Speaker A
Hi, I'm Dr. Tracey Marks, a psychiatrist, and I make mental health education videos.
Dr. Tracey Marks shares proven strategies to overcome ADHD procrastination by pairing unpleasant tasks with rewards and prioritizing effectively.
Key Takeaways
- Pair unpleasant tasks with enjoyable rewards to increase motivation.
- Breaking tasks into smaller steps helps reduce overwhelm and procrastination.
- Creating a pleasant environment can make difficult tasks less aversive.
- Prioritizing tasks by urgency and importance prevents inefficient time use.
- Scheduling and time logging improve task management and follow-through.
Summary
- ADHD causes procrastination due to tasks feeling overwhelming, boring, or lengthy.
- Breaking large tasks into smaller subtasks reduces resistance to starting.
- Pair unpleasant tasks with rewarding activities to motivate completion.
- Avoid food as a reward to prevent emotional eating associations.
- Schedule unpleasant tasks before enjoyable activities to use natural breaks as motivation.
- Create a comforting environment to make unpleasant tasks more tolerable.
- Prioritize tasks using urgency and importance based on Stephen Covey’s method.
- Avoid spending time on unimportant tasks that seem urgent due to procrastination.
- Use time logs and planners to track task duration and schedule rewards.
- Recap emphasizes pairing rewards, creating comfort, and prioritizing to power through ADHD challenges.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and ADHD procrastination challenges
- 00:29Why tasks feel aversive and breaking them down
- 00:58Breaking large tasks into smaller subtasks
- 01:27Pairing unpleasant tasks with rewards
- 01:58Choosing appropriate rewards and avoiding food
- 02:58Realistic rewards and time logging
- 03:48Scheduling unpleasant tasks around pleasant activities
- 04:26Combining pleasant and unpleasant tasks
- 05:06Creating a comforting environment for tasks
- 05:41Reducing resistance by making tasks less unpleasant
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
This is part of my series on non-medication ways to help your ADHD. You'll see a link to that playlist in the description of this video and in the corner.
Speaker A
With ADHD, procrastination is huge. No one wants to do unpleasant things, but with ADHD, you can avoid doing things just because the scope of the task seems too great.
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It may have too many steps, or you think that it's going to take too long.
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So, with cognitive behavior therapy, we call these aversive tasks, meaning they seem too painful to start or complete.
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And the usual reasons that they seem aversive are being too big to get started, it's boring and routine, it takes you too long and you lose interest in it, it has too many steps and you don't feel like doing all the steps.
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I talked in a previous video about breaking up large tasks into smaller tasks. So, go watch that video for more details on that.
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Once you've got your subtasks, take the ones where you feel the most resistance to do it, and pair it with a rewarding task.
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Some examples of rewarding tasks would be watching something on television, going for a walk, group chatting with friends, listening to an interesting podcast episode.
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You don't want it to be something to eat, like having a slice of cake, because you don't want to associate reward with food because that perpetuates emotional eating.
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It's best to create a list of rewarding activities to have on hand so that when you're faced with something that you don't want to do, you can immediately pull from the list.
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On the list, include the time that it takes to complete the reward. If you can't think of things to do that you find rewarding, think of what you'd rather do instead.
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And it needs to be something that you'd reasonably do, not like, "I'd rather be on a trip to Bali." But if you think to yourself, "I don't feel like doing this.
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I think I'm just going to go watch an episode of Westworld," then, that becomes the reward that motivates you to finish the task.
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So, you push through the task so you can get to the reward. Now, in my time management video, I talk about keeping a time log of how long things take and scheduling tasks in your planner.
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So, if you add in a reward at the end of a task, you need to make sure that you add that to your time log.
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You can also use regularly scheduled, pleasant activities as motivators. This means that you would schedule your unpleasant activity around the natural breaks.
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Let's say you normally watch the news at a certain time and you enjoy doing that, then, plan to do your hour-long unpleasant activity an hour before the news show.
