few days or a few weeks or so but eventually it would always come crashing down and i never really knew why but the problem is these weren't

built for my brain these were neurotypical productivity systems they were built for neurotypicals they were built even specifically for david allen's brain uh gtd is the perfect system for david allen but for the rest of us it doesn't always work out especially when you have an adhd brain and in david allen's book he talks about what you need requirements in a productivity system and the crucial requirement that you need for those systems to work is trust and i did not have trust i didn't know why at the time i had no idea about adhd so

i didn't know why i couldn't trust myself but i knew it was true i knew that these systems would always end up falling apart and i never really knew why the problem is i couldn't trust my own brain and i think that really comes down to these three major flaws and neurotypical productivity the first one is motivation and this one really is huge this i think is maybe the most important point i want to share today and that's that neurotypicals are motivated by importance and rewards and consequences and these really aren't motivating in the same

way for people with adhd like we understand when something is important and we obviously love rewards like if we do something and get a reward at the end that's great that's a great way to you know potentially build a new habit but if you tell us there's a big reward at the end of the road that doesn't really give us any motivation at the beginning to get started even if you increase that reward the reward could keep getting bigger and it really doesn't bring the motivation that we need to get going the second major flaw

in neurotypical productivity systems are distractions and shiny objects productivity systems are full of distractions and anyone can get caught up fiddling with all the little bits and bobs like there's so much to tweak and continue to refine even for those that don't have adhd but it's especially bad for us that do distractions are just can be so detrimental to us it can can completely derail us where we just can't get anything done because we're we're spending so much time tweaking the system following all these fun trails looking for the new shiny objects but at the

end of the day we don't have a system that actually works for us and the third major flaw is overwhelm our brains have learned to shut down in response to overwhelm uh when we have too much on our plate we just don't do anything there's a point where we can be flying get a ton of stuff done and then we hit that point of overwhelm and you're just done i'm gonna drop everything at once um and everything's gonna fail and neurotypicals often give the advice of like well just suck it up and do the hard

work just force yourself to do it even if it's boring even if it's not fun just make yourself do it but with an adhd brain we're incapable of doing that it's not really a choice it's not that we're choosing to sit on the couch and do nothing our brain is like shut down completely it's def desperate to get dopamine working and it knows that that's not going to give us the dopamine so when we hit that overwhelm point we're completely shut down and there's no way we can just push through it to make it happen

it reminds me of one of my favorite jim gaffigan lines he talks about when he had his fourth kid and people would ask him hey what's it like jim what's it like having a fourth child and he said imagine you're drowning and someone hands you a baby and that is what it feels like for our brain that's lacking that dopamine when it doesn't hap when it's not absorbing the dopamine right it just can't survive it's desperate it can't breathe it's like it doesn't have oxygen and you're trying to have it more and more tasks and

responsibilities and stuff that it's got to work on it's like i can't even breathe here i need that dopamine i can't just ignore this basic need of dopamine to get these hard tasks done i'm drowning and you're tossing me a babe you're tossing me more work and responsibilities and we hear this advice from like productivity gurus or experts or from books that are trying to help you get stuff done they'll tell you stuff like get up earlier do inbox zero be a stoic workout two hours a day don't eat any carbs or sugar or fat

or calories and finally eat the frog first and this is actually one of my favorite examples of neurotypical productivity advice that doesn't really work for most people with adhd it comes from a mark twain quote that says if it's your job to eat a frog it's best to do it first thing in the morning and people have taken this and the idea is that the frog is that really ugly that task you don't want to do that difficult thing the advice goes take that thing and do it first thing in the morning and get it

out of the way and then the rest of your day will be so much easier i first heard this advice and i was like of course why wouldn't i do this this totally is logical it makes sense to me that if i tackle this difficult task if i eat the frog first the rest of the day should go so much easier just get out of the way right another popular neurotypical productivity tip is to take a big project and break it into all of its individual steps and then you can see what the tasks are

that you need to do to get it done and it's another productivity axiom that really makes sense you hear that and you're like oh yeah it's hard to get going on a project if i don't know what all is going to be involved so let me break out all those steps and then i can throw them into my system and then know all the things that need to be done to be able to complete it but the problem with these is it doesn't work it just doesn't work for us we try to eat the frog

