How to Finally Get Started with ADHD

Starting can take a surprising amount of energy for ADHD brains, even when we truly want to do the thing. In this post, we make sense of why task initiation feels so demanding and explore practical supports for each stage: getting started, staying focused, handling distractions, and wrapping up in a way that makes the next start easier.

Keep reading to discover:

• Why task initiation demands more energy than any other stage of a project, and what that means for ADHD brains
• A five-stage flight analogy: pre-flight, takeoff, cruising, turbulence, and landing
• Practical strategies for each stage, from clearing distraction “ice” to riding out mid-task turbulence
• How to build a shutdown sequence and a logbook entry so your next session starts easier

https://youtu.be/ucWOGkeraBE

Listen to the episode above or stream it on your favorite podcasting app. Prefer to read? No problem! Keep scrolling for a summary of key takeaways.

Why It’s So Hard to Get Started with ADHD

Task initiation is a perennial struggle for ADHD brains, and there are so many different reasons for it. Maybe it’s task paralysis, where we have far too many things to choose from, everything seems equally important, and we can’t prioritize. Maybe it’s project paralysis, where the project is simply too big, we don’t know how to break it down into steps, and the brain melts into overwhelm before it can even begin. Maybe there are emotional blocks: dread about starting, knowing we’re going to be bored, shame that we haven’t started earlier, or plain uncertainty and overwhelm.

Speaking of which, if overwhelm is a familiar block for you, I encourage you to take my free quiz that helps you discover your unique overwhelm type for your ADHD brain. Doing so, you’ll figure out your type and learn actionable strategies to help you shift from overwhelm into action today.

There are so many reasons why we struggle with task initiation, and the analogy in this post speaks to all of them: flying a plane. It helps us release the judgment, normalize the experience, and identify exactly where we’re at and the specific supports we need to take those initial steps forward.

We’ll move through this analogy in five stages: pre-flight, takeoff, cruising, turbulence, and finally, landing. Let’s start where every flight starts, well before the wheels ever leave the runway.

Pre-Flight: The Prep Work Isn’t Wasted Time

Before a plane ever moves, the pilot and the team, depending on the plane’s size, do a full walk-around. Checking the flaps, the tires, the fuel. Inside the cockpit, testing every instrument, making sure every control moves fully and correctly. None of this is wasted time. It’s what makes the entire flight possible.

Keeping this in mind, let’s consider this same truth for ourselves and treat the prep work before we start a task as pre-flight. None of it is wasted.

Your Own Walk-Around

So what does our version of the pilot’s walk-around look like? A few things.

• Gather your tools. Whatever the task is, whether it’s a work project, an email you’ve been avoiding, a load of laundry, or a phone call you need to make, get everything you physically need in front of you before you try to take off. The pilot doesn’t discover halfway down the runway that a system isn’t working. We check first.
• Know your destination. What does done actually look like for this session, probably not the whole project, not the pilot’s whole flight itinerary for the week, just this one flight? Where are we landing today? (This is the same idea behind the working card method we talked about in Episode 367: narrowing the whole pantry of everything down to what’s actually on your plate right now.)
• Break the work into steps ahead of time. This is your own flight plan, your own checklist. What are the things you want to make sure you have in place?
• Name potential problems in advance. What might derail you, and what’s the plan if it does? Pilots don’t hope that nothing goes wrong. They plan for what might.

Clearing Your Ice

Now, if you live somewhere cold like Minnesota in the winter, before a plane can take off in freezing temperatures, it gets de-iced. A heated fluid gets sprayed over the wings, and it plays a critical role because ice doesn’t just add weight, it disrupts the airflow that creates lift. A plane cannot safely take off with ice on its wings.

Keeping that in mind, consider your own sneaky blockers that would stop you from taking off. These might be your notifications, your open tabs, your phone sitting face-up next to you. That’s ice on your wings, physically disrupting the lift you need to get off the ground. So before you start, I invite you to do your own de-icing: notifications off, one window open, full screen if that helps. This is a key part of the pre-flight check, it’s needed to make the rest of the flight possible.

Warming Up the Engine

And what’s more, jet engines can’t jump straight to full power the second they’re started. They spool up gradually, bringing temperature and airflow to a stable level before they can handle taking off. Rushing that risks damage to the engine. So give yourself that same runway. A short refresher before you dive in. Look over your notes. Reread the plan. And reconnect with your why. That reconnection is your engine warm-up.