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Then, you can recover from your unpleasant activity by watching the news. Another way you can use the reward system is do the pleasurable activity at the same time that you're doing the unpleasant one.
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So, with this strategy, you would refer to your planner to see the things that you would need to do that day.
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And then, are there things that you can pair with something enjoyable, like folding clothes while watching television, or listening to a podcast episode while you're exercising.
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Let's say there isn't a specific activity that you want to do while you're performing the task, because it takes a lot of concentration or focus.
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In that case, find a way to create a soothing environment to do the activity.
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For example, instead of sitting at a desk to file an online insurance claim, do it outside on your deck, or sit in a cozy chair to do it.
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Comforting surroundings help offset the negative experience you have of completing the task. And this isn't something you naturally think to do.
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You have to purpose to do the unpleasant task in a pleasant environment. If you just push through, you may get it done, but you reinforce the experience as something really unpleasant.
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And if it's something you have to do again, it may be harder to push through the next time because you remember how much you hated doing it the last time.
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So, with this strategy, you're trying to make yourself hate it less, so there's less resistance to doing it the next time.
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Another way to address getting things done is to prioritize the tasks on your to-do list.
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Some of the things to think about are, are these things required for your job?
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What things have a deadline? Stephen Covey wrote a book called "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People." And in his book, he suggested prioritizing tasks by looking at the level of urgency and importance.
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So, using this approach, you could rank your priorities as things that are important and urgent, important but not urgent, not important but urgent, and not important and not urgent.
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We tend to be driven more by the things that are urgent, regardless of their importance.
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And things can become urgent simply because they were put off for a later time.
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So then, they end up taking a priority over the things that could have been more important, but just not urgent.
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Important and urgent things would be things like things that are required for your job or school.
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They're urgent because they have inflexible deadlines. Important but not urgent could be things like exercising, doing grocery shopping so that you can cook a healthy meal instead of ordering takeout.
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Not important but urgent can be things that don't necessarily have much consequence to you, but someone else's impatience makes it urgent.
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Or someone asks you to do something, but because they waited until the last minute, they need it urgently, and if you want to be a team player or support them, you'll meet their timeline.
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And then, not important and not urgent tend to be pie in the sky things that you'd like to do at some point like reorganize your closet, or it could be something that someone else could do for you.
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And these are things that are usually appealing in some way, because maybe they don't require a lot of thought, or maybe it's something that you find fun.
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And if that's the case, this would be something that you complete during whatever downtime that you have.
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Maybe it becomes a weekend project. Because these projects are appealing, it's easy to get drawn to them and see them as more important than they really are because they produce a good outcome.
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It can feel really good to purge my closet of things that I don't need.
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And as a result, I can tell myself it's important, and then, ended up doing that before I mask up to go to the grocery store to get more vegetables for my Mediterranean diet.
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Okay, so a recap. This video is talking about how to follow through with tasks that you would ordinarily put off.
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The two tips for that is pairing pleasant activities with the unpleasant ones. This means that you already have generated the task list and identified which parts are unpleasant and how long it should take you.
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You saw how to do that in the video that preceded this one. You use the pleasant activity either immediately afterwards, as a reward to look forward to, or you do it simultaneously with the unpleasant activity.
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You can also create a comforting environment in which to do the unpleasant activity to make it more tolerable, like taking bad-tasting medicine with something sweet.
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And you can adjust the time that you do the hated stuff, so that it's just before you do something that you like.
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The second tip to being able to follow through with tasks is to prioritize them in order of importance.
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This helps reduce wasting time on unimportant things so that every important thing doesn't become urgent.
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Fire drills beget more fire drills. And a constant state of urgency and catch-up makes you extremely inefficient and neglectful of things that are really important.
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I hope this was helpful for you. I have more coming on organization and planning.
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Stay tuned. See you next time.
Topics:ADHDprocrastinationtask managementreward systemtime managementmental healthproductivityStephen Coveycomfort strategiesnon-medication ADHD tips
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