Ep 122 - ADHD, Hyperfocus, Procrastination and the Work That Actually Matters

Have you ever been incredibly busy - cleaning, answering emails, reorganizing your to-do list - and still somehow avoided the one thing that mattered most?

That's not laziness. That's procrastination wearing a productivity costume.

In this episode, Coach Mande John breaks down Paul Graham's essay "Good and Bad Procrastination" and applies it directly to the ADHD brain - helping you understand why you avoid big work, how to recognize when you're stuck in busy-but-not-moving mode, and how to redirect your focus toward what actually moves the needle.

Here's what we explore:

• The three types of procrastination - and why one of them is actually a good thing
• Why to-do lists can become a source of overwhelm and avoidance
• The "buckets" method for organizing your attention by season
• How to define "enough" so you're not endlessly pouring energy into tasks that don't matter
• The emotional weight behind big work - and why cleaning the bathroom always wins
• How to have a healthier relationship with hyperfocus (without letting it derail your life)
• The Hamming question: "What is the most important thing you could be working on - and why aren't you?"
• Delegation, simplification, and letting go of what only needs to be done good enough

This episode comes with a free PDF of all the reflection questions. Grab it at: www.learntothrivewithadhd.com/biggerwork

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Transcript

 Welcome to Learn to Thrive with ADHD. This is the podcast for adults with ADHD or ADHD like symptoms. I'm your host coach, Maddie John. I'm here to make your life with ADHD easier. Let's get started.

Have you ever had something really important to do? Something that mattered. Something that could move your business, your life, your work forward? And then suddenly every small task around you became urgent. The cat box needed clean, the laundry needed to be folded, the dishes needed to be done, the inbox needed to be cleared. The toilet was perfectly fine yesterday and suddenly can't wait another minute.

These are real examples for me and for clients, and I have done

almost all of these things except that last one. I had a client once who noticed that pattern in herself, and the toilets in her house were fine until she had to do something that she didn't want to do, and then suddenly every toilet in the house needed to be cleaned.

And that's what many of us in the ADHD community call procrastinate. It's procrastination. With activity, you're not doing nothing. You're doing things sometimes useful things,

Sometimes things that genuinely need to be done eventually. But the question is, are you doing them because they are the most important thing right now? Are you doing them to avoid the bigger thing? That's what we want to explore today through Paul Graham's essay Good and Bad Procrastination,

I think this essay gives a really helpful perspective when we're dealing with procrastination. Hyper focus, overwhelm to do lists, delegations, how to choose the bigger work without drowning in shame.

Paul Graham starts with a really interesting idea. He says maybe procrastination is not always bad. Most people talk about procrastination as something we need to cure. But he points out that there are always infinite things that we could be doing. No matter what we choose to work on.

we're not working on something else. So the question is not really how do I avoid procrastination completely? The question is how do I procrastinate? Well, he describes three kinds of procrastination. The first is doing nothing. The second is doing something less important, and the third is doing something more important. The third kind is what he calls good procrastination.

It is when you put off smaller tasks in order to do the bigger, more meaningful work. I love this reframe because procrastination can become such a source of shame. We keep saying, why am I not doing this? Why do I keep putting this off? What's wrong with me? And Paul Graham's essay feels like an invitation to pause and ask a better question.

What is actually important here? What are the big things in life that really matter?

What are the little things that I might need to let go? That's very different from using procrastination as another reason to criticize ourselves. It's a way to look honestly at our attention and decide where we want it to go.

But this is also where we need to be careful, especially for ADHD professionals and entrepreneurs. There's a big difference between putting off errands because you're doing meaningful work and doing errands to avoid meaningful work. Progressivity is when you're active and busy and maybe even productive, but you're avoiding the thing that matters most

It's procrastination. Wearing a productivity costume for people with ADHD. This can be especially sneaky because many of us are not avoiding work by doing nothing, or avoiding work by doing other work. We answer emails, we delete emails, we clean, we research, we organize, we rewrite to do lists, make a new plan, tweak a graphic shop for supplies. And because we're doing something, it feels harder to call it procrastination.

One example I think about is email this idea of inbox zero. And for some people, in some roles, that matters.

If you're in a corporate role where every email truly has to be handled, then yes, maybe that's part of your job. But for many of us, obsessively deleting emails or trying to make the inbox perfect is not the best use of our attention. Emails can sit there or be deleted without reading them.