Line Up and Wait

Now, I had to do research into the steps of flying because I didn’t know all the nuances (and for any pilots, I apologize that I’m likely getting a lot of this wrong.) But I found there’s a phrase that air traffic control uses that I love for this moment: line up and wait. The plane taxis onto the runway, aligns itself, and waits for clearance. It is positioned. It is ready. It just hasn’t been told to go yet. I think that’s such a beautiful connection to that pause moment where we take a breath. For my clients, this is when we talk about practicing the pause. We’re right at that choice point, right before you start something. You’re lined up, ready and waiting for clearance.

So to recap the pre-flight stage: the getting-ready phase is not wasted time, and it has its own steps. Gather your tools, know your destination, break down your steps, plan for problems, clear away your ice, warm up your engine, and give yourself that one breath before you go.

Takeoff: The Most Intense Minutes of the Whole Flight

Here’s something that I find fascinating. When it’s time to take off, it turns out that the initial climb burns fuel at the highest rate of the entire flight. It is the most intense, most demanding minutes in the air.

And I think that’s such an accurate, useful picture for us, too. Starting often demands the most intensity of the whole session, all packed into the shortest window. That’s why it feels the way it feels.

As the passenger, this is the part where you can’t use your phone. No electronic devices, no distractions. You’re seat belted in, and you’re not getting up, because it isn’t safe to. You’re fully present. The pilot, meanwhile, is completely focused. And here’s another detail I uncovered that I just love: there’s an actual FAA regulation called the Sterile Cockpit Rule. During taxi, takeoff, landing, and anything below ten thousand feet, no non-essential activity is allowed in the cockpit, no casual chat, no side conversations, no unrelated tasks, just the flight.

I mean, can you imagine if that were the standard for the first 15 to 20 minutes every time we sat down to start something hard? Think of how effective that support would be!

So the invitation here is to clarify what your own sterile cockpit is. Again, during this takeoff phase, nothing else happens here but the work. If a stray thought shows up, and it will, that’s what the notebook next to you is for, not your phone. Jot it down, close the loop for this working session, so you can let it go rather than chasing it down a rabbit hole.

Remind yourself even more of your why. Why are you willing to do this? Why are you willing to put in the effort and use all of this intense startup energy in order to take off? Again, this is the fuel for the hardest fifteen or twenty minutes. And when your brain wants to veer off course, because it will want to, remember this is totally normal. This is the part of the flight, this is the part of the project that demands SO MUCH ENERGY. That’s just what takeoff feels like. Come back to the checklist you built in pre-flight.

You might even clarify a smaller version of done just for takeoff. For example, if my version of done when preparing this episode content was all the ideas fully written out, maybe what done looks like for takeoff is getting the main bullet points out, the main headings of my argument, and how I want to frame them. That’s done for takeoff. This gives your brain a more immediate focus so you’re not overwhelmed thinking about getting to the final destination. Instead, you’re focused on what getting off the ground and cruising altitude looks like.

Cruising: When Focus Finally Levels Off

Eventually, and it does happen, the plane levels off. If you’ve flown before, you may remember feeling it level off in your body. The plane’s angle shifts, the engine noise changes, and the seatbelt sign turns off once you’ve reached that cruising altitude and the pilots are confident it’s actually smooth and safe.

This is flow. This is what it feels like when our brain finally drops into focus, and we’re no longer fighting ourselves just to keep going. I’m guessing you’ve been in that state at some point, and when we drop into it, it generally takes far less intensity than takeoff did. We’re in the air now. We’re just flying.

AND ALSO, we’re still not turning our phone back on and calling everyone we know. We’re still in flight. We just get a little more room to move. This is where you check in with yourself. Fuel as needed. Get up, stretch, grab water, grab a snack, use the restroom.

And then, and this part matters just as much as the break itself, come back to your seat. Come back to the same work. Don’t let the break turn into a brand new runway you have to taxi all the way from.

Turbulence: Slow Down, Don’t Fight It

Pilots usually know turbulence is coming before it hits. They get reports from other pilots who’ve already flown through the same airspace, they watch weather radar, dispatch feeds them information from the ground. They are almost never caught completely off guard.

We can borrow that. Most of us actually know our own turbulence before it hits. Certain hours of the day. Certain rooms. Certain kinds of tasks. Certain situations. I invite you to get curious about what your patterns are, so the bump doesn’t feel like it came out of nowhere.

