Motivation Is Overrated
“I’m feeling lazy today”, “I can’t motivate myself today”, “I just can’t get myself to do anything?” Sound familiar?
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:
These are feelings that most of us struggle with from time to time, but for those of us with executive function struggles such as ADHD, Autism and other forms of neurodivergence it can have a huge impact on our lives.
Part of the problem is the fact that we’re relying so much on motivation in the first place and there are ways we can reshape our lives to mean that we’re not having to rely so much on motivation, or rather executive function, to be able to get the things done that we want to do.
Motivation is a bit of a loaded work for people who have executive function difficulties. Growing up it might have been used in frustration at us - we might have been told to “find some motivation and get on with it” when our executive function wasn’t there that day. Or we might have been told “you could achieve so much more if only you were a bit more motivated”.
Of course this comes from a lack of understanding of the things we struggle with - with executive function we can want to do the thing, it’s just we can’t. There’s a block, something stood in the way that means we can’t get on with the thing we want to do, and all this talk of motivation just ends up making us even less likely to do it.
So it’s a good job that this motivation is overrated anyway. Regardless of how you feel about the word or not, the fact is that it doesn’t actually help us that much with continually and consistently getting the stuff done that we want to get done.
Executive function challenges wouldn’t be so much of a problem if our To Do lists just looked like this every day
Of course telling you to forget about it doesn’t exactly solve your executive functioning struggles. And honestly, I’m not really going to talk today about how to solve those either. There’s a lot of content already online about executive function solving techniques and I can definitely recommend, say, the Wall of Awful as a useful metaphor here. But what I am going to talk about instead is a different question: How do we make these things cost less executive function?
I like to borrow from Spoon Theory when I talk about executive function because it’s such a fantastic metaphor. At the start of each day we begin with a certain number of executive function spoons. The number of spoons we have at the start of the day can vary according to how much sleep we got last night, how stressed we are, if we’re ill, how our mental health is and for all other reasons.
As we go through the day, getting ourselves to just do things costs spoons. Maybe you’re someone who struggles a lot with getting out of bed and just the simple act of getting up in the morning costs a lot of spoons. Maybe making your coffee doesn’t - it’s a habit that you just do. Self-regulation, the things we make ourselves do, cost a varying amount of spoons and eventually we start to run low or out completely.
The metaphor isn’t quite perfect because it doesn’t really feel like I’ll be happily spending spoons all day and then suddenly I run out, although sometimes that does happen and I sort of power down. But most of the time it’s more like everything costs more executive function spoons. Some days I can get on with work straight away, other days I have to spend a lot of spoons for it.
What I want to talk about today is how to reduce that upcharge, building in tools and strategies so that the cost of doing the particular thing becomes lower, even on low executive function days.
The main source I’m drawing from in this video is the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. It’s a book that I would recommend those of us with executive function struggles to read with a bit of a critical eye; the book is designed for neurotypical brains and so some of the advice really won’t work for our delicious neurospicyness. But after a few tweaks to make it more neurodivergent friendly, there are some real gems that we can use in our executive function cost reduction exercise.
I wasn’t sure I’d be able to find a stock image of this book but the Portuguese version works well enough for me!
The premise of Atomic Habits is that we get things done by building good habits that enable us to get things done. And we build good habits by implementing small chunks, one habit at a time. Through the “Aggregation of Marginal Gains”, the strategy adopted by British Cycling before turning around their Olympic fortune, we can build up habits that lead us toward success.
The beauty of building a habit is that once something is habitual, it becomes executive function free, or at least executive function very cheap. I’ve played piano since I was 14 years old. When I was a teenager I was sporadic at practising. At University it often fell by the wayside.
It wasn’t until I started a full time job that I managed to get some consistency and when the pandemic happened and I was stuck at home the sameness enabled me to make it a daily routine. Years later, piano practise to me is something that is executive function free - I get up in the morning, brush my teeth, get dressed and sit down at my piano. I don’t even think of that sequence of events, it’s just a thing that I do.
There are a few things that went into building this habit to make practising executive function free and I’m going to draw on Atomic Habits for explaining them.
The first is the process of habit stacking. You’ll notice that when I described sitting down at the piano, there was a sequence that led up to it. First was getting up, which by the way is very much NOT executive function free but I have to do it so I battle through it. When I do get up I go to the bathroom and brush my teeth - these are habits so I get on and do them. Then I get dressed and then I sit down at my piano.
All of the points between getting up and sitting at the piano are already habits, so very low executive function cost and things that I don’t even think about when I do them. So I stacked piano to the end of that existing sequence of habits.
