Bad ADHD Productivity Advice

go eat that frog make sure your room is quiet and tidy with no distractions do a little bit of writing every day and at the end of the year you will have a complete book there's so much productivity advice out there a lot of it good but when you're neurod Divergent like I am there's a lot of it that just doesn't work at all we spend so much time and energy trying to follow neurotypical advice that wasn't designed for us in mind and just end up without feeling frustrated exhausted and really rubb

ished about the fact that it didn't work for us today I'm going to look at one of the most popular productivity books out there Atomic habit by James Clear I have it here and I'm going to look at it through the lens of neurode Divergence and examine what works and what doesn't the idea is I want to equip you with the tools to help you evaluate whether particular advice works for your own special flavor of neurod Divergence before we dive in my name is Lee and I am an ADHD who coaches neur divere

nt leaders and entrepreneurs to further their careers and their businesses I'm also someone who has a constant itch to be productive so today's topic is very personal and very important to me I also believe that I'm probably autistic as well um but I'm still working on understanding and reevaluating my life through this lens as well so this video is going to be a bit more ADHD focused like a lot of my previous ones have but I'm starting to bring in thoughts around autism and how this plays in as

well this video also follows on from last week where I spoke about how we can use some of the strategies in atomic habits to lower the executive function cost of certain things that we want to do in our lives if you haven't seen it already I'd really recommend you go back and check it out and I'll put a link up here somewhere but today I'd like to look at the book as a whole and discuss it from the perspective of productivity and neurod Divergence if you haven't read the book already I do actua

lly recommend it I found it a really good book and there's a lot of useful stuff in there but I do have two caveat to make first the first is that it engages in the stereotypical productivity Trope of do exercise and loose weight this is personally very frustrating to me as someone who is body neutral and a supporter of the fat activist movement because I personally think that the prevalent dialogue in society around weight around moralizing around weight is unhelpful that the perception that be

ing fat is a moral failing is just wrong and harmful and that the fact that exercise and health eating automatically equals weight loss is a gross oversimplification it's a very complex topic and a lot of these productivity books tend to oversimplify this and flat out say things like just exercise just eat better and you'll lose weight and use that as example fortunately this book doesn't belabor that point too much so literally just use it as examples of how you can Implement habit but I wanted

to bring awareness to it as it's something that bothered me a little bit when I was reading it the second caveat is of course the topic of this video so I wanted to start with the things that I love about it Hab it stacking where we add a new habit on the end of a sequence of existing habits can be super useful for people who are neurod Divergent so can setting up your environment to enable you to do the thing putting things at the point of performance I spoke about both of those a lot in my pr

evious video one of the other things that James C speaks about in chapter 4 is about making ourselves consciously aware of the particular habits he talks about how our brains are really good about subconsciously spotting patterns recognizing things that come up time and time again our brains Pi up on cues from our bodies and they respond accordingly so his premise is that by making some of this subconscious stuff conscious then we're better at able to consciously respond to it what's funny about

this is that one of the examples he uses is in relation to how we can tell that we're hungry He suggests that we don't need to see a cookie on the counter to be able to tell that we're hungry what is funny about this is until I read that line in the book when I was rereading it when I was writing the script um I didn't realize I was hungry I have poor interception which is something that is common across neurod diverences and that's when we're not very good at reading our internal cues now I do

n't have terrible interos like if I'm really hungry then I will notice it but it's easy for me to just not pick up on that especially if I'm engrossed in something else I've just realized talking about it right now that I'm hungry now and I hadn't realized before I said those words usually other things cue me in like knowing what time of day is as part of my routine or my partner asking me if I'm hungry and of course if I'm really really hungry then I'm going to notice but moderate hunger or get

ting to the point where I need to eat that kind of stuff I just don't really pick up on but that makes his following Point even more important for those of us that struggle with interception He suggests using the pointing and calling technique in order to bring something subconscious to the conscious I'm sure many of us do this already I know I personally I packed my pockets for my phone and my wallet and my keys and everything before I leave the house and if I don't fill them there when I say t

heir name then I know I forgotten them so I can go back and get them I think this can be even more useful for those of us who are busy brained and so our brains are spinning like this all the time and we don't usually slow down by stopping and talking about a thing that kind of interrupts those thought processes and enables us to notice that something is different that something is not there that we need to do something by calling out these things we're bringing awareness to our current behavior

what we're currently doing and by having that awareness it enable us to change that behavior or do something else I also really like his two-minute rule to starting a new habit I alluded right at the start of the video to eat that frog that's a 2001 book about productivity whose entire premise is that if you start the day by doing the hardest thing eating the Frog then you get that weight off your shoulders and you're more likely to be able to just get the rest of the stuff on your to-do list d

one because you feel better about it it's all kind of get on with it do the hard thing first eat the Frog the problem is that while in theory that sounds nice you know wouldn't feel so much better if the worst thing in our to-do list was done earlier in the day in practice it doesn't really work with us that have executive function challenges because what we'll end up doing as much as we want to get it done we'll end up procrastinating because it's too hard to get started we have an executive fu

nction block instead it's better for us to build up with small tasks so that we get some momentum behind us before we tackle that biggest task it's almost like Newton's first law an object in motion stays in motion unless an external Force acts upon it an executive function struggler stays in motion unless something else stops us from doing so we need that build up so that we can get going and we can't can't start from a standing start again Newton's first law Atomic habits Embraces this by enco

