4 Ways to Start a Big Project With ADHD

Let’s talk about the experience of starting a big project with an ADHD brain.

If you’re like me anyway, when it’s time to begin, the process looks something like this:

Open the document. Look at it. Close the document. Check email instead. 😂

I find that big project overwhelm has a particular flavor to it.

When the project is enormous, and every piece of it seems equally important, it’s often challenging to find an easy way in to move the project from 0 to 1%

And while going from 0 to 1 may seem like a tiny distance, it’s actually one of the hardest parts of the whole process, because we’re moving from nothing to something.

From stuck and spinning into taking the first critical step.

Today we’re exploring four strategies for exactly that situation, and they come from a rather unusual place: a 1500-piece Harry Potter puzzle on my dining room table.

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.

In Episode 374, we’re exploring:

• Why your usual opening move on a project might be the hardest possible place to start
• How to sketch a “box lid” so your ADHD brain knows what done actually looks like
• Why the details of a project only become visible once you get close to one section

1. Notice Whether You’re Starting at the Easiest Place, or Just the Familiar One

Last month I started a 1500-piece puzzle, and it was a hard one for me. If you listened to episode 371 about the things making my ADHD life more enjoyable this past season, you probably heard me talk about doing puzzles all summer. I absolutely love them, and this Harry Potter one was particularly challenging.

It was a map of the entire world of Harry Potter, with Hogwarts in the middle, Hogsmeade, the Forbidden Forest, the Whomping Willow, all these little sections, the four house crests, plus a simple, identical border that wrapped the whole way around. Imagine an oldish-looking map with lots of similar colors and repeated patterns. And when they were all loose, it was a big pile of pieces that looked like they could belong just about anywhere. It wasn’t like, “Ah, these are the brown pieces that clearly belong to this brown horse, and these are the red pieces that clearly belong to the red barn.”

So I opened the box, dumped out all 1500 pieces, and started flipping them face up, pulling out edges and corners while loosely sorting everything else into color groups as I went: blue, green, brown, and tan.

Now, my parents happened to come visit that same weekend, and my mom, who also loves doing puzzles, took one look at my table covered in loose pieces and said: “Whenever I start a big new puzzle like that, I always feel a little overwhelmed. There are just so many pieces, and I wonder how I’ll get it all done!”

That’s actually what got my wheels turning on this analogy, because I hear the same thing from clients when we start working together: “The project is so big. There are so many moving pieces. I have no idea how I’ll get it all done.”

The Border Trap

My standard approach, like a lot of people’s, is to build the border first, because it gives me my container. It tells me the boundaries of the thing I’m working inside. And most of the time, that works great.

Except in this situation, the border was exactly the same look and color and pattern the whole way around. No sky at the top, no grass at the bottom, no context clues of what belongs where. So I essentially sat there pushing random edge pieces together, waiting for something to literally click. For a really long time.

I did eventually finish the border, but it was only afterward that I realized if I’d started with something just slightly more distinctive, like the house crests or the scenes on the side of the map, literally anything other than the border, it would have made starting the puzzle so much easier. Those sections had more distinct colors and their own shapes, something I could have used as an anchor, and it probably would have helped me make a significant dent in the puzzle in much less time.

So I had these objectively easier entry points sitting right there, and I still spent my first hours on the hardest section of the entire puzzle. And here’s one of the key ADHD pieces for this particular segment: I started there because that’s the section I always start with.

That, my friends, is cognitive inflexibility in action. It’s the black-and-white thinking we can slip into, often without realizing it. My brain ran a routine it knew well: sort the pieces and start with the border first. The problem was that it stuck with that routine long after it was actually helping. Despite the clear friction, I didn’t even stop to consider another way, because it’s not what I usually do.

Building the border first is a solid approach most of the time. It just wasn’t the best approach for this particular puzzle, and I only realized that once I was already deep into the process.

How Cognitive Inflexibility Shows Up in Our Projects

I promise this isn’t just about my poor ability to do puzzles. In a similar way, when we’re taking those first steps on a project, we can get caught up in trying to do it the “right way,” the way we’ve “always done it,” or how we think we “should” do it.

Just like my brain thought, “This is how you put together a puzzle,” your brain might think, “I always have to make sure I’ve read all the research first,” or “I always start with an outline,” or “I always start at the beginning and go in order.”

And again, our standard approach can be effective quite often. But sometimes it can leave us feeling completely stuck: we keep trying the same approach without getting anywhere, trying to put together a bunch of random pieces with no anchor to work from. And in those situations, we often spend our best focus and freshest attention on the sections that are hardest to gain traction, especially when there might be an easier way in.

So when you notice the overwhelm creeping in on a big project, and you’re stalled on getting started, it can help to ask yourself:

• Is this the easiest place to start?
• Or is this just the place I usually start? Or where I think I “should” start?

