194: 3 ADHD Friendly Ways to Stop Avoiding the Hard Stuff

When “Busywork” Is Actually Working: The Case for Following the Easy Impulse

I recently redesigned my podcast cover art. I genuinely wanted to freshen it up, but honestly, I was also avoiding harder business tasks, and graphic design is a task I enjoy that doesn’t require the same mental lift. If I’d handed a monkey brain my full pending list and asked them to rank what actually mattered most for my business, new cover art wouldn’t have cracked the top hundred. So let’s talk about whether following that impulse toward easy, seemingly less important busywork is actually a problem, or something you can use to your advantage.

I want to walk through three real downsides of following that busyness impulse, and for each one, a way to turn it into something that actually works in your favor.

Con one: it’s just easy stuff avoiding the hard stuff

That’s true. But here’s the upside: doing the easy stuff creates motion, and motion creates momentum, and momentum eventually carries you toward the harder task anyway. If you’re using nonlinear pending lists, the kind I teach as sticky notes you can pull off a wall rather than a rigid ordered list, you can walk up, grab the easiest one, and just get moving. Plenty of advice says tackle the hard thing first, and that’s fine if you can. But if you can’t get yourself to move at all, any motion counts. You can’t steer a bicycle that’s standing still, but once the pedals are turning, even toward something easy, you can start steering yourself toward what actually needs to happen.

Con two: busyness can feel productive without actually being productive

We’ve all had that day where we felt like we worked constantly and still ended it frustrated, convinced we accomplished nothing. Here’s the fix: if you’re using a wall of random sticky notes instead of a fixed to-do list, you can walk up at the end of the day and realize, wait, I actually did do that today, and that, and that too. Write it down, move it to your tackled side, and give yourself credit. You’re busy either way. The difference is whether you prove to yourself that the busy actually amounted to something. You may have done seventeen things today. They just weren’t necessarily in the order some planning expert would have prescribed, and that’s fine. New cover art was technically on my list somewhere. It just wasn’t in the “right” order, and that’s not the same as being unproductive.

Con three: you could miss real deadlines by chasing impulses

This one’s legitimate too, if you’re not tracking what actually has a due date. The fix: once you’ve dumped everything out of your brain onto sticky notes, go back and star, circle, or move to the center anything with an actual deadline, and write the date right on it. When you walk past that wall, and you will, because it lives somewhere you actually pass by, those starred deadlines catch your eye in a way a closed planner or an unheard calendar alert never will. Urgency is a genuine gas pedal for our brains. Leaning into that instead of fighting it means procrastination stops being purely a liability and becomes a tool you can actually work with, as long as the deadline is somewhere visible enough to trigger that last-minute push.

Your practical, actionable step

The next time you catch yourself doing something easy instead of the harder task on your list, don’t beat yourself up over it. Just make sure it’s visible, written down somewhere you’ll walk past, and that anything with a real deadline is starred so it can pull you back when urgency needs to kick in.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.