You have three weeks to hand in a report. For twenty days, it sits there at the back of your mind, and you don’t touch it. The night before, you finally get down to it, work until three in the morning, and hand in something that’s actually pretty good. Then you swear that next time, you’ll start earlier.
If this sounds familiar, you’re not lazy. Your brain simply runs on a different fuel.
Why urgency gets you going
An ADHD brain isn’t switched on by importance. It’s switched on by interest, novelty, challenge or urgency. Knowing that a task matters isn’t enough to get it started. As long as the deadline is far away, it creates almost no tension, and so almost no energy.
The night before, everything changes. The pressure rises, the dopamine follows, and suddenly you can focus for hours on end. That’s why you feel you “work better under pressure”. And there’s some truth in that. But you pay a very high price for working this way: short nights, stress, hit-and-miss quality, and guilt that comes back every single time.
The real sticking point: getting started
Most of the time, the problem isn’t doing the work. It’s starting it. A task that’s vague, long or offers no immediate reward gives your brain an excellent excuse to wander off elsewhere. And the longer you put it off, the bigger the task grows in your head, and the harder it becomes to begin.
So the aim isn’t to become an organised person overnight. It’s to make starting easier than avoiding.
Five ways to get started without waiting for the panic
1. Shrink the first step to almost nothing
You can’t start “do the report”. You can start “open the document and type the title”. Break it down until the first step feels almost ridiculous. Once you’re under way, the rest often follows on its own.
2. Create artificial urgency
If your brain needs a deadline, give it deadlines that are close. Tell someone you’ll send them a first draft on Thursday. Block out a slot in your diary as if it were a real appointment. Set a timer for 25 minutes and decide that you’ll stop when it goes off.
3. Work alongside someone
Working in the presence of another person, even if they’re doing something else entirely, makes it much easier to stay on task. This is known as body doubling. A friend on a video call, a café, a coworking space: just having someone there is often enough.
4. Make the task more interesting
Change where you work, put on music that carries you along, turn the task into a challenge (“how many emails can I get through in 20 minutes?”). That isn’t cheating. It’s giving your brain the fuel it needs.
5. Decide in advance when you’ll start
“I’ll get on with it this week” almost never works. “On Tuesday at 9am, after my coffee, I’ll open the document” works far better. A specific time and a specific trigger take one decision off your plate at the very moment you have the least energy to make it.
What if it still goes wrong?
Sometimes it will. The idea isn’t to stop procrastinating altogether, but to do it less often, for less time, and with less damage. Every time you start a task before the panic hits, you prove to your brain that it can be done. That’s how a habit is built.
What we work on in coaching
In my programme, getting started on what matters is one of the six areas we measure at the beginning and at the end. We mainly work on it in Block 3, “Execution and priorities”: together, we pinpoint what’s actually holding you back, put in place the strategies that fit the way you work, and fine-tune them week after week.