Productivity: The Holy Grail of ADHD

Do you want to be consistently productive? You’re not alone.

Executives with ADHD are obsessed with productivity. Everything they do, or don’t do, is the focus of their attention.

If you ask them what they want most in the world, it’s to be consistently productive. And yet, being consistently productive is as elusive as the holy grail.

For executives with ADHD, the tasks are either too big, too mundane or too triggering. The task itself quickly becomes the obsession. How interesting it is. How achievable. How humiliating it will be when it doesn’t get done.

If you’ve experienced this pattern, you know the next worry is how you’ll be perceived if you don’t get the task done on time. You start to believe that the task is much bigger than you are.

The task is like a red flag in front of a bull. It’s your nemesis. Your challenge. A thing to overcome. And in this state of mind, your thinking becomes narrow and fixed.

You find yourself chasing your tasks – or avoiding them. You recognize that the task is all you can think about.

What feeds this obsession with the task?

You’re trying to manage your feelings based on what you do – that’s the long and short of it.

Part of your strategy – whether you know it or not – is to avoid feeling bad when you fail to meet a deadline. You want to feel caught up, so you chase the tasks some more. You’re chasing ‘calm’. You’re assuming that if your task is completed, you’ll feel in charge of yourself.

You’re not yet aware that the ADHD brain is predominantly externally focused. That’s where rewards and penalties are located e.g. humiliation, praise, shame or approval. Anything with a very strong emotional pull – good or bad – demands your attention. It can distract you from seeing the situation another way. And, more importantly, from formulating strategic choices about your work.

You know that you rely on the adrenalin of deadlines to get your work done. There’s a good reason for this. If you have ADHD, your brain is always on the hunt for dopamine. But in the long run, this comes at a big cost to your mental and physical health. And you never learn the deep satisfaction of tapping into your intrinsic motivation when you need it.

Instead of focusing on external motivation, learn to look inside.

As long as you’re obsessed with your task(s), you’ll be chasing, avoiding, fearing, and apologizing.

To feel in charge of your workload, and be more consistently productive, turn your attention inward.

When you learn to rely on your inner guidance system, you’ll be in charge of yourself. Not your fear. Not the task.

Being in charge of yourself, you’ll be able to change your relationship to your tasks.

Here’s how.

Give yourself:

1. A ceasefire in your war with tasks. Build in a pause to your day. Deliberately see them as tasks you want to do. Even if they’re mundane, they serve you.
2. Permission to give up your addiction to adrenalin. Radically accept and be fiercely compassionate with yourself.

3. The power to choose your tasks: how to work, when to work, when to take a break. Choice is the seat of agency. Turn toward it.

4. Time to Plan. Planning supports you in being proactive. It is sacred. Treat it that way.

5. A new relationship with time. See ‘time’ as there for you, not against you. “Time helps me get my tasks done. It’s working with me when I work with it.”

6. Time to think. Your brain needs space to process – everything.

Your power lies in your choices. Choose to turn inward.
Change the balance of power in your relationship with your tasks, and you’ll experience more productivity, energy and agency – with you in the lead.