the main struggle that we adhders have is not with motivation but with consistency if the conditions are right we can motivate ourselves every single day this was my first step to completely transforming my productivity I talked to Dr hell one of the leading experts in the ADHD space and asked him what his thoughts are as long as what you're working on is stimulating when we have stimulation we hyperfocus in this video we're not just scratching the surface we're diving deep to uncover the secrets of how to actually get stuff done when you have ADHD how
ADHD powerhouses like David gogin Simone biles or Bill Gates stay so insanely productive and no it's not the same old advice you find in those boring productivity guides or generic online videos I will walk you through five powerful strategies that completely changed my life from being stuck in a vicious cycle of procrastination executive paralysis and frustration to being able to instantly focus and execute and stay consistent with my daily tasks despite my ADHD spoiler alert I won't just tell you to buy a planner oh and stick around until the end because I will also reveal
how you can access three bonus steps as well as a gamified tool that I built to track your progress for free before we dive head first into the strategies let's talk about why the traditional productivity industry has failed us adhders the reason for why you've most likely failed over the years is because most things you find when Googling on how to get stuff done don't don't work longterm for people with ADHD breaking tasks into endless smaller chunks special to-do lists or starting with the hardest thing first I found that these strategies made it even more
difficult for my brain to execute what I had to learn was that to get stuff done consistently you need to have high dopamine levels to feel motivated and focused the problem is our dopamine levels are usually way lower than for the average person it's the reason why we are always looking for a kick why we love an people taking risks or easily get addicted to fast food in video games because these things all give our brains fast dopamine and so naturally I thought this dopamine deficiency will make it infinitely harder for me to be productive
turns out this was not entirely true it might sound crazy but throughout my years of research struggling myself and trying every solution Under the Sun I learned how to actually use this dopamine deficiency to my advantage because my constant craving for dopamine is now able to get me addicted to completing work believe me I never thought I would say this a few years ago however this allowed me to stay so consistent with uploading the videos you all know from me so what's the trick what completely changed the game for me was understanding that your ADHD
brain is not wired for importance but for interest in other words it is wired for what it wants to do not for what it should do this is why we have no problem in focusing or putting effort into playing video games for hours but procrastinate on the laundry for days but what's interesting for us for people with ADHD it's mainly challenge fear novelty and connection to make it easier for you to remember I developed the nice model our brains need tasks to be new interesting challenging and to be treated like an emergency nice but how
do you make work nice and interesting especially boring work is this even possible and how do we optimize our daily tasks for our low levels of dopamine let's dive into the strategies strategy number one starting first thing in the morning in the beginning I made the mistake of listening to all these gurus out there telling me to meditate Journal exercise and then get to work while a bit of that helped it took away almost all my motivation and dopamine in the morning for my important tasks study show that your dopamine levels are highest first thing
in the morning which also means you are most productive during this time and so what I do now is wake up put on some motivating music to get some easy and fast dopamine if I need help getting out of bed a shower and then get to work immediately the only things you should do before your work are things that charge up your dopamine levels aerobic exercise or sunlight can help with that I also like to take cold showers whenever I can because they've been shown to increase dopamine by over 500% and the effect lasts for
a few hours so it's easily become one of my favorite and fastest ways to boost my dopamine naturally good morning friends it is 9:00 a.m. I just woke up and it's time for a cold shower it's always a bit scary when you go in oh my God that's cold okay maybe it's not my favorite way but I then immediately sit down in front of my PC get going by riding down what I need to do actually time blocking my day over the calendar because telling myself I'll just get to a certain thing whenever it doesn't
work and after an hour or so make myself a coffee which you guessed it increases dopamine as well this is the procedure I follow almost every single day now notice how I use the word almost what I had to learn over time was that routines are incredibly difficult for us to maintain because once something no longer feels new the dope Fades and you start avoiding and dreading it we are allergic to boredom so it can feel like just wanting to run away from that familiarity now what completely changed the game for me was having a
few days where I break out of this routine on purpose where I journal or meditate or do it all at once yes do exactly what the productivity gurus tell me to do but only every once in a while whenever my brain needs it the point is to do something uncommon to make things less predictable for your brain and help it regain a sense of novelty for your old routine this way you can stay inconsistently consistent which however wouldn't help you get anything done at all without breaking your big task into its first three steps I
