Bad Productivity Advice
“Go eat that frog!” “Make sure your room is quiet with absolutely no distractions!” “Do a little bit of writing every single day and at the end of the year you’ll have a full book!”
Firstly, this blog today is based on a YouTube video I put out. If you would prefer to watch instead of read, you can find the video here:
There’s so much productivity advice out there, much of it good, but a solid portion of it is useless when, like me, you have a neurodivergent brain. We spend so much time and energy trying to follow advice aimed at neurotypicals that just leaves us feeling exhausted and bad about ourselves because it didn’t work for us.
Today I’m going to take a look at one of the most popular productivity books out there, Atomic Habits by James Clear, through the lens of neurodivergence and examine what works, what needs tweaking and what really doesn’t to help you evaluate what advice is useful and what isn’t for your own flavour of neurodivergence.
This post also follows on from last week where I discussed how we can use some of the strategies suggested in Atomic Habits to lower the executive function costs of things that we want to make a regular part of our lives and you can find this video by clicking above. But for today, I’d like to focus in on the book as a whole and discuss it from the perspective of productivity and neurodivergence.
We’re back talking about Atomic Habits again.
If you haven’t read the book already, I do actually recommend it. It’s well written and I think there is a tun of value in there but I have to caveat two things. The first is that it fits the stereotypical productivity trope about talking about weight loss and exercise.
This is personally very frustrating for me as someone who is body neutral and a supporter of the fat activist movement because I personally think that the prevalent dialogue around weight and exercise is unhelpful to all of us, that the perception that being fat is a moral failing is not only incorrect but shaming and unhelpful and that exercise and healthy eating equals weight loss is a huge oversimplification of a very complex topic.
Fortunately the book doesn’t belabour this too much and it’s just used as an example of building habits and how that can help us attain a particular goal. Personally, I was able to take it as an oversimplified example and move on but your mileage may vary. The second caveat is of course the topic of this post.
So I want to start off with some of the things I loved about it. Habit stacking and setting up your environment to make doing the thing easier are both things that I find incredibly valuable for my ADHD brain and things that I have been using in my daily life since long before I got diagnosed. I’m not going to talk about them both now but take a look at last week’s post for a breakdown of how they can help reduce our daily executive function spend on certain thoughts.
One of the things James Clear speaks about in chapter 4 is that our brains are constantly subconsciously processing information, spotting patterns, picking up on cues and responding accordingly. He talks about how one of the steps we can take to changing our habits is bringing these subconscious actions to the forefront of our minds so we can consciously respond to them.
What’s funny about this is one of the examples he uses and that’s to do with hunger. He talks about not needing to see a cookie on the side to realise your hungry because your body will suddenly bring your awareness to it and you will realise you’re hungry. It was as I was re-reading this chapter while writing this script that I read this line and realised that I was actually hungry.
For those of us with interoception challenges, the cookies being out is probably a reminder we very much needed…
You see an aspect that is common in many forms of neurodivergence is interoception, the ability to notice what is going on inside of us. Now I don’t have absolutely terrible interoception, sometimes I do notice that I’m hungry on my own, but a lot of the time I don’t.
My interoception is diminished and so frequently I won’t notice I’m hungry until I see something that makes me think of food, or my partner asks me if I’m hungry and I stop to think about it or I see the clock and realise it’s lunch time. Of course when I’m REALLY hungry I’ll notice it but moderate hunger can often pass me by completely.
This then makes his following points even more important for those of us that struggle with interoception, namely that we can use a “pointing and calling” technique to bring the subconscious to the conscious. I’m sure many of us have developed systems to do that already - I know I certainly pat my pockets and mentally call out the things I need to bring with me when I leave the house and that means I go back for the thing that I’ve forgotten.
I think this can be even more useful for those of us that are busy brained and benefit from verbal processing. Having to slow down long enough to say what we are doing or what we need just pauses our brain long enough to spot that something is missing or wrong.
By calling out the habits we have we are bringing awareness to what’s there and how we are currently acting, enabling us to enact the behavioural change that we are looking to enact.
I also really like his two minute rule for habit formation. I alluded to Eat The Frog in the intro to this post, a 2001 book about productivity whose premise is that in order to maximise productivity we should start by doing the biggest and hardest task, eating the frog, to get it out of the way.
I don’t particularly want to eat a frog anyway…
The problem is that while in theory it sounds like a nice idea to shift big task, in practise it doesn’t work for those of us with executive function challenges. For us, the bigger and more intimidating the task is, the more likely we are to procrastinate away from doing it and the harder it is to get started.
Instead we can build up to it, starting with smaller tasks, easier wins to get the ball rolling and build up to the larger task. Almost like Newton’s first law - an object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an external force - once we are already in motion we can often stay in motion and tackle more of our todo list than if we tried to attempt it from a standing start.