Not every email needs to be processed. Not every piece of digital clutter deserves our time and attention. That is the kind of thing I'm constantly looking at in my own life, in our gym business, in my coaching business, what is taking attention but not actually making a difference? What are we maintaining just because it's there? What can we eliminate so that we can focus on what matters more?

That's why I think this essay is so useful. It helps us ask a better question. Not

am I being productive, but am I working on the right thing because you can be very busy and still be avoiding the work that actually would move the needle.

One of the most important points in this essay is about the to do list. Paul Graham says that advice about procrastination can be misleading if it only focuses on crossing things off a list, because the to do list itself can become a form of procrastination. And I think for ADHD brains this is huge. A to do lists can be helpful.

I'm not anti list. In fact, I think offloading is incredibly important. By offloading I mean getting everything out of your head and putting it down somewhere. That might be a list. It might be a tool like Trello, it might be Google Tasks, it may be Google Keep a notebook, a voice memo. I even text myself. The tool doesn't matter, but it is a relief getting that out of your brain.

Because when everything is floating around in your head and keeps nagging at you, it keeps creating noise.

And when you get it down somewhere, there can be a real feeling of relief. But here is the important distinction. Getting something out of your head does not mean it becomes your boss. Just because something is written down, it does not mean it has to be done today or this week, or ever.

And lists can serve you, or you can start running your life

For ADHD years, a to do list can become a dumping ground for anxiety again. Become a list of everything that's not done. Everything that's not right. Everything we should do, everything someone else wants from us. Everything that matters. Everything that doesn't matter but still makes noise in our brains. Once it's all on the same list, it can all start to feel equally important.

And that's where overwhelm comes from. I once heard someone say that overwhelm is what happens when everything gets prioritized as important.

I personally feel that because when everything matters equally, there's no clear next step. There's no hierarchy, there's no stopping point. So the question I come back to often with my clients is what is enough? What is enough for today? What is enough in this area of life? What is enough in this season? If you do not define enough, you keep giving time and attention endlessly.

There's always more that could be done. More emails, more cleaning, more organizing, more improving, more optimizing. You can make yourself crazy with more. Sometimes the work is deciding what is enough so you can stop pouring energy into endless lists and start focusing on work that actually matters.

Of course, there's a reason we avoid the bigger thing. Big work is often uncomfortable. It's usually less clear. It may not give us an immediate reward. It may take days, weeks, months, or even years before we know whether it worked and often big work as something of our identity. It may ask us to be visible, be brave, make a decision.

Risk failure. Tolerate being a beginner, or might ask us to do something without knowing how it will turn out. With all that pressure, cleaning the bathroom seems pretty appealing. Cleaning the bathroom has a beginning and end. You see the results. You know whether you did it, you get a little bit of satisfaction. The bigger project doesn't always give you that.

Writing the book, launching the program, recording the podcast, making an offer, hiring help. Raising your prices, having the hard conversation, building the new system so much more.

So sometimes we're not avoiding the work. We're avoiding the emotional load of the work. If something feels hard, too boring, too uncertain, or too exposed, of course your brain might look for relief. That's being human. This is where emotional regulation matters. If we can name what we're feeling, notice what we're thinking,

and understand why we're taking action in one direction, or avoiding action in another. We can begin to steer ourselves. Instead of saying, I'm lazy, we can say this task feels unclear, or this task feels risky, or I'm afraid I will do it wrong or I don't know where to start. That gives us something to work with.

Perfectionist SCM also plays a role here too. Something has to be perfect. It becomes huge. It becomes too big to start or impossible to finish. So we avoid it or we keep working around it, or we stay busy with smaller tasks that have clearer endings. That's why procrastinating is not laziness.

And is often avoidance. Emotional discomfort, perfectionism, uncertainty, or executive function. Challenge dressed up as productivity. Paul Graham ends the essay with the idea that maybe the way we solve procrastination is to let delight pull you instead of the To-Do list push you.

I think that is such an interesting idea for ADHD ers, because we're often interested driven. When something lights us up, we can go deep,

We can enter hyper focus. We can make huge progress in a short amount of time. We see patterns, solve problems, build things, create things, and get into a flow state that feels almost impossible to access when we're trying to force ourselves through boring tasks. And yet, many people with ADHD feel guilty about hyperfocus.

