From Doing to Done: How to Finish Tasks When You Have ADHD

From Doing to Done — How to Finish What You’ve Started

Do you have unfinished projects everywhere? Half-done tasks, abandoned hobbies, paperwork piles, and things that are almost complete — but somehow never get finished?

In this episode, Christine talks about why finishing is often harder than starting when you have ADHD. You’ll learn why motivation disappears mid-project, how executive functioning affects completion, and practical ways to make tasks easier to finish without relying on willpower alone.

Topics include:

• Why “almost done” can feel impossible
• ADHD and sustained attention
• Decision fatigue and task avoidance
• Small steps that actually help
• Building systems that support completion

If you’ve ever wondered why you can start things easily but struggle to cross the finish line, this episode is for you.

Did you miss the From Stuck to Starting episode? Find it here.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Have you ever started something? Oh, you're so full of enthusiasm and energy until you're not. And now it's just sitting there. Partially done, maybe even almost done. And somehow you still can't bring yourself to finish it. If you have ADHD, you might really resonate with this. Why is that? Why do we start things and then have such difficulty getting things finished? I'm Christine Dunning. I'm a Master Certified Life Coach. I'm the owner of Two Cats Coaching and the host of this, a solo person's guide to ADHD. And today we're going to talk about how to finish what you've started. So if you've been following along, in the last episode, we talked about ADHD paralysis, what it takes to get started when your brain says no. By the way, if you haven't seen that, it's episode 32, and I'll put links below. ADHD paralysis means we get stuck and can't start something. And that's really about activation. How do we get ourselves moving in such a way that we can start things? Getting your brain, you know, online, basically. This episode is different. Because once you've started, now you've got to stick with it. Finishing is not an automatic skill. It's a completely different set of skills than starting. 92% of people who start New Year's resolutions never finish them. No, that wasn't an EDHD tag. That means anybody. So this isn't really just an ADHD problem. Although it's harder for us, like a lot of things. So if you're one of those people and you've got a whole bunch of unfinished projects, almost done piles, things you've lost steam on halfway through, believe me, it's not a personal failure. It's a very human pattern. Like last time. This isn't just procrastination. It's not laziness. It's not a lack of discipline. It's a breakdown and follow-through and staying regulated over time. As somebody with ADHD, some of the things that we tend to lack, we have issues with sustained attention, working memory, task monitoring, motivation regulation, cognitive flexibility. And that means we are more prone to that mid-task slump. We have big issues with completion and follow-through. That's part of our executive dysfunction. In the last episode, our brain was shutting down things before we even started. But here, your brain is losing fuel in the middle. It's like you're driving along and you hit something, and all of a sudden, you've got a hole in your fuel tank, and you just come to a screeching halt, and you don't know how to get started again because you don't know how to fix the hole. One of the reasons why this is such an issue is that ADHD brains are what's called interest-based. We're really great at things that we're very excited about, at least for a while. That means we follow things that are really engaging in the moment, and most tasks hit a spot somewhere in the middle where it's just not as exciting anymore. And so we lose interest. And that's when our attention slumps. No that starting requires activation, but finishing requires that regulation over time, which means it is really just a different set of skills. And by the way, I would like to show you a picture of the poster child of unfinished projects. For those of you who are listening to me, yeah, it's me. I was the one raising my hand. This for me is the number one way that my ADHD manifests. I'm a creative. I always have a whole lot of different things I like to do. I like to keep my brain active with different kinds of activities, but it also just means that sometimes I just can't get things finished. So where do things tend to break down? Well, the first one is simply that mid-task slump or the middle collapse. The novelty is kind of worn off. We're now into the weeds of things. You know, maybe things have become a little bit more challenging here, or dopamine drops. The task becomes more boring. Maybe it's more complex. If you have issues with cognitive flexibility, I mentioned that earlier. A lot of times you get into the middle of a task and you have to change things. What you thought you were going to do here isn't working, and you need to shift and rework things. And so that becomes really difficult for us. We really don't know what to do when we hit that middle section where things change. Another one is simply the almost done trap. I personally have a few of these that I'm working on right now. I've got things that are really close to finished, and then I could list them for sale. I'd like to make that money. But perfectionism kicks in. Again, these aren't the funnest part of the tasks anymore. This is the drudgery part of a project. And so it feels really hard to get it done. Maybe it needs a skill that you're not very good at or don't know. Any of these things can stop you from moving forward. Another issue is the issue of an open loop. You have too many unfinished tasks. And so you just get cognitive overload. It's it's like having a whole bunch of tabs open on your computer, and now you're trying to find that document you were working in, you can't even find it. There's so much stuff open, you don't even know what to do. You know, you've you've got you've maybe you've done some brain dumps. I mentioned that last time, and you've you've put down all these things, but now they're all just sitting there, and you haven't closed any of them. And so it becomes this mental clutter, and your brain just starts avoiding it. I want to give you some ideas on how we can possibly work on finishing things. And like I told you, this is my difficulty too. So I'm listening hard to myself as I try to explain what I should do to finish some of these projects. Number one is make sure you know what done looks like. Your done needs to be visible and concrete. Now, saying something like, I'm just going to work on my laundry while working on something isn't the same thing as finishing it. Clothes folded and put away. That's done. Try to take out the ambiguity and have an actual statement of what needs to be the finished product. The dishes are done when the counters are clear, the sink is empty, things are dried and put away, and the dishwasher is running. Step number two, use completion sprints. Take little short