And when turbulence does hit, here’s what pilots do. Instead of speeding up or trying to push through it, they actually slow the plane down to a speed that’s better for turbulence, I didn’t research any further into that, but apparently it’s a thing. And so they slow down a bit for safety, and then they mostly just ride it out. One pilot description I read called it surprisingly hands-off. The crew isn’t fighting the situation. They’re not trying to fix the air density creating the turbulence. They’re prepared for it, they know they’ll get through it, and they ride it out safely.

That is such a different instinct than the one most of us reach for when focus gets bumpy. An email pops up, a thought hijacks us, our energy dips, and our instinct is to either chase that distraction down the rabbit hole, basically change our location entirely. Rather than flying to New Orleans, there’s a sudden flight change to Tokyo.

Obviously, that’s not an ideal situation when we had plans for New Orleans. So what actually works in these situations is closer to what the pilots do: slow down, reread the last line you wrote, take one breath, and buckle back in. The seatbelt sign comes back on, everyone gets reseated, and the flight continues. You get to outlast the distraction and come back to course.

Descent, Landing, and Shutdown

Alright, we’ve prepped the flight, taken off, leveled off, and now it’s time for the descent. We’re ready to bring it home. This is the stage I think we skip the most, both in flying and in focus work, and it’s where a lot of the next session’s friction actually gets created, or avoided.

Again, on a flight, the descent starts well before the runway is ever in sight. It’s a gradual, planned wind-down. Unless something has gone wrong, we aren’t doing an emergency stop. So, keeping this in mind with your own work, I invite you to give yourself that same advance notice. Notice you’re approaching the end of a work block before you’re actually out of time, instead of getting yanked out mid-thought.

Then comes the approach, where the plane aligns with the runway and slows to exactly the right speed. Everything gets more deliberate the closer you get to the ground. This is your natural place to look for a stopping point, rather than just stopping wherever the clock happens to run out. Finish the sentence, finish the thought, and get yourself to a clean edge.

And here’s something worth naming: touching down still leaves an after-landing checklist and a taxi all the way to the gate, before anyone gets to deplane. Again, if possible, give yourself that same couple of minutes after you land. This is where you close your open loops instead of just walking away mid-thought.

There’s a real shutdown sequence pilots follow too: parking brake set, the levers are put in a certain position, the engine master switches off, cabin signs off. It’s a specific, repeatable order of wrapping up.

And with that in mind, it can be really useful to build your own repeatable shutdown sequence. Something like: save the file, jot down the very next step, close your tabs, physically close the laptop. Same order each time, so it becomes automatic instead of one more decision your tired brain has to make.

And then, the logbook. Pilots are required to log every flight. It’s the official record, and it’s what makes the next flight easier to plan. I think this might be the most ADHD-friendly move in this whole analogy. It’s another way to think about the breadcrumb analogy we explored a few weeks ago in episode 363. A single line that says, “here’s exactly where I left off and what’s next,” removes so much cognitive load in your next session. Future you doesn’t have to reconstruct where past you was.

Bringing It Home

So here’s what I invite you to take with you. If you’re having a hard time getting started, YES. Welcome. Same. It IS hard to get started, especially with an ADHD brain. In fact, it’s literally what takeoff requires. And also, I invite your brain to hold the other half of that truth: it does level off. There’s a process from start to finish for all of it, the getting ready, the intense takeoff, the flow, the turbulence, and the landing. It’s all part of the process, and we can put in place support for each step to ensure the smoothest flight possible.

Resources From This Episode:

• Episode 363: The ADHD To-Do List Strategy You’re Missing
• Episode 367: Overwhelming To Do List? Try This.
• Book a free coaching consultation
• Watch on YouTube: @I’m Busy Being Awesome

More ADHD Resources:

• Discover Your ADHD Overwhelm Type – Free Quiz!
• Get the I’m Busy Being Awesome Podcast Roadmap
• Free course: ADHD Routine Revamp
• Learn my Top 10 Tips to Work With Your ADHD Brain
• Discover my favorite ADHD resources
• Access the I’m Busy Being Awesome Planning System

Paula’s Favorite Resources

• Stay focused with brain.fm and get a 30-day free trial. Personalized music, backed by science, designed to help you get and stay in the zone.
• Speechify: my go-to text-to-speech app. One-month free trial plus $60 off a premium subscription if you decide to keep it.
• Todoist: my favorite task manager. Simple, easy to use, and incredible integration with other platforms. Get two months of premium free. No credit card required.
• Wispr Flow: The best tool for talk-to-text. Awesome for verbal processing and saving time. Free trial, no credit card required.

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