I know my relationship with hyperfocus used to be much less healthy. I would go all in on something and then I would stay in my pajamas. I might not take a shower. I might barely do anything else except to make sure my kids were taken care of. I could go deep into a craft, a hobby, or new interest and spend all my time there and now I have a healthier relationship with Hyper Focus.

I still let myself enjoy the thing that lights me up, but I make sure the minimums of the important areas in my life are getting done. Not necessarily before I go and do the hyper focus activity, but sometime during the day or week, depending on what it is right now. For example, I'm taking a course that I'm super interested in and it's fun and I'm excited about it, and I'm letting myself spend extra time on it.

And I'm not letting that mean anything terrible about the things that remain on my to do list. That's the shift.

It's not. I can only enjoy this after everything else is done, because everything else will never be done. And it's not. I'm going to disappear into this and let my whole life fall apart. It's this matters to me, and I'm allowed to follow this energy. And I'm going to also keep up the basics while I'm doing this.

So the signs that hyperfocus is becoming harmful are usually pretty clear. You're not eating. You're not drinking water, you're not sleeping. You're not showering. You're avoiding important things that truly need to happen. Your relationships and responsibilities are taking a hit in a way that's not sustainable. So I don't think the answer is to shame hyperfocus. I also don't think the answer is to let hyperfocus burn down the rest of your life.

The answer is to design around it. Ask yourself, what are the minimums that need to stay in place while I follow this energy? Maybe your minimums are sleep, meals, water, medication, movement, daily check ins with your partner,

And one ten minute home reset.

Maybe you in a minimum day is paying a bill, showing up for an appointment, keeping food in the house.

Maybe they're different in different seasons. The point is not to maintain everything perfectly. The point is to protect the basics that keep a future. You okay?

Another piece of this conversation is delegation and simplification.

I'm constantly looking at my life, my husband's life, our businesses, and asking what can be simplified, delegated, eliminated, or made easier so that we can focus on the bigger things. And I want to say this carefully, because I never want it to sound like certain tasks are beneath us. This is not the point.

This is not about being too good for a task. It's about being honest that our time, energy, attention, and executive function are finite.

There are tasks that need to be done, but not necessarily do. They need to be done by you. There are tasks that can be delegated, automated, simplified, delayed or done at a good enough level. And there are tasks that only you can do. One funny example from our gym happened when we were looking into some new equipment, and we were talking with someone about some of our challenges in the gym, like weights not being refract or weight, trees taking up space.

And he said, why do you have 35 pound plates? And we didn't know, like we just had them. And he said, that's just a 25 and a ten. But that simple thing is a great example. We were creating space for managing reranking, something that we didn't need.

Sometimes it's that simple. Sometimes it's just asking, why are we even maintaining this? That question applies everywhere. Why are we maintaining the system? Why are we doing this task? Why are we keeping this expectation? Why are we spending attention here? I've hired an assistant in my coaching business, and we've hired people at the gym as well. We continue to look for ways to get

where support makes sense.

And I talk with my clients about this too, because so many people feel guilty around delegation, they feel like they should be able to do it all.

But I don't think any of us can or should. There's always more work to do, always more books to read, more music to listen to, more videos to watch, more things to learn, more tasks to complete. More things that could be cleaned, organize, updated, handled. So we have to decide what's enough. The question is not about lowering standards and careless way, it's about creating a stopping point.

It's about recognizing that without a definition of enough, everything can demand more from you forever. And when we consider delegating, it's about asking what is the best use of my attention? What am I holding on to that's keeping me from the work that I say matters? Sometimes the most responsible thing you could do is stop trying to do everything yourself.

One tool I use for myself and my clients is what I call buckets. Imagine carrying five gallon buckets of water. I remember being little enough that I could fit inside those buckets. And I remember trying to carry them around and water sloshing everywhere. But if you carry two buckets in one hand, that's the image that I want you to see here.

The water is going to spill out a little bit, but you're you're maintaining those buckets, right? You're carrying two buckets in each hand.

