226: ADHD Productivity Hack – Make an Overwhelming Space Approachable

The Approachability Hack: Why Rearranging Beats Standing Frozen in the Doorway

Have you ever looked at a space in your home, felt instantly overwhelmed, and just turned around instead of walking in? Today I want to give you three concrete examples of something I call the approachability hack, and fair warning, it breaks some conventional organizing rules on purpose.

Motion before productivity

The core idea is this: being in motion without being productive first is what eventually allows us to become productive. We can’t skip straight to the second without passing through the first. Sitting in overwhelm doesn’t help us, so the goal is simply to make a space more approachable so we can actually attack it.

Step one: take it in, and take a photo

Just look at the space as a whole. Acknowledge it exists. Snap a photo, because our brains will forget the transformation, and we need proof afterward that real progress happened.

Step two: give yourself permission to skip the hard decisions

Step into the space with zero expectations and no agenda that has to be finished. You’re just going to enter and do something, anything.

Step three: rearrange, even though the experts say not to

I’m a big fan of Dana K. White, and she’d call this “stuff shifting,” which she specifically advises against. I actually agree there’s not a ton of merit in stuff shifting for its own sake. But I think it’s okay to break that rule here, for two reasons.

First, paralysis isn’t progress of any kind. Walking in, feeling overwhelmed, and walking back out is our absolute floor, nothing happens there. Giving yourself permission to just go in and rearrange a little creates motion, and motion is what creates momentum. It will feel a little hopeless at first, and that’s fine.

Second, our brains aren’t wired to instantly start making decisions. I can’t always touch an item and immediately know where it belongs. That decision-making muscle needs to warm up first. Moving things around and accidentally stumbling onto something easy, something that requires almost no thought, starts oiling that rusty gear so real decisions can follow. This is actually one of the things I love about Dana K. White’s five-step no-mess decluttering process: her first three steps require no decision-making at all. I’m just saying the same thing in my own words.

So step in, mentally choose to create a little bit of clean space, even if that just means shifting stuff out of the way and making a different pile bigger. When you see that small cleared spot, whether it’s a wiped-down baseboard or a patch of vacuumed floor, it lets you feel what the whole space could become. It’s motivating: maybe I can clear two more inches, maybe I can grow this little niche outward. That’s how you answer the eternal question of where to start. Sometimes you have to create the starting point yourself.

Three real examples

Your kid’s bedroom looks like a tornado hit it. If you have a spare set of sheets, strip the bed, remake it fresh, then throw a larger flat sheet over the whole freshly made bed. Have your kid scoop everything off the floor and toss it onto the bed. Then ask them to find items on the bed they already know the home for and put those away, while you vacuum the newly uncovered floor and dust the periphery, giving them body doubling so they stay on task. The magic of this order is that once you reach the bottom of that pile, there’s nothing left to do. You’re rewarded with a freshly made bed and a floor that’s actually clear. And often the momentum carries into the nightstand, the dresser, the desk too.

A member of my group had a big cardboard box of papers she’d been putting off for ages. During one of our Work With Me Wednesday sessions, she grabbed some empty binders and a three-hole punch and decided she could no longer look at the box as one giant whole. So she just punched and filed the entire box into three separate binders, no evaluating, no deciding what to keep. She told me it felt silly, like she should be sorting it properly. But now she can pull down one binder at a time, look at one page at a time, and either move it to a labeled binder (holes already punched) or drop it straight in the recycling. The box under her feet is gone. What used to nag at her every time she sat at her desk is no longer even visible, and the task that could have taken months of avoidance is now something she can chip away at a few pages at a time.

Your kid’s playroom is unplayable because it’s covered edge to edge. When my kids were little, I’d bulldoze the entire room into one corner and throw a giant quilt over the pile. Then I’d vacuum and clean out all the storage pieces, the play kitchen, the ball sorters, everything. When the kids weren’t in there, I’d lift the quilt, pull one item out at a time, and know exactly where it belonged because the shelf, sorter, or kitchen was already clean and waiting. Everything got put away once, instead of shuffled around a messy room and set down wherever it sort of already lived. It’s not a forever fix, but in the moment, it makes the whole space approachable again. And you might notice your kids actually play better in the emptier space, which is its own case for owning fewer toys.

Why adding a step actually helps

Conventional advice says touch it once. This hack adds a step on purpose, and that extra step is exactly what moves you from paralyzed to approachable. It’s not meant to satisfy anyone who calls it inefficient. It’s meant to work with our actual brains, the lovely, easily overwhelmed fish brains we’ve got, and that’s worth rolling with.

Your practical, actionable step

Pick one overwhelming space today. Take the photo, give yourself permission to skip hard decisions, and just rearrange or bulldoze it into a corner to create one small approachable spot to work from.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.