uraging us to start with small habits instead of running a mile we might just run for a minute instead of reading a whole chapter every night we might just start with a page or two just reading one page is enough for us to cast those votes that say we are someone who reads regularly that is a habit of us it's also cheaper from an executive function point of view to just pick up a book and read a page than it is to regulate for a whole chapter I love as well how he acknowledges that many of us wi

ll hear this and be like well that's a trick I know you're just trying to get me to read a page cuz I'll then end up reading the whole chapter and then we kind of talk ourselves out of it because we know we're being tricked and his solution to that is actually just to force ourselves to stick to that small amount so make sure we only read one page and then put the book down practice for 2 minutes and then stop by making ourselves stop even if we want to do more we're breaking out of that mentali

ty that we're tricking ourselves and we're still enforcing that habit casting votes for that habit that mean that we are going to be able to stick with it and grow it long term he also advocates for keeping it below the amount that it feels like work because when it feels like work it stops being satisfying and we're more likely to carry on doing the Habit if it feels satisfying I feel like this is very executive function friendly it means we don't have to self-regulate for too long and so there

fore it's fairly cheap to get started on these habits it also means we're only doing it for a short amount of time so we can switch things up and get a dopamine hit if we need variety like ADHD is do and finally it means we're less likely to hit the All or Nothing mentality that I'm going to read a chapter or I'm going to do nothing becomes I'm going to read one page it's in the middle and it means that we get things done having said that one of the strategies in the book I think is actually rea

lly unhelpful for that All or Nothing mentality and I'd really advise against that for people who have ADHD in particular and that is the Habit tracking technique now he talks about it in multiple ways he talks about it one in like moving a marble from one jar into another jar when you complete a task which I think is quite cool actually I don't have a problem with that because I see the way it measures our progress the one I don't like is the daily checking a box that we did this habit and that

's because in a way I it kind of shames us if we miss a day you know we see these completed rows and rows of days that we successfully did the thing and then one day we're busy or our executive function is bad or we forgot whatever the reason is we didn't do it that particular day and now we have ruined the entire streak that feeds into our All or Nothing mentality we either have the streak or it's ruined and if it's ruined ruined then we give up I also think that seeing that we didn't do that f

or one day it can lead to us feeling guilty or bad about ourselves or some kind of Shame which leads to a brick in our wall of awful which means executive functioning on it in future is going to be even harder I think it runs really counteractive to the way that we tend to work with things to be fair James Clear does actually acknowledge this a little bit that it could lead to an All or Nothing mentality and he kind of suggests that that's because we're measuring the wrong thing we're measuring

that we're doing it every day we're not measuring the progress that we're getting in the task which I do kind of get but I think that Nuance is a little bit of a moot point I don't think it cancels out the impact of Breaking the Chain for us he also Advocates accepting a m day just make sure it's not two M dayss which again I kind of get but I think sometimes we need to give ourselves a bit of Grace and a bit of accepting that some days our lives are going to be in chaos and we're not going to b

e able to get the thing done for a few days and consistency looks like on average we get it done done so you know if you're ill or something like that I wouldn't feel too bad about the missing 2 days in a row but the part I like least about this book though is the whole idea around stopping undesirable habits the premise is fine make the undesirable habit unattractive and you're less likely to do it the implementation is what I don't particularly like and in particular I'm referring to the punis

hment aspect one of the ways in which He suggests making a habit unattractive is by putting a financial penalty to him so something like if you sleep in then you lose money for having done so for me this just categorically does not work for neurod Divergence and in particular ADHD because we already spend enough money paying the ADHD tax because of things that we haven't done how many times have you spent extra money because you missed a deadline or you forgot to do something and there's a finan

cial penalty attached to it does that stop you from doing those things it just hurts it doesn't help it just hurts it just costs us money and it doesn't get us to the point where we are better off ADH du tax is already an expensive part of our lives so I would strongly advise not to take this approach the punishment is just going to feel bad financially and just make you feel bad about yourself as a person I don't like it and actually I'd extend this a little bit further I don't really like the

idea of punishments to stop us doing a undesirable habit full stop I like the idea of the outside out of mind stuff so hide the Habit away so that it's you're less likely to be attracted to doing it but the punishments to me are just adding bricks to the wall of awful our brains work best with things that give us dopamine bursts things that are positive things that are exciting punishments just bring shame and guilt and all of those feelings and we just don't need more of that in our lives what

I do think is valuable though is the accountability strategies that he finishes with but the positive accountability strategies like body doubling is having someone there for you to show up and do the thing with it's you feel good for doing the thing with them and it helps you in regulating to the thing having an accountability body you know you get to catch up with them and you get to tell them that you've done the thing it doesn't work so well if it's a negative thing and the final valuable pa

rt I want to highlight to is the reflection a lot of us don't take the time to slow down and think and reflect and this is something that I'm very guilty of myself one of the best ways for us to move forwards is to actually stop and take that moment to reflect and think what worked what didn't work and how best can I keep moving forwards as part of why a big lover of coaching because it forces us to slow down and reflect and I get to be that person for my coaching clients that's all I have for y

ou today I'd like to think this critical approach to evaluating productivity advice is helpful and you can use that as a way to think about other productivity advice that you come across I also hope it just allows you to not feel bad if particular bits of advice don't work for you because it's not your fault it's just how your brain works please let me know your thoughts please give me a like if you enjoyed this let me know in a comment subscribe if you want to see more topics in a similar vein

I've got some really exciting educational videos coming up thank you for watching and I look forward to seeing you in the next [Music] one