196: Making Progress with ADHD

The Leaky Rowboat: Why “No Progress” Usually Means You’re Keeping Yourself Afloat

A member in my group once asked me something so many of us feel: what do you do when you start working on your home, have to stop, and come back feeling like you’ve made no progress at all, like you’re just starting over again and again? I heard the same frustration that same week from an in-person client, that hamster-wheel feeling of getting things in order only to watch it fall apart, over and over.

Here’s the image I gave both of them. Picture yourself in a leaky rowboat, and all day long, all you do is scoop water and dump it over the side. Scoop, dump, scoop, dump. You’re exhausted, and it looks like nothing has changed. It feels like zero progress. But that’s not actually true. Try this instead: imagine what happens the day you stop bailing entirely. You sit down, decide you’re done, you’ve burned out, and you just let the water sit. However fast that boat is filling in your own life, it keeps filling. Skip a day of bailing, and you sink. Every single day you choose to do something, even something small, is a day you kept yourself afloat.

With my in-person client, we brought in extra hands and bailed hard together, and the boat looked wonderful, barely any water left. Two weeks later we came back, and the water had crept back up, but not as high as before. Some of the progress had genuinely stuck. That’s the value of accountability, of a team, a friend, or a membership group of body doubles working alongside you: it doesn’t stop the water, but it helps you bail faster, and it makes the burden feel lighter because someone is sharing it with you.

So is there any way to actually slow the water coming in, rather than just bailing forever? Not completely, and that’s by design. Life is supposed to be a little messy. Kids are messy, pets are messy, hobbies and activities and a life full of things you love will always create some mess, and no one should expect a home that’s perfectly neat and still. But there is one real way to plug some of those leaks, to slow the water enough that you can actually take a day off from bailing without the whole thing sinking: have less stuff.

That’s the real answer, and it’s why every organizer you’ve ever listened to, Dana K. White, The Minimal Mom, the Clutterbug team, all of them keep circling back to the same message. Less is more because less stuff is less water finding its way back into the boat. Every item you let go of is water you dumped onto dry land for good instead of water waiting to seep back in.

The harder question, of course, is how you actually get past the struggle of letting go of the stuff in the first place. That’s a conversation for another day. For now, when you look around and feel like nothing has changed, remind yourself that you are working hard, that you are keeping the boat from sinking, and that the path to less exhaustion and more peace isn’t found in bailing faster forever. It’s found in making the boat leak a little less.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.