first but what ends up happening is we just stare at the frog for hours and feel like a failure for avoiding the frog all day and getting nothing done at all meanwhile wondering what is wrong with you and why you can't follow this basic advice that must work perfectly for everyone else and dread seeing that same frog waiting for you tomorrow we get stuck on that big task it's too much and we just avoid it and stare at it all day and not get anything done at all and with the other advice the breaking a

big project into all of its steps it sounds logical it makes sense but then when we try to do it instead of breaking a big project into all of its steps we break that overwhelming project into all of its steps oh wow that is a lot of steps i'm terrible estimating time so it sort of feels like this is an infinite project now with the never-ending steps maybe i should check twitter or put something on netflix and maybe i can start this project tomorrow um or maybe instead of that this is what you do you

start breaking your project into steps but eventually get so bored of steps that you think of something interesting and open 50 tabs on that topic and end up reading about the history of the space program and did you know that the apollo 11 had to change course at the last second and landed four miles from their planned destination wait what was the project i'm supposed to be working on again uh i don't say that one light-hearted it's kind of a joke but it's also true i've done that and i'm sure you have too and so

the problem with these even though they sound like logical advice logical tips that we should apply they just don't work it doesn't work for us which results in self-blame we start to think hey this advice is working for other people these gurus or whoever are recommending it so it must be working for other people why isn't it working for me something must be broken with me you try to force it to work which doesn't help the problem another issue is great intentions and failed actions we wonder why our actions always fall short of our intentions

people with adhd often have really good intentions but our actions just don't line up and we don't know why and following this neurotypical advice often makes that compound even worse this makes labels like lazy or whatever even more hurtful because we know how hard we are trying to make it work and we know that our intentions are in the right place and it just doesn't pan out and the third one is shiny objects and this is one that anyone has experienced neurotypical people included there are a lot of little distractions when you're building a productivity

system when you're trying to figure out tips and advice and applying things to your life to make you more productive but for people with adhd these distractions are much more detrimental like we can spend a whole weekend working on the project and then get nothing done but we keep going in to tweak the system thinking that oh if i just do this little thing and that little thing that'll be the solution and we just get tied into all these little distractions that are available when you're working with a complex productivity system so what do we

do about it we need to acknowledge the problems of motivation overwhelm and distractions productivity advice normally relies on those neurotypical motivations those that importance consequences and rewards and that doesn't work for us so we need to find another way to be motivated the way people with adhd find motivation is through interest dr william dodson calls this the interest-based nervous system i like to refer to it as just the four c's of motivation because i find it easier to remember and those four c's are captivate create compete complete with captivate it's all about finding something that

captivates your interest something that you find fascinating or interesting and you want to dive more into and with create it's all about novelty something new creating something new those creative activities they provide dopamine because there's this anticipation of oh what is going to be the result of this creative activity and that motivates the adhd brain the third one is compete and a lot of us know how much we love a good challenge a good competition if you're anything like me there's nothing that motivates you more than someone telling you like you can't do that that's

impossible suddenly i am gonna prove them wrong and it becomes my life goal and then that motivation shows up because i'm meeting this challenge head on on the fourth one is complete and this is all about setting due dates and deadlines something that makes urgency show up in our lives a lot of times we'll have a big project and we'll avoid it for weeks but then suddenly when it's due when that completion date is right around the corner then we can fly into action and get a lot of stuff done so finding those deadlines and

due dates is paramount in motivating us to get things done the other thing that happens when we use these four c's when we find a task that uses captivate create compete or complete it fuels our motivation so we're able to use the energy that we gain doing that task and it kind of spills over into doing other work we're building up this momentum it's like we've got a train on the tracks and it's not moving at all but then we find something captivating or creative and we start doing this project and then that that train

starts going we start building up that momentum and then when we want to eat the frog it's a lot easier so rather than eating the frog first we should eat the ice cream first we need to find those things that give us that energy that motivation so we can build up the momentum and similarly with the break your project into all of its individual steps instead we should just break it into the first few steps and then pick the ones that match those four c's captivate create compete complete which one of those steps is going

to line up with one of those so that you're going to be able to find that motivation and get yourself rolling down the tracks so with all that in mind i've got some strategies i want to share with you and none of these are going to work for everyone and even the ones that work for you they're not going to work every time the way our brains work we just need things to be new sometimes and we'll get bored of a routine that works so take these and try them out if they work use it

