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Comment by nkrisc | Hacker News Reader

For me it’s that as soon as I intend to begin a task, I start thinking about every step, and everything that might go wrong at every step, and planning contingencies for every hypothetical problem, and on and on.

So suddenly the task seems totally overwhelming, when I could just… not do it. So I find a time later I can attempt it and after a few times it is no longer novel and I forget about it.

If anything is hyper-active, it’s the executive function part of my brain that is driven to plan out every tiny, hypothetical detail before I can start.

What’s missing is the reward and internal incentives for doing things when there are other things that do feel good to do (that aren’t what I need to do).

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I'm the same way and I've found there's no real way around it. I've found it's actually a really useful way of thinking for complex projects and planning and prioritization, but bad for getting things done. The only things that work for me to manage this:

1. Relentlessly make distractions high friction. Block websites, go to the office if you get distracted at home, etc.

2. Use time-based daily planning instead of goal-based (stuff like pomodoro helps). If I put "create work plan for project Z" on my to-do list, it is ambiguous and I will put it off forever. If I just say "Spend 25 minutes on work plan for project Z, no pressure on outcome/output", I make tons of progress (and often can continue the task for a while)

3. music

4. the obvious diet/sleep/meds advice

I, too, experience that. I am anxious and I overthink and I am avoidant. Vyvanse helped a ton, but it was producing health complications, so I am taking something else that's not as good.

It's not a substitue for counseling, but consider talking to your favorite LLM chatbot. It will provide generic advice, but it will probably work 80% of the time. Sometimes being told what to do is good enough of a kickstart.

Or I can give you the crappy advice that works. "Just start."

Look up "mental rehearsals" I think it's called. You do like 2 dry runs in your head. First, you let your mind kind of do what you're already doing, imagine obstacles and challenges along the path to completion. Second, try your hardest to picture yourself calmly overcoming each of those obstacles through to completion. It makes it seem more attainable.

This is a great insight, I wonder if that's a sign of Innatentive type ADHD. But I would say that the process of thinking of other things that also need to be done, is not done by the executive function part of the brain. The executive disfunction is the decision not to begin the task.

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