It cost executive function at the start but I always do the earlier routine, and so every time I did piano afterwards it cost a little less executive function until it got to the point it is today: it’s a habit, so it’s cheap or free.
Over time it’s allowed me to fall further and further in love with piano to the point where when I got the opportunity to play this beauty while on a trip I practised every day.
Now at this point I want to stop a little bit and talk about consistency because consistency is important for building a habit. And while adding a habit into the day consistently might be something that works well for someone autistic who loves structure, which I very much relate to, I can already hear the ADHDers screaming at me: “But I can’t be consistent about anything!”
So to that I’m going to read a quote from Atomic Habits that was so impactful for me that I actually put the book down and took a picture of it. It goes:
“You don’t need a unanimous vote to win an election; you just need a majority. It doesn’t matter if you cast a few votes for a bad behaviour or an unproductive habit. Your goal is simply to win the majority of the time”
This is huge. Because it is a re-definition of what consistency looks like. Consistency isn’t showing up every single day, and then one day we don’t manage it and give up because now we’ve broken the streak and it’s game over. Consistency instead looks like showing up on average, the majority of the time.
It gives us permission to accept that sometimes we will miss a day and while we should do our best to show up every day, to not miss two days in a row, it’s okay if the odd day doesn’t make it because we only need a majority to win an election.
I think this redefinition of consistency is important in general for us ADHDers because we tend to end up in black and white thinking: either we do this habit and we’re good at it regularly, or we’re not and we don’t do it at all. Either we’re good at this thing or we’re terrible. Of course we’re more than capable of understanding nuance and shades of grey, it’s just that our minds often miss that on the first pass and we need a reminder.
A lot of the way that neurotypical productivity advice is given also feeds into our all or nothing tendencies in a way that isn’t helpful for us. I love the idea behind the 1% better every day, it’s beautiful to think how just a small improvement compounds over time to something that is substantial and exciting by the end of the year.
The problem is that for us it’s really hard to get 1% better every day and on a day where we get 0% better it can make us feel like it’s game over. But what if we just tweak it slightly. What if instead of trying to get 1% better every day, we just try and average it.
Because we know some days we will hyperfocus and get 5% better in one day. We know some days we have all the energy in the world and our drive makes us work at a speed that is unfathomable to neurotypicals. And some days we can’t muster even that 0.1%. Consistency isn’t getting 1% better every day, it’s getting there on average.
The last thing I want to tackle today is all about setting up our environments to make starting the habits easier, or executive function cheaper. I know Jessica of How To ADHD refers to this as having everything at the point of performance, and it’s the exact same concept. If we have everything we need to do a habit easily available then we make it more likely that we do the habit.
There’s a big difference between having everything you need to make a coffee right there versus having to go looking for the components every single time.
My piano is a permanent fixture in my living room. The music I need is in the stool directly in front of it. My piano is a silenced one, which means I can play it without noise even if my partner or neighbours are still asleep. Everything I need to do piano is right there, and it is easy to get started doing it and that’s what makes it executive function free.
This also works because it tackles our out of sight, out of mind feature that often comes with ADHD. If it’s there in our vision at the time we need it then we’re far more likely to remember to do it. It also means we’re far more likely to get distracted looking for the tools and equipment that we need and we don’t need to spend the executive function looking for that.
So what does it mean in practise? It means sleeping in your gym gear with your shoes and bag by the door when you wake up if hitting the gym is your first goal of the day. It means keeping your journal on your desk with a pen on top so you remember to take that time to reflect. It means keeping your art supplies next to your paper in a room that inspires you and makes you feel creative. It means keeping a pair of headphones on top of your work laptop so that you can shut out the world or put your music on for focus.
Building our environment in a way that helps our neurodivergent brains is so important for everyday life in general but anything we can do to minimise the executive function expenditure is always going to be a net positive on our life.
I have so much more to say on this topic but I’m going to leave it here for today. One thing I want to make clear is that there is so much productivity advice out there but so much of it ignores our neurodivergence. The good news is that a solid portion of it does work or can be tweaked in a way that it will still work for us. The bad news is that we will need to get critical of some of it to throw out the stuff that doesn’t work.
With this in mind, I’m going to follow up next week with a deep dive into the aforementioned Atomic Habits from the perspective of someone with ADHD (and possibly autism). It’s one of the most popular productivity books out there and while I have spoken already today about how tweaking some of its points can have great value towards executive function, there are also points that really won’t be helpful for most ADHDers.
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.
Want to see more?
Sign up with your email address to receive the latest thoughts on neurodivergent careers and leadership.