ADHD finishing tasks: the murky middle is not a sign something's wrong

It's a sad fact of life for a lot of us with ADHD that plenty of the projects we start don't get finished. You can probably think of several from your own life without trying very hard.

When you're starting something, it feels fresh. It feels new. It has potential, and all of that gives you a real lift. That's what carries you through the early stages, and it works.

The end can be motivating too. Once you're nearly there and it's a few final touches before the result goes out into the world, you can feel the completion coming, and that pulls you forward.

Which leaves the middle.

The short version

The initial excitement has worn off. The end is still far enough away that you don't get any pull from it. And on top of that, complications have usually started to show up. Something you thought you'd hammer out in an afternoon has taken a week. Or a month. You're still pushing, but it doesn't feel like you're arriving anywhere.

Part of that is time blindness. Getting an accurate sense of how long something will take is genuinely hard, and it's one of the things that makes the middle feel like a failure when it isn't one.

But there's something else going on. The reason the project is taking longer is often that you're discovering things you didn't know when you started. Unless you've done exactly this before and it's a small variation, you're learning the real shape of the project. You're learning about the problems you couldn't have seen from the beginning.

If that learning is enough to keep you going, wonderful. But it might not be, and the middle can come with a lot of frustration regardless.

I don't have a clean solution for this one. I don't think there is one. No shortcut and no clever system gets you past a murky middle, because the murky middle is the crux of the project. It's where the growth is. It's where you build new understanding by working through difficulty.

There are three things that can help, though.

Picture the finish, in detail. What does it actually feel like when it's done? How do you take credit for it? What do you let yourself feel proud of? And how are you different afterwards, in how you think about yourself, for having seen it through?

Try a beginner's mindset. Forget that this was your idea. Forget, if you can, the time you've already put in. Come to it with a blank slate, as though you were seeing it for the first time. That can sometimes give you back the energy you had at the start, except now you're much further along.

Look for something enjoyable in the work itself. It doesn't have to be big. Maybe you found exactly the right word for a sentence. Maybe it was a good ingredient to add to the dish. Maybe it was a new way of thinking about something in a language you're learning. Any time you notice something you enjoy inside the process, that alone makes the next bit easier.

📸 Screenshot/clip placeholder — a long-running project broken into steps in the app goes here.

Murky middles are hard. The reason for that isn't that something is wrong with you. They're hard for everyone.

If you can hang on just a bit longer than feels comfortable, you might be surprised how close the end actually is.

The first version is Telegram for the waitlist. There isn't a store download yet. Join the waitlist if you want a launch email.

Keep reading

• ADHD perfectionism: decide what "done" means first
• ADHD body doubling: good for starting, harder for carrying on
• If ADHD stops you from boring tasks, try a 5-minute sprint
• ADHD time blindness: notice the clock without killing hyperfocus
• More on Task Paralysis

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Herding Chickens is a productivity app in development, not medical advice, therapy, or an ADHD diagnosis. If you are struggling, talk to a qualified clinician. In the UK, start with the NHS ADHD in adults page.