You sit down to work. Your coffee is hot, your inbox is quiet and you have a four-hour block of deep work time scheduled. You are ready.
Then the cursor blinks.
You need to start work but before you can begin you need to make a choice:
Which client project takes priority?
Should you draft the proposal first or handle the fulfilment for the current client?
Do you use the new template or the old one?
Should you send that follow-up email now or wait until you have the attachment ready.
An hour passes. The coffee is cold. You have done nothing but you are exhausted.
You are not procrastinating and neither are you unable to make a start. This is something entirely different. It is simply the struggle to make a choice.
Every decision costs something and for the ADHD brain the cost is higher.
Executive function is the part of the brain responsible for making choices, holding options in working memory and filtering out irrelevant information. It runs on a finite resource.
Make enough decisions and you deplete it. Keep making them and eventually the system shuts down.
ADHD brains use more fuel per decision than neurotypical brains.
A 2024 scoping review published in Frontiers in Psychology found that for people with ADHD, the experience of mental effort is meaningfully different. The authors note that "sustained mental effort avoidance" is included as a diagnostic criterion in the DSM.†
In other words, avoiding tasks that require sustained mental effort is one of the official criteria used to diagnose ADHD. The struggle is part of ADHD itself.
So when you sit down to work and face ten small choices in the first five minutes, say, what to open, where to start, which tool to use, what order to work in, you are not preparing to work. You are burning the fuel you need for the work itself. By the time you are ready to begin, there is nothing left.
You cannot stop making decisions entirely but you can move them to a time when the cost is lower.
The evening before works for some people and Sunday night works for most. If you make the decision outside your working window, it does not cost you working fuel.
Try these three.
Decide what you are doing first, second and third
Do not be tempted to list everything, or more than three. Just list the three things. Write them down in order.
When you sit down tomorrow you open the document and do the first thing.
Decide what you are not doing
Everything feels urgent but just pick three things that are NOT happening tomorrow. Write them down.
When your brain throws them back at you in the day, you have already decided, so you can ignore the new ones.
Decide your environment Open the software, close the browser tabs, lay out the notebook, set the music or the noise-cancelling headphones.
If your working environment is ready, you do not have to decide how to set it up when you are already running low on fuel.
These three decisions take ten minutes on a Sunday night (or the night before) and save you hours of friction across the week.
The three decisions above clear the path for the morning. They do not cover everything that a working week throws at you. For those moments, something else makes the difference.
Here is what people get wrong about support.
They assume you hire someone to do the things you cannot do: admin, scheduling, follow-up, the tasks.
But the real value is that when you work with someone who understands your patterns, you stop making decisions alone.
You do not have to hold all the options in your head while also evaluating them.
You say them out loud and the other person holds them for you.
They ask questions, they point out the option you missed and they tell you which one looks like a trap.
A thinking partner reduces the load.
You stop using your executive function to hold the options and start using it only to evaluate them. The cost drops immediately.
People with ADHD often think more clearly when someone else is in the room, even if that person is not doing anything. The external presence reduces the internal load.
If you are grinding to a halt before you start, look at the number of decisions you are asking your brain to make before it can do the work it is actually good at. Remove some of them, outsource some of them and see what happens to your fuel tank.
† Wagner, D., Mason, S.G. & Eastwood, J.D. (2024). 'The experience of effort in ADHD: a scoping review.' Frontiers in Psychology, 15. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1349440/full