know in the beginning of this video I mentioned how breaking a big task into all its small parts makes it even more difficult for our brains to start but be with me back in my professional job a few years ago I often made the mistake of breaking up my big task into all all its small puzzle pieces instead of check emails it would be email Ralph remember to send the email to Bob double check the email from Sandra send out offer to University X CC Sandra and email to University X write email to boss Etc
I'm getting overwhelmed just talking about it I made checking emails into this huge list of to-dos which massively increased the amount of motivation AKA dopamine I needed in order to start until I learned about dividing my task into just its first three steps it turns out that once you focus on what's right in front of you you can actually get started I was like three emails that's easy no problem and this concept actually also works in regards to time imagine you have this huge task in front of you that will take hours you get lost
thinking about all the effort it will take and so you procrastinate on it intensely but what if you challenged yourself to work on it for just 5 minutes just 5 minutes and see what happens most of the time I ended up working for way longer especially when I converted fully by switching out my outcome based goals to time based goals I realized that outcome based goals like finish writing five emails set you up for failure because our estimates often aren't accurate and it's a lot more daunting to have to start a task that you know
you have to finish in a given time frame once there's no expectation of finishing attached ironically enough the task is easier to finish for example we switch that task out with reply to emails for 1 hour also if we follow this do something principle failure becomes unimportant because the only measure for success is acting acting I don't mean Oscar worthy acting I mean sitting down and just doing it we feel free to fail and that freeness propels us forward it's also why perfect ISM always makes us stand still Perfection seems too overwhelming to start on
but even if you focus on just the first three steps of a task and reformulate your goals to be time based you will still likely fail in the long run if you don't build momentum the productivity industry often coins the term eat the Frog which means you should focus on the hardest thing to do first because you have the most energy when you start makes sense right we just talked about our dopamine levels being highest in the morning well turns out it's not that simple while neurotypical brains start from motivation level say 10 our brains
often start from motivation level minus 10 and so therefore the hardest task even if you want to tackle it first thing in the morning will still be incredibly hard to initiate even when we've structured it into its first three steps we usually end up staring at that task and feeling like a massive failure we procrastinate shame and self-doubt creep in and it's just not a good time this is when I had to learn about the power of momentum and flipping the script on the traditional productivity industry by starting with the easiest thing first wait the
easiest thing yeah the easiest thing starting with the thing that's so easy you literally saved it for the end of the day because it's just going to take a few minutes why because our brains need a quick dopamine hit to get started on things let me explain by giving you an example video games are designed to get you hooked by giving you easy tasks in the beginning at level one right they then steadily increase the difficulty at higher levels because at that point you're already hooked and you therefore often tackle those more difficult tasks naturally
whereas if you started with those chances are you probably wouldn't have continued or given up action isn't just the effect of motivation but also the cause of it action leads to more action this is why when you do something for just 5 minutes usually the rest will follow going back to me I focus on the easiest task whenever I've had a break of work for longer than an hour which is usually right after waking up and after lunch I have a short call with a colleague I get some notes down or watch an informative video
on something that I need to learn the dopamine I get when taking off those easier tasks sort of then spills over into my more difficult tasks making it easier to start on them and once I start I get going this then gives you an on-ramp instead of needing to climb stairs which helps you build a positive feedback loop and gets you addicted to winning this was my first step to completely transforming my productivity by helping me build streaks so why is it that we can hyperfocus on video games for hours but only read one page
every 30 minutes it's not just about starting easy it's because video games have completely hacked our dopamine and it's not just video games educational apps like dual lingo literally build their whole business model on helping their users achieve streaks there's that word again streak that's weird before diving into this one let's first classify what a streak is cuz I was as confused as you are dualingo classifies a streak as being the number of days in a row you completed lessons or practiced and the more streaks you have the more levels you gain and so people