bursts of time to get through projects. I talked about doing just fives at the beginning. We actually do some of these on my webinars. And you get up and you actually do something for five minutes. And so if you do this around completion, that will help as well. Take five-minute or 10-minute or 20-minute sprints to wrap up a project, close a loop. Try using the Pomodoro method, that 525-525 method that I've talked about so much. It's really especially powerful when you're dealing with some kind of a deadline. Next, just the finish line. Sometimes it's not perfect, but you have to get it to done. I always think about things like books here. You know, every author I've ever talked to, there just comes a point where if they want it to publish, they have to let it go. It's not perfect, but it's 80, 85, 90%. And you're like, okay, it's done enough to move on. Version one is done. Get it to a point where you're comfortable. Not perfect, but you can let it go. The next step is to make sure you're externalizing that process. Whether that's simple checklists, any kind of a visual tracker, the way they do in a fundraiser when they put up the thermostat and you can see how much money has been raised. Create something like that for yourself. Cross things off the list. You need to see that progress to stay engaged. And make sure that you get the project to where you can close the loop and get it done. Don't leave it at 5%. Push, this is the time to push through. Send that email, put the dish all the way away, submit the form, send it to the publisher, whatever it is you need to do. The last step is where sometimes things get abandoned. One of the methods that I use that I talk about, it's it's called fresh eyes. And you simply stop, close your eyes, and then open them looking for what's not done. Consider using that here and saying, okay, am I finished with this? And open your eyes. Oh, I've got three more things to do. Work on getting that done. By the way, I talk about fresh eyes in the episode about dishes and laundry. You can find that here. Limit those open projects. Too many in-progress things mean you're not going to get any of them done. No more than three. Try to limit it. Make sure you're adding rewards throughout. You know, we need payoffs. We need dopamine hits. And so when I get this section done, I will schedule a spa day. When I get this section done, I'm going to let myself go get an ice cream cone. Make sure that you use your network. Use body doubling to get things done. This is especially powerful when you're really trying to get through the last bits of it. Invite a friend over and they can sit and they can sit and read a book while you get your work done. Or, you know, do a body doubling online. Join a writer's group where not you don't necessarily critique each other's work, you just sit in the same room and write. I've been part of those groups. It's really helpful. I really actually get writing done during that time period and not scrolling on my phone. If by some chance you need to leave a task, you know, you're really working on this, looks great. Oh, but you know, I got to go to work. So leave yourself a breadcrumb really quick. What is the next step I need to get done? Write that in now. That's really going to help you get to the point where when you come back, you won't have restart paralysis. The project I'm working on right now that I can't seem to finish, it's a musical I wrote for my second and third graders back when I was teaching full-time. It's actually been performed a number of times. I've rewritten bits and pieces of it over the time. And I think I know what I want the final form to look like now. And it's really, it's one more song, because I'm getting rid of one song. I'm going to add one song in. And then it's a little bit of tweaking. I've got some background tracks to make, um, motions to put in. That's never something I do very easily. But all of that stuff really is probably two days' work at the most. You know, two eight-hour days. I just need to find the time to finish that. My best example of a time when I did, I promised myself one summer that I was going to write a screenplay. I had some really good ideas. I wanted to see if I could do it. I just wanted to see if I could go from beginning to end and actually write a whole thing. And so I created my outline, I put it on index cards. And then every morning I went to Panera Bread and I sat and I wrote. And I picked, pulled out one index card. And that really worked out well. One of the things is that I got was getting stuck on certain scenes, certain scenes that were really hard to write. So I didn't feel like I had to write it in order. I knew what the order was. I also knew that might change. But I wrote the cards that were easy first. By the time I came to that difficult section, the really challenging part, I knew the characters really well. And so it was much easier for me to write that then than if I had tried to just force out something before then. Um never did anything with that screenplay, but I'm really proud of myself that I actually wrote it. And I think it wasn't bad. Here's a quick formula for you. Define what you need to get done, shrink it down so that it is in doable bytes. Finish each one of those bytes and then close it down. Call it done. Announce it to the world. And I'm so proud of you for getting those things done. Here's my question. What are you almost done with, but not quite? Pick one thing, work on it. Now, if you're looking at me and going, Oh, Christine, that sounds so easy. You make it sound like something I can really get done, but I have been stuck on this problem for a long time, and there's no way I can do it. I just can't seem to finish. Well, here we go. This is what life coaches do. And I have a special program that I offer for creatives, and I simply call it get it done. Because as a fellow creative, I want you to get your work out into the world the same way I want to get my own works out into the world. So it's two coaching sessions for the price of one with touch-ins in between. So we usually, the way I have done this with uh previous people is we schedule one, we talk about the project, we set some parameters, we maybe help you figure out how to organize it, what to select if you've got multiple things going on. And then you go to work. We set some deadlines and I do some check-ins. If it's something that you can send me part of, I'm I'm happy to take a look at it and see what I think. And then we schedule one more so that you can get over those last humps. If you need more sessions after that, you can certainly purchase them. It's not a big deal. As a fellow creative, I want to see you get your work in the world. Hit me up. You can find my contact stuff, you know, where all the contact stuff lives. And so, again, thank you so much for coming. And I hope this helps you get on your way to finishing some of the projects that you deserve to have done. I'm going to keep talking about this. I have some other ideas that have come up in the writing of this, and I'll bring them to you in future episodes. Thanks again for coming.