148: How to Apply What Works for ADHD Brains to a Task That is Difficult

Four Handholds for Climbing the Wall of Awful

This picks up where the last episode left off, where I talked about our brains’ most offensive four-letter word, just, as in “can’t you just do this,” and the metaphor Brendan Mahan of ADHD Essentials describes as the wall of awful, the invisible climb we have to get through before we can even begin a task that nobody else can see us struggling against. He outlines several handholds for getting up that wall, and I want to walk through how I actually applied them this past week, in two very different situations.

The four handholds themselves

Set a time limit so you feel a sense of urgency to race against. Break the task into small chunks instead of facing it as one overwhelming whole. Define what “done” means before you even start, since we’re prone to losing steam once the initial dopamine rush of novelty fades, especially if we never knew what the finish line looked like in the first place. And reflect afterward, checking whether you’re actually making progress or just busy bailing water out of a boat full of holes, work that feels productive but isn’t moving anything forward.

Handhold one and two in action: pressure washing the patio

Getting ready for my son’s graduation weekend, I found myself willing to pressure wash the back patio for hours while avoiding other, arguably more important tasks. When I stopped to reflect on why that particular task kept pulling me in, I realized it was quietly using all four handholds already. The heat and sun gave me a natural time limit, thirty minutes to an hour before I needed a break. And because the patio is made of individual pavers, the task broke itself into chunks automatically, I only ever focused on one stone at a time. Looking up at the whole patio would have felt overwhelming, but looking down at just one stone kept it manageable.

Handhold three in action: defining done

Each session, I’d mark out a literal box with the pressure washer and tell myself once that box was clean, I was done for the day. That let me stop without guilt, since I never framed the goal as finishing the entire patio in one sitting, just finishing the box I’d defined.

Applying the same handholds somewhere much less satisfying

The real test came the night before family arrived for graduation. I’d spent the day making salads and cookies for a backyard party with several other families, chopping, baking, helping kids in and out of the kitchen, and true to form, I don’t clean as I go. By evening, my kitchen looked like it had exploded, and I was too exhausted to want to touch it, but company was coming the next day and there’d be no time to deal with it then.

I decided to treat the kitchen exactly like the patio. I set a recurring five-minute timer to race against. Instead of cleaning by category, all the trash first, then all the food, I treated each section of counter like its own paver, one complete, clean chunk at a time, so I could actually see progress instead of watching several half-finished layers disappear slowly together. I defined done clearly before starting: dishwasher running, sink empty, counters wiped, nothing more required, drying dishes and a quick morning floor sweep were both allowed to wait.

Then I moved chunk by chunk. Empty the dishwasher before the timer goes off, done, that one only took two and a half minutes, a reminder that tasks are so often smaller than they feel in your head. Reset the timer, next chunk: clear and wipe the table. Reset again: clear the counter section by the stove. By the time only the sink full of dishes remained, everything else around me was already done and wouldn’t need touching again, which gave me the momentum to push through the last and hardest chunk.

The takeaway

Set a time limit, break it into chunks, define what done actually looks like before you start, and reflect afterward on whether it worked. Those four handholds apply just as well to a dreaded exploded kitchen as they do to a task you’re already enjoying.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.