Break it Down, Build it Up

You’re chilling on the couch.  Maybe playing a game, maybe watching YouTube, maybe just daydreaming.  You have something to do.  It might be big or small.  You know how to do it.  You have everything you need to do it.  You have the time to do it.  You even want to do it.  But for some reason, you just can’t make yourself get up and do it. 

This is a common scenario for people with ADHD.  You may even struggle with this every day.  The advice most often given is to break it down.  Stop seeing what you have to do as something that is huge and overwhelming.  Break it down into its smallest parts.  If you have to clean the kitchen, then the first step is to go to the kitchen.  No big deal, right?  You go to the kitchen all the time.  So, you get up and go to the kitchen.  Now all you have to do is take the dishes that are sitting on the counter and put them into the sink.  You can do that.  That doesn’t even require you to take more than a few steps.  After that, you might as well rinse off the dishes and put them in the dishwasher.  Oops, that was too big; you hear the couch calling you back.  Okay, then just the glasses.  Some of them have milk in them and you just know those are going to stink if you leave them.  Just the glasses.  Hey, that went well, so might as well work on the bowls.  So on and so forth and before you know it, you’ve gotten the dishes done.  And that’s the hardest part of cleaning the kitchen.  Now you just have to wipe the counters, maybe sweep the floor.  But, hey, after doing the dishes, these things are nothing, hardly any effort at all.  And when you are done, you get to sit in your nice, clean kitchen and have a bowl of ice cream while you play Pokemon or Candy Crush, with nothing hanging over your head.  That sounds great!  And it is great.  It is a tried and true method.  There are studies and research that will bear this out as an effective method to get things done. 
But it’s not the only method.  Breaking things down only works if the problem is that you are feeling overwhelmed by your task.  And that’s not always the reason for procrastination and avoidance. 

Sometimes we don’t get things done because they are already too small.  We tell ourselves, “It won’t take but a minute to load the dishwasher.”  And because we believe the task is so simple and not at all time consuming, you put it off because we can always do it later.  We can save it for the last minute because that’s all it will take.  We break it down in our minds until it is so small that it becomes insignificant.  In that case, the answer can be to make it bigger, more complicated, more urgent.  Now, we don’t want a list that says, 1. Rinse dishes, 2. Put dishes in dishwasher, 3. Wipe down counters, 4. Sweep floor.  Here, it might be more effective to have one item on the list: Clean kitchen.  This will allow you to get a more realistic time frame.  Before you told yourself that each of those activities would take just a minute or two.  But seen as a whole, you know it’s going to take 45 minutes.  This also allows you to see the larger impact that the activity has.  Not having a swept floor is a small thing.  Not having a clean kitchen is bigger.  You can’t cook in a dirty kitchen.  You don’t even want to walk into a dirty kitchen.  Now, it has more urgency because it’s something you need to get done before you can do other, more pleasant things, like getting a bowl of ice cream and sitting down to play Angry Birds or solitaire.
Sometimes you need to break things down, but sometimes you need to build things up.  There’s no one solution that is going to work every time.  Circumstances change and the solution with them.