while it works i mean if it doesn't put it down for a while and try a different strategy but hopefully this this will help you put those four c's into action my first strategy i like to call embracing the pivot and this is all about knowing ahead of time that our productivity system is going to fail we are going to lose faith in it at some point and give up so if you know that going forward it's okay we don't have to feel bad when it doesn't work but then we can know that going forward

so that when we when we're trying a new app or a new system we don't pour everything into it as if it's gonna be the end-all be-all solution we know that it's going to eventually fail us most likely and then we just pivot to a new system and that's okay we don't need to feel bad about it it's not about shame for that system failing it didn't fail it worked for that amount of time and now we're moving on to something new we just embrace the fact that our brain wants those new things every once

while and we pivot when the time comes another strategy is pomodoro timers you don't have to be strict to the i think it's 25 minutes of working five minutes a break i like to do maybe 15 minutes of work 10 minutes of break and then sometimes i'll be i'll get hyper focused and get into a groove i'll still set a timer so that i don't lose track of things but then i might say okay i'm going to go 40 minutes and then i'll take a 10 minute break and i just mix it up by by

having those timers i can glance down and see it and then i know that it like provides that that urgency to get something done another strategy is looking for side quests now you have to be careful here because obviously side quests can derail us big time but sometimes you're staring at a project and it's really important it's the one you have to get done and you can't get rolling on it try and find that side angle that might be a little bit more interesting and then you can kind of build momentum that way because we

might be worried about distractions it might be helpful to set a due date or a timer here so you don't end up doing side quests all day long but it can help again to build up that momentum so that then you can tackle the more difficult aspects of that project another strategy is just micro commitments sometimes getting started can be really hard so if you make just a little commitment to get yourself moving that can make a really big difference so instead of saying i'm going to clean up the kitchen or even i'm going to

do the dishes maybe it's just i'm going to go put five dishes away or two dishes away something really tiny and then a lot of the time that'll build up like okay well now while i started i can do some more but give yourself the freedom to walk away if that's enough like you know what i did the two dishes i did that micro commitment and that's enough but getting that those little commitments can help get the ball rolling for stuff like that another strategy is changing your environment we crave that novelty something new and

so a lot of the time i'll go work in a coffee shop even though there's distractions and sometimes for some work that won't work very well but a lot of time the novelty of people moving around it just sparks creativity and can get me motivated to getting some things done part of it might be the body doubling aspect of it but part of it is just the hustle and bustle that can be sort of interesting as long as it's not too distracting for whatever you're working on just a few more strategies here another one is

making tests or paperwork into like a game and this is really it sounds silly but you can do stuff like i'm gonna answer the questions in reverse order or i'm only going to do every third question first something like that which doesn't sound like a big deal can add just a little bit more interest to it that will help you get motivated to get things done i know it sounds silly but that little thing of like i'm gonna just do every other one first it does seem to add a little bit of that extra motivation

and you can even add that challenge or urgency to it set a five-minute timer and challenge yourself to see how many you can get done following up on that another strategy is to use time-based goals so instead of saying i'm gonna write a thousand words tonight maybe you could just say i'm gonna write for 20 minutes tonight instead of saying i'm going to clean the whole office just say i'm going to clean the office for 10 minutes i'm going to do this for 15 minutes and an added bonus of doing this is you learn a

little bit about how long tasks take because we're usually not very good at estimating time so by setting the time up front and then just seeing how much it can get done one you can feel accomplished like hey i did my goal of trying to do this thing for 10 minutes and two now i know hey 10 minutes of work on this this is about what it looks like and finally i just want to say change the world and make it a better place hopefully you can use these strategies put them into practice and make

a change make a difference in the world it's not always gonna be perfect you will fail sometimes i fail all the time uh it's a struggle we're always gonna struggle but when you persevere and you don't blame yourself it can make all the difference in the world it can really make a huge impact thanks for listening to this talk i hope you enjoyed it i hope you have found something helpful if so i would love to hear from you you can follow me on twitter and instagram and tick tock all the same username which is

just my first name middle initial last name so jesse j anderson i have got the same username for all those places you can also find my website where i've got a link to my free adhd newsletter and that's also jessejanderson.com finally i'm writing a book on adhd called refocus a practical guide to adhd i'd love for you to check it out it's at refocusbook.com i'm writing it in public so you can see on the website the current table of contents and stuff i'm working on and you can even suggest things that you think would make

sense to have in this book and you can also sign up for the wait list while you're there