need to come back every single day makes sense but there's no way that an educational app that's tailored for Learning and effort has people coming back every single day right there's just no way turns out there is about 20% of all Learners have streaks Beyond 365 days that's one whole year how is this possible imagine doing something for 365 days imagine where you'd be a year from now if you stayed consistent with eating healthy doing exercise chances are you would have achieved your goal the main struggle that we ad years have is not with motivation
but with consistency if the conditions are right we can motivate ourselves every single day so to completely change the game we need to start playing it you need to do what all these games do which is track and log your progress but not in a boring way you need to actually see visually see where you were 20 days ago to where you are now because that way the growth will excite you I know in the beginning it sounded way too comp licated for me too like where do I even start don't worry I got you
because I now like to track my momentum and streaks with a gamified tool that I built over notion and at the end of this video I will reveal how you can access this game ofi tool to track your momentum and productivity as well as three bonus steps as well completely free to start you can also just use a calendar and take every day you've successfully sat down and worked for 30 minutes what's important is that you put it somewhere every day where you see it so your brain doesn't forget three things to remember here first
consistency can look like this this and this it's completely normal for us to have off days the most important thing is that you're able to get back up and so work at a pace that's good for you second don't be too hard on yourself if you miss a day just come back and third don't directly compare yourself to people like David goggin get out of your head and stay hard compare yourself with yourself and start small if 5 minutes of work each day seems difficult for you then start with that if just getting out of
bed and showering is difficult for you there's no shame in tracking that either the point is that soon your brain will see building streaks as a challenge and the last thing you'll want to do is break the chain which will help you stay a lot more consistent and motivated in the long run if you want to take it further you can even try assigning points to specific tasks but don't make it too complicated if it's too complicated your brain will probably need dopamine and therefore motivation to engage in just tracking your tasks which would be
very counterproductive but even if you start in the morning build momentum and introduce streaks you would still be missing one of the most essential pieces for ADHD productivity which is regularly introducing novelty there's a reason why we always switch our hobbies and want to turn our whole lives around every single week we need constant feelings of newness to stay inspired motivated and get dopamine which can be incredibly frustrating when we need to work on one boring task for hours days or maybe even weeks so how do we solve this problem what I learned over the
years is that you can actually introduce novelty without changing the task you're working on to boost your motivation and focus for said task I know sounds complicated again but it's actually really simple let's say you're working on your taxes regularly switching where you work who you work with or the time at which you're working on your taxes will all help you stay focused and M motivated for that task because you're introducing novelty which gives you dopamine you can use everyday occurrences to introduce novelty into your workday you might have caught yourself trying to finish the
laundry before a specific song ends or finish writing that email right before an appointment this is because you are challenging yourself which makes the experience more new on top of that we adhders are very competitive so challenging ourselves can work wonders alternating between different tasks can also help introduce novelty combining two tasks masks can also introduce novelty here's the crazy part though even the slightest tweaks in your work environment like lighting or temperature adjustments have been found to significantly improve focus and productivity fidget Spinners weighted blankets standing desks are all sensory based strategies with data
to back them up now next to these five methods there are actually three more scientifically backed strategies that work in Synergy with each other that help me to completely eliminate my procrastination executive dysfunction and Achieve life-changing focus at the push of a button these are my favorite methods proven to be most effective for years consistently because they take slightly longer to explain I've put them together in a separate video which explains how you can easily apply them into your own life just click the link below to access it this is where you'll also find the
free notion habit tracker I mentioned earlier also I talked to Dr hell one of the leading experts in the ADHD space and asked him what his thoughts are on ADHD productivity here's what he had to say as long as what you're working on is stimulating when we have stimulation we we hyperfocus you know when we don't have stimulation that's when we space out you know boredom is our Kryptonite we bounce off of it we can't do boredom but stimulation in whatever form draws us right in and that's when we hyperfocus now now keep in mind
you can't can't do that indefinitely it's tiring and so you know I can't write for much more than an hour at a time special shout out to Jesse J Anderson for his thoughts on ADHD productivity I've linked his channel as well as his book extra Focus down below and of course special shout out to all of you for following along check out these related videos if you haven't already stay inspired and I'll see you very soon oh
