3 Strategies to Maintain Momentum in Your Work Without the Drain of Hyper-focus Mode

Everyone with ADHD is familiar with this situation:

You sit down to work with the sun shining outside your window. The next time you pick up your head, the room is dark. Hours have passed.

You haven’t eaten.

You haven’t even gone to the bathroom.

A tornado could have been raging around you and you wouldn’t have noticed.

Welcome to the state of hyper-focus. One of the two extreme states of ADHD productivity.

Why People with ADHD Fall Into Hyper-Focus Mode

ADHD brains and nervous systems lack the traditional inner guardrails that neurotypical systems possess that tell us that we’re hungry or tired or that it might be wise to take a break.

Focus and momentum can be so hard to attain that when they arrive, we don’t want to do anything to disrupt them. We want to ride the wave of momentum for as long as we can, because we don’t know when the next one will arrive.

The False Productivity of Hyper-Focus

A hyper-focus session can feel productive because we get a lot done. But it’s a false productivity, because it comes at the expense of our future capacity. Without proper breaks during a working session, the system crashes and burns out.

The result is that an intense hyper-focus session can leave us out of commission for days following, as the body and nervous system shut down to recover.

The problem is that when we’re in that state, almost nothing can pull us out.

Set a timer? You’ll shut it off — often without even realizing what you’re doing. Next thing you know, it’s hours later and you don’t even remember when the timer went off.

Constrain yourself to a shorter amount of time? Without enough runway, you’re unlikely to even get started.

ADHD brains are often compared to expensive race cars with faulty engines: capable of going fast when the engines work.

But they’re really more like airplanes: they can travel far and at high speeds, but they need a long runway to pick up enough speed to take flight.

This is why the Pomodoro method — the technique of working for 25 minutes followed by a 5 minute break — often fails for people with ADHD. It hardly gives you enough time to get the engine running before you’re forced into an unnatural interruption. 25 minutes is generally too short to even start heading down the runway.

Enough Time vs Too Much Time

The wide chasm between hyper-focus and Pomodoro reveals the productivity tension for ADHDers:

You need enough time to ramp up and get into the air. But without a reliable stopping mechanism, you become like a plane without landing gear. You’ll keep going strong until you run out of gas.

When that happens, you’ll crash and burn. Recovery from a long stint in hyper-focus mode can take hours to days, leaving you once again searching for that magic wave to ride. And that’s how the cycle continues.

3 Strategies to Maintain Momentum Without the Drain of Hyper-Focus Mode

In my experience, I’ve found 3 things that help me stop within my limits without losing momentum.

(1) Create “Work Packets”

Any task you need to do can be broken up into smaller segments, which I call “work packets.”

A work packet is a natural sub-set of the work that has a clearly defined beginning and ending. Some examples:

• a drawer in a dresser you need to clear out or organize
• a section of a sales page
• a single video you need to edit
• a section of your resume
• a set number of phone calls
• writing a single social media post

What’s important is that it has a clearly defined ending. With tasks like writing, a packet may just be the first draft of that sub-section; it’s not necessarily a final draft.

Work packets help you leave off your work at natural interruption points, rather than the random interruption of short time blocks.

(2) Keep Track of Status and Progress

When you reach your stopping point, make notes of where you are and what your next step is. This will help Future You ramp up faster.

Sometimes you might even take a single tiny action toward the next step. For example, if you’re writing a long article, you might write the heading for the next section and some notes about what you want to say in that section.

Record any decisions you’ve made about the direction of the project so that you don’t need to spend time reviewing where you were to get up to speed.

On the map of your progress, this is a “you are here” sticker.

(3) Create an Environment Where External Factors Will Force You to Stop

This is the secret weapon to guard against that common ADHD tendency to try to squeeze in just “one more thing” — even when that one more thing isn’t even related to the current project or task (IKYK, and I see you).

Here’s the reality: ADHDers can be terrible enforcers of our own guardrails.

You need external factors to literally force you to shut down the computer or step away from the desk.

One of the best ways to create those guardrails is to work in a place that has a defined limit on how long you can stay there: coffee shops, libraries, gyms, co-working spaces — any place where people will force you to leave at a certain time.

Another option is to recruit a co-working buddy. This needs to be in person.

One reason virtual co-working doesn’t work for this is that when the Zoom ends, you’re still on your computer with nobody around to force you to shut down.

In the moment, you might bristle at the limits. You’ll complain that they killed your flow. But you’ll be grateful for the forced recovery time when you’re able to pick up again tomorrow.