How Do You Approach a Big Project?
Here’s the situation:
You have a big paper to write or presentation to prepare. You need to clean out your closets or organize your files. You’re redoing your website or writing a sales page.
Or your facing some other task that feels like a big mountain to climb.
How do you approach it?
The General ADHD Approach
If you have ADHD, you might procrastinate for as long as possible, then use the pressure of urgency to tackle the whole thing in one long burst of hyperfocus.
You fuel up, you pull the all-nighter, and you race the clock to get it done.
It generally works. Until it doesn’t.
The Common (Neurotypical) Advice
A neurotypical person would advise you to break it up and take it slow. “Bird by bird,” as writer Anne Lamott shared in her book, Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.
That expression comes from a story where her brother was struggling with a school project on birds, and her father advised him to take it “bird by bird.”
It’s the same thing as one bite at a time or one step at a time.
Pick the cliché that works for you.
Why The Typical Advice Fails for ADHD Brains
It sounds reasonable enough, but you know what tends to happen:
You get distracted between “birds.”
When you return, you forget where you left off. You’ve lost all momentum — your fire has burned out. Then you must start again, doing the heavy labor of igniting the spark and rebuilding the fire.
OR
You tackle one bird, get some momentum, and decide to continue. Hyperfocus kicks in.
The next thing you know you pick your head up, realize it’s now dark outside, and wonder where the time went.
You’ve fanned the flames of the fire for so long that you eventually deplete yourself from tending to it.
ADHD often presents a double-edged sword for productivity:
The energy required to start is often a heavy lift, but it can be just as hard to stop once you get going.
We often don’t really stop as much as we crash from exhaustion.
The Challenge: Sustainable Momentum
How can you face a big project without overwhelm and procrastination,
How can you tackle that project in a more sustainable way — a way that helps you sustain momentum and avoid burnout?
The Strategy: Create “Work Packets”
The advice to “break it up” isn’t bad advice; it just needs more specificity and refinement.
I like to break up projects into what I call “work packets.”
What Are Work Packets?
A “work packet” is a clearly-defined sub-section of the project that can feel complete on its own.
It’s a section of a report, a complete circuit in a workout, a drawer in a dresser.
How Do Work Packets Help Resolve Overwhelm?
The brain craves a feeling of completion. This feeling of completion is what triggers the release of dopamine —the neurotransmitter that fuels the brain’s reward circuit.
This is especially crucial for ADHD brains, which tend to lag in production of dopamine.
One of the challenges that arises in writing — especially with longer pieces — and other big projects is that there isn’t always a clearly defined end point.
How do you know when it’s done?
Without that feeling of completion, we don’t get the dopamine.
When we don’t have a clear finish line, we either keep going until we’ve pushed ourselves too far and drained our energy, or we leave a task incomplete, in which case it hangs over us and occupies precious bandwidth that we need for other things.
So we need to give ourselves a defined finish line.
That’s where work packets come in.
Examples of Work Packets
Here are some examples:
When I’m planning a workout, I combine three to four exercises targeting both upper and lower body into one circuit. I may plan a few different circuits for one workout session, and plan to do three to four sets of each circuit. If I don’t have enough time for all of them, I can either cut out an entire circuit or reduce the number of sets I do of any circuit and still feel complete.
If I’m working on a long newsletter, article, or sales page, I’ll break up the work into sub-sections with clearly-defined objectives and end-points. I pick one to work on in a given work session — sometimes even tackling them out of order.
Rather than trying to organize the whole dresser in one shot, I’ll focus on a single drawer.
If I’m cooking a big dinner or even making one specific item, I’ll break it up into discrete tasks. For example, when I make apple crisp for Thanksgiving each year, I make the topping in advance, in a separate work session.
How Are Work Packets Different From the “Bird by Bird” Approach?
Bird by Bird is about focusing on the present moment and taking the project in small increments. Write one sentence. Walk around the block.
That approach can help to get started, but it doesn’t always generate momentum that brings you back when you’ve been forced to leave off.
What differentiates work packets from the “bird by bird” approach is that a work packet feels complete as a piece of effort that gives you a feeling of completion.
This feeling of completion is key — it’s an essential factor for the dopamine reward that helps us return to the project.
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