Task Paralysis

ADHD executive dysfunction: the harder route you take to avoid the hard thing

Executive dysfunction with ADHD doesn't look like doing nothing. It looks like doing something more complicated to avoid the direct thing.

disclaimer: these posts are not medical advice and provided as information only, with no guarantees

Published 4 Sept 20266 min readBy Leonid Chindelevitch

A clock crumbling at the edges, with a sticky note that says Out at 5:40

Imagine you're standing at the edge of a wide frozen lake, and you need to get to the other side.

You look at it and think: if I start walking, I'm going to slip. Maybe the ice isn't thick enough. Maybe I should walk around instead, or find someone who can give me directions that get me there without crossing.

Then you look behind you, and there's a kiosk renting skates.

The short version

It isn't doing nothing
Executive dysfunction rarely looks like laziness. It looks like effort, spent on a route that avoids the thing.
The tell is complication
Nobody plans a detour around something easy. If you're building an elaborate alternative, that's the signal.
Preparation is the worst kind
The hardest detour to catch is the one that looks like getting ready, because you are visibly learning things.
You can't see it from inside
The simple option usually isn't hidden. It's just invisible from where you're standing.

Executive dysfunction doesn't look like laziness

People call it lazy.

That isn't what's happening. Look again at the lake: you didn't sit down. You considered walking around a lake, which is longer and harder than crossing it. You considered finding someone to give you directions, which means locating that person, explaining the problem, and understanding the answer.

Both are more work than the thing you were avoiding. You weren't refusing to spend effort. You were spending it in a direction that felt survivable.

Which makes it a useful signal. Nobody plans a detour around something easy. If you're designing an elaborate alternative to a direct task, that elaborateness is telling you something about the task.

The hardest version to catch is the detour that looks like getting ready.

📸 Screenshot placeholder — the app's task list, showing a task that's been sitting a while.

The detour that looks like preparation

I decided recently to start training for a triathlon. Of the three disciplines, swimming was clearly my weakest.

Instead of confronting that, I spent a long time researching triathlon distances. Then equipment. Then training programmes, schedules, locations. In all that time I had not once stepped into a pool.

When I noticed, what struck me was that almost all of the preparation would become irrelevant the moment I put a swimming costume on, found my goggles and got in the water — because at that point I'd have real information about how well I can actually swim. Fifteen minutes of that beats hours of planning and months of procrastination.

That's what makes preparation so hard to spot. Researching distances isn't a waste of time in the abstract, and it doesn't feel like avoidance from the inside, because you're visibly learning things. But I was gathering the wrong information, expensively, to avoid the cheapest source of the right information. The pool was the kiosk, and it was open the whole time.

One caveat. That realisation isn't usually available at the moment it would help. I got there because a triathlon is months away and the runway was long enough for the penny to drop on its own. If your goal is on a shorter timescale, waiting to notice isn't a plan.

So the problem worth solving isn't how to have the insight. It's how to get it sooner than you would alone.

You can't see the kiosk from inside your own head

The kiosk was never hidden. It was behind you the whole time, in plain sight and open. You couldn't see it because you were facing the lake, doing what the lake makes you do: calculating whether the ice will hold.

That's closer to what executive dysfunction is than anything to do with willpower. The functions that falter are the ones that would let you step back, survey the situation and sequence it, not the ones that make you want to. You can want to cross very badly and still be unable to turn your head.

So you don't need someone to tell you that crossing matters. You already know. You need a vantage point that isn't your own head.

Outside is a position, not a person

"Outside" doesn't have to mean a person. A person works — that's what body-doubling is, and why it helps when encouragement doesn't. But people are expensive to ask, and asking has its own initiation cost, which is a problem when initiation is the thing that's hard.

That's roughly why we built Herding Chickens the way we did. It isn't the skates. It's the person pointing at the kiosk behind you.

Capture gets it out of your head. Send the bot a plain message and it becomes a task, filed into one of four areas.
One main a day, and only one. The bot deliberately only lets you set one. Sequencing is exactly the function that's unreliable, so the app holds it rather than handing it back every morning. Why we built it that way.
The check-in asks. A while after you set your main, it asks whether you're on it. Not whether you're trying hard enough — just a question from somewhere other than inside.

And once you can see the task, if the first move is still too big, the bot will split it into up to five steps. That's a different problem from this one, and we wrote about it separately: when "just do it" doesn't work, break it down instead. The steps come from an AI and it doesn't always get them right, so there's a redo button — press it until the split looks like your task rather than a generic one.

The friction can reverse

What frightened you about walking was that the ice is slippery. You pictured going down. Then you put skates on, and the slipperiness is what carries you. Same ice, same property, nothing about the lake changed.

Some of what makes a task feel impossible works like this. Being interested in twelve things is a nightmare when you need to do one of them and an asset when the one you're doing is interesting. Hyperfocus is a liability at 2am and worth a great deal at the right moment, which we've written about too.

That isn't true of everything. Some things are just hard.

What this won't do

It won't solve every problem you hit on the way, and we'd be lying if we said otherwise.

Seeing the first step doesn't make the rest of the crossing free. What it changes is what you're standing in front of: a kiosk ten feet behind you instead of a wide lake.

If you want to try it, take the goal you've been circling, send it to the bot as a task, and make it today's main. Then look behind you.

The first version runs in Telegram; there's no store download yet. Join the waitlist for a launch email.

Keep reading

Herding Chickens is a productivity app in development, not medical advice, therapy, or an ADHD diagnosis. If you are struggling, talk to a qualified clinician. In the UK, start with the NHS ADHD in adults page.

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