Do you ever find yourself at the end of a nonstop day feeling like you haven’t made progress on the things that are actually important to you? If so, you’re not alone.
If you are a person with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, you might find it even harder to direct your effort toward what’s most important – especially if your goal is a ways in the future and you have lots of distractions to manage.
Fortunately, there are research-backed strategies that can help you start and finish a task even when you feel stuck.
I’m a professor and clinical psychologist who has spent my career researching the challenges that adults with ADHD experience and ways to help improve their quality of life. I co-authored a book with Dr. Russell Barkley, a preeminent ADHD expert, published in October 2025 called “Living Well with Adult ADHD: Practical Strategies for Improving Your Daily Life.”
There are a few strategies that may help you more effectively direct your efforts toward the things that matter most.
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Tips grounded in cognitive behavioral therapy
One of the most effective nonmedication treatments for ADHD in adults is specialized cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT.
By teaching skills that help manage thoughts, feelings and behaviors, CBT helps people with ADHD learn and use self-regulation skills. Research shows that CBT for adult ADHD can help reduce ADHD symptoms and improve quality of life.
But you don’t have to be in full-time therapy or even have ADHD to potentially benefit from CBT strategies.
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If you find that you have difficulty doing what’s most important in our increasingly distraction-filled world, these tips might help.
Before diving in:
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Identify the goals that are most important to you, not just most urgent. Sometimes the most meaningful tasks, like taking steps toward a new career or growing your social network, fall by the wayside because they don’t have external deadlines.
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When testing out new strategies, it can take some time to see results. But if you could take meaningful action just 10% more often, that could add up to much better outcomes. So choose one of the following tips and practice until it becomes a habit.
Tip No. 1: Break it down
Important tasks are often also bigger, scarier and more ambiguous, which can make it hard to get started. Imagine you want to get a new job and the next step is to draft your cover letter.
If you saw “Write cover letter” on your to-do list, would you jump right into that task? Maybe. But if you’re like me, this task might be daunting and vague enough to make you turn to an easier task instead.
To get past that emotional barrier, break the task into much smaller steps. No step is too small if it gets you started.
So instead of “Write cover letter,” try “Outline cover letter” or “Find template for cover letter.” Still in avoidance mode? How about “Create cover letter document with opening line.” Even if you stop there, you’ll be one step closer to the goal.
When breaking down tasks, a timer can be your best friend. “Work on cover letter for 15 minutes” might feel less overwhelming and build behavioral momentum.
Consider, for instance, the Pomodoro technique, invented by a university student in the 1980s who was trying to come up with a strategy to work more efficiently.
A pomodoro, the Italian word for tomato, represents an amount of time – typically 25 minutes – to focus on a task, followed by a short break. The creator of this technique used a tomato-shaped kitchen timer, thus the name.
To practice the technique, write down the task you’ll work on, start the timer and get to work. When the alarm sounds, take a five-minute break to refresh. Then move to the next interval of 25 minutes, until after four repetitions you get a longer break, such as 15 to 30 minutes.
Research shows that this technique may reduce distractibility while working, leading to greater productivity and a sense of completion. It helps me get started on my most avoided task: grading papers. I’m much more likely to commit to 25 minutes of grading than I am to tackle them all at once.
Tip No. 2: Notice your avoidant thoughts
“I have much more time to do that later.”
“I’ll do just one more thing before I leave.”
Do these thoughts sound familiar? If so, you’re not alone. Using mini-surveys sprinkled throughout the day, my lab found that college students reported having thoughts like this about 50% of the time. For non-college adults, the rate was only slightly lower, at about 45% of the time.
We also found that when people had recently had these thoughts, they were more likely to be distracted and avoid something they should have been doing. We decided to call these thoughts “avoidant automatic thoughts” because they pop into your head effortlessly and are associated with putting off doing a task.
Importantly, we found that college students with ADHD report more avoidant automatic thoughts, along with the distraction and procrastination that come with them.
Just becoming aware of these automatic thoughts in daily life is a good place to start. Make a list of the thoughts that you experience most frequently when you go into avoidance mode.
If you catch yourself having one of these thoughts, coach yourself by adding a strategy to your self-talk. For example, when “Write cover letter” results in the thought, “I’ll have time for that on Friday,” say to yourself: “But you can do a little bit now. Maybe just two Pomodoros.” Then add: “After that, you can check your email.”
Tip No. 3: Leverage relatively rewarding activities
When people are avoiding tasks, they’re not usually sitting around doing nothing.
In one study mentioned above, we found that work-related tasks were among the most frequently avoided. What were people likely to be doing instead? Other work-related tasks. A similar example: The only times in college I ever did a dorm room deep-clean was when I should have been studying for finals.
This so-called “procrastivity” might contain some useful clues about how to motivate your way through tasks you tend to avoid.
It’s helpful to think about rewards not as things – like cookies, video games and gold stars – but as activities, like eating cookies, playing video games, seeing gold stars and thinking about what they represent.
There’s a name for this: Psychology’s Premack principle holds that the opportunity to do a more preferred activity can be a reward for doing a less preferred activity. An example would be what’s commonly known as “grandma’s rule” – if you eat your vegetables, then you can eat dessert.
This means that you can arrange the activities on your schedule in a way that uses more rewarding activities to “pull along” your behavior during less rewarding activities. Set up your day to “do the worst first,” and strategically place more enjoyable activities after difficult but important ones. For example, a friend of mine delays her first cup of morning coffee until she completes her workout. It’s not pleasant in the moment, but it helps her get the workout done, and her coffee feels extra rewarding afterward.
What are some relatively rewarding activities that already happen throughout your day? Can you arrange the order of things to leverage them? If you can flip the motivational script even once a day, it might make a big difference in making progress toward your goals.
Remember that better self-regulation is about making small, sustainable changes that fit with your daily life. There will definitely be setbacks: After all, you’ve been doing it the old way for a long time! But be sure to notice and celebrate even the small steps toward your goals.