And you simply can't carry more. And like I said, some of that water is going to spill. And that doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. That's just the capacity of the bucket. Once it's tilted

Muddy I also think that we have 12 buckets work, family, health, home, money, relationships, business, marriage, parenting.

think of all 12, but when I work with my clients, I like to ask, can we get it down to four main buckets for this season? For one person, the buckets might be family, business, health, home. For someone else, it might be relationships, career, money, creativity.

For someone else, it might be parenting, health, work, recovery. There is no perfect set of buckets. The point is to identify the main areas that truly matter to you right now.

Then we can sort the noise instead of having one giant list, buy toothpaste, build my business model and schedule a doctor's appointment that are all living on the same level. We can begin to categorize, and once we have the buckets, we can ask better questions. Which bucket needs attention right now? Which bucket has been neglected? Which buckets overflowing?

Which bucket has a true emergency?

And again we come back to the question was enough. What is enough in the health bucket right now? What is enough in the family bucket right now? What is enough in this season, with this capacity, with this life? This allows us to honor deep focus without completely dropping everything else. And you may choose to go all in on your business bucket for a season, but you still keep a pulse on your health bucket, your relationship bucket,

And your home bucket. For example, you don't need to carry every possible bucket. You need to know which buckets matter the most right now and what level of attention each one actually needs. And yes, some water will spill. That's okay. The goal is not to never spill. The goal is to keep the majority of the water in the buckets that you decide matter most.

So here are something you can try first. Offload. Right? Everything that is taking up space in your mind. Everything you need to do, everything you want to do, everything you're responsible for. Everything you feel guilty about. Everything unfinished. Everything that keeps coming back to mind. But remember, this list is not your boss. This list is getting the noise out of your head.

Then you sort what you wrote into the buckets. Choose four main buckets

in your current season of life, you might have to broaden your categories. Remember, the point is getting all of these things into manageable categories that you can easily keep an eye on and move forward with. Once you have your buckets, look at each one and ask, what is enough here? Then ask, what is the one thing that would move the needle here?

Not what are the 20 things I could do? Not what would make this perfect? Just what would move the needle?

Then ask one more question. What small tasks am I using to avoid the bigger task? Maybe you're answering email to avoid making a sales call. Maybe you're cleaning to avoid writing. Maybe you're researching to avoid deciding. Are you making it really pretty? Plans to avoid doing the first step of something. This is not about judging yourself. This is about noticing the pattern.

And once you see procrastinating, you have no choice but to change.

So here's some questions you can use when you feel overwhelmed, or when you notice yourself drifting into progressivity. Don't stress about writing these down. You can go to Learn to Thrive with adhd.com/bigger work to get a PDF of these questions, and that will be wherever you are that'll be in the description or the show notes. So what are they?

Is this an errand or is this impact? Am I doing this because it matters or because it gives me quick relief? What is the bigger thing I might be avoiding? What feels scary, unclear, or emotionally loaded about the bigger thing? What would move the needle in this season of my life?

What are my four buckets right now? What is enough in each bucket?

What can be delegated, automated, simplified, delayed, eliminated or done? Good enough. What is work only I can do.

And maybe the biggest question, one that Paul Gramm pulls from Richard Hemings thinking, is that.

what is the thing that I could be working on and why am I not working on it? That question can feel confronting and but it can also be clarifying.

I think one of the most freeing ideas in this essay is that some things will be left undone. There are more things to do than any of us can ever do. There are more task, more projects, more ideas, more errands, more improvements, and more responsibilities than we could ever handle.

So the goal can't be to finish everything. The goal is to leave the right things undone. For ADHD professionals and entrepreneurs, this is a powerful reframe. We're not trying to become machines who complete every task in perfect order. We're trying to build lives where our attention goes towards what matters most. And that may mean that we stop using small tasks to hide from big work.

It may mean we let ourselves follow delight and hyper focus. But with minimums in place,

It may mean we delegate more. We may have to rethink our to do list. If we haven't already offloaded everything from our heads, then we might need to do that and stop treating that list like our boss. And we want to ask again, what is enough?

This week, I want you to look at your lists and ask what on here is an errand and what on here is impact. And then ask yourself what is the bigger, more meaningful thing I could be working on?

and finally, what small, productive looking task am I using to avoid it? Because procrastination is not always doing nothing. Sometimes it's doing everything except the thing that matters most.

Thank you for staying with me to the end. Here I see you, I'm proud of you and I'll see you next week.