Atomic Habits embraces this by encouraging us to start with small habits. If we want to become someone who reads every night then we can start by becoming someone who just reads one page. Just reading one page is enough for us to cast those votes and make this become a habit and it also becomes a habit we can build on. It’s also a lot cheaper from an executive function point of view to just read one page, compared to reading a whole chapter.
I love how he acknowledges that many of us hear this and feel like it’s a trick to get us to do more than two minutes and therefore why would we fall for this trick? His solution to that is to force ourselves to just do it for two minutes. Read for two minutes and then stop. Run for two minutes and then stop. Practise for two minutes and then stop.
By making ourselves stop, even if we want to do more then we remove the feeling of tricking ourselves into doing more, and that allows us to embrace adding this short habit into our life and get it to the point where we can increase the time or effort.
Personally, I hate running so anything more than 2 minutes sounds like a nightmare to me anyway.
He advocates for keeping it below the amount of length when it feels like work. One great strategy for building a habit is to make it satisfying to keep doing it, so if we do it for too long it can start to run counter to that.
I feel like this is very executive function friendly, especially for ADHD because it means we don’t have to self-regulate for long until we can switch something up for the next bit of variety and dopamine hit. It also means we’re less likely to hit the all or nothing mentality - if it’s easy to do for just two minutes then you’re less likely to miss a day and then you’re less likely to hit that “well I missed one day I might as well give up” thought pattern I spoke about last week.
Having said that, one of the strategies in the book does encourage this mentality in a way that I think is very unhelpful for ADHD and that is with regards to Habit Tracking.
There are some good ideas with this, like moving marbles from one jar to another upon task completion which is a very satisfying way to measure progress and therefore can keep us going. What I don’t like is the suggestion of implementing daily habit tracking calendars for the simple reason that not being able to check one day off and seeing that obvious sign that we missed a day sparks that all-or-nothing part of our brains and makes us want to give up.
I also think there’s an aspect of shaming with this method of habit tracking. If we see an obvious gap in a calendar when every day is ticked then that makes us feel bad about it. It makes us feel guilty or ashamed of missing that day which gives us a brick in our wall of awful and makes it even harder for us to get started again moving forward.
To be fair, James Clear does acknowledge this a bit and accepts that it can lead to a bit of an all or nothing approach. He suggests that this could come from measuring the wrong thing, ie we can get so caught up in tracking the habit instead of what the habit actually is and the wider goal it serves.
I do think this is a fair point but I think knowing how our brains work I don’t think simply knowing that we’re tracking the wrong thing by caring about the missed day is enough to cancel out the effect of those missed days.
How irritating is it to see one of these not crossed off if all the others are?
He also advocates accepting a missed day and just making sure it’s not two missed days. I definitely respect this view, but I think it needs taking into account that consistency for people with ADHD doesn’t look the same as it does for neurotypicals and so ADHD consistency might involve missing two days and not feeling bad about it.
But the part I like least from this book is the thoughts around stopping an undesirable habit. The premise is fine, stop an undesirable habit by making it unattractive to perform, but I think the mechanics of this are actually harmful to people who are neurodivergent, particularly with regards to ADHD.
One of the ways he suggests making a habit unattractive is by attaching a financial penalty to it - if you do this undesirable habit then you have to pay. For me this categorically does not work for someone who has ADHD, mainly because we already pay the ADHD tax.
A visual representation of what the ADHD tax feels like…
How many times have you had to pay extra money because you missed a deadline or forgot to do something? Or had to buy an extra version of the thing that you lost? The ADHD tax is already an expensive part of our lives that is very financially painful for us so I’d strongly advise against implementing a financial punishment for engaging with an undesirable habit.
And actually I’d extend this a little further. I don’t agree with the idea of punishing ourselves for engaging in undesirable habits. Our brains work best with things that reward us, bursts of dopamine, positive changes. Punishments just bring shame and guilt and we experience enough of that without adding more of that into our lives.
What I do think is valuable though is accountability tools and strategies that encourage us, that lift us up if we make progress in the direction we want to go. And I think the final valuable part of this book is on reflection, of taking the time to think deeply about what works and what doesn’t and I believe this is the golden piece of advice to take forward with us into our lives.
And that’s all I have for you today. I’d like to think this approach to critically evaluating a productivity book from the perspective of neurodivergence has helped you in moving forward with this in your own life when it comes to evaluating productivity advice you might receive and also not feel bad about finding some stuff doesn’t work for you because of your wonderful neurospicy brains.
If this resonates with you and feel you would be interested in talking to an adhd and autism-friendly coach, feel free to get in touch. If you’re looking for more blog posts, you can find them here.
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