Those are two very different situations, and most of us typically focus on the familiar path, without even considering there might be an easier way in.

Tip one: ask yourself, “Does it make sense to start here? Is there a potentially easier place to start that would allow me to gain traction faster?” If so, what would it look like to begin there rather than the place you “always start”?

2. Sketch Your Box Lid Before You Touch the Pieces

One major advantage of doing puzzles is that most have a clear picture of what “done” looks like on the box cover. Whenever you’re feeling stuck or thinking, “where the heck does this random piece go,” you can check the box and get a clue.

What I’ve found is that most of us begin our big projects without a version of that lid. We don’t have a clear picture of what we want the finished project to look like. And I think that’s actually where a huge amount of ADHD project overwhelm lives.

When we don’t know what “done” looks like, it’s incredibly challenging to take that first step because we don’t actually know what we’re creating or where we’re going. So instead, we find ourselves circling the perimeter of the project: we try to take a first step, then doubt our decision, wondering if it’s “right,” so we stop that direction and start a new one. And, not surprisingly, this prolongs the feeling of going in circles.

If you can relate, here’s the next lesson we can pull. If a project has you frozen, and after asking yourself our first question your brain offers, “I don’t know! I have no idea what I’m doing here,” this is a great opportunity to step back and sketch out your box lid instead.

I realize this sounds so obvious, but it’s something that’s incredibly easy to overlook: it’s critical to know what we’re doing before we start doing it. We want to know the picture on the box.

Now, I don’t mean a literal puzzle box design, unless you want to! I mean clearly defining what you’re doing and where you’re going:

• What is the picture you’re putting together?
• What is the point of this project?
• Once we put all the smaller pieces of your project together, what are we ultimately creating?

That’s what we want to define.

An Incomplete Box Lid Still Works

You might not know every element of the cover design. That’s okay. For example, I’m currently working on this 1000-piece picture of probably 75 to 100 little dogs, which is actually even harder than the Harry Potter puzzle, but the box cover doesn’t show the whole picture. A logo covers a part of it, and another section blocks the picture where it says “1000 pieces!” So I can’t actually see the complete picture. But again, I at least have a general idea of most sections, and I know I can figure out the other areas based on context clues as I start filling the rest in.

So if you’re having a hard time starting, of moving from 0 to 1%, because overwhelm has you stuck, you might also check in with your puzzle box. Do you know the picture you’re creating? What does “done” look like?

For example, “When this is done, there’s a page on my website with copy for these four sections.” Or, “When this is done, the spare room only has a bed and bedside table in it, and all the additional boxes are gone.” Or, “When this is done, I’ve sent the proposal, and it includes a budget.”

And again, it’s absolutely okay if this rough sketch of your lid is wrong or inaccurate in places. You can always revise it. The important thing is having SOMETHING in place, which helps you better see where the different pieces fit into your project.

Tip two: sketch your box lid. Take two minutes to roughly sketch out what “done” looks like before diving into the individual pieces. It’s allowed to be incomplete or slightly wrong. Having any picture in place, even a rough one, helps you start recognizing where the pieces belong.

3. Start With What You Know For Sure

That’s exactly what the box lid did for me with my own puzzle. Once I realized how inefficient my usual approach was for putting together the border, I turned to the box to help me choose one easily identifiable section where I could gain faster traction.

Rather than thinking, “But I always build out from the border,” and forcing myself to keep hoping I pick up two nearly identical pieces to put together, I instead looked at the puzzle box and asked myself, “What’s a recognizable section where I know I could make some traction in the next 15 minutes or so?”

So instead of letting my brain go to, “I don’t know which pieces to choose; there are so many, and they all look the same,” I paused and chose something I DID know. I chose something that WAS clear.

This is a version of a strategy we talked about back in episode 364, the “I Don’t Know” episode. One of the questions in there is: “I may not know all the answers yet, but what do I know for sure?” So in this situation, I may not know where all the pieces fit, but I do know for sure that this section with the lake looks clearly different than the rest, and I can start looking for those specific lake colors to make a dent.

Applying This to a Project With Many Pieces

In those situations where overwhelm is strong and our ADHD brains automatically say, “I don’t know where to start,” we can ask ourselves a similar question: “While I don’t know every single specific step, what do I know for sure needs to happen for this project to succeed? Or what do I know for sure is a piece of this project?”

This might sound like “Well…I don’t know all the required steps, but I do know this project needs a budget.” Or “I know the client wants the slides by the 15th.” Or “I know I need photos of the room before I can list the property.” Or “I know the first section has to introduce the problem.”

Now, if you notice any cognitive inflexibility showing up here and your brain fighting with the idea, saying “you’re doing it in the wrong order” or “you have to do this part first” or “you’re taking the easy way out” or whatever the brain thinks, I’ll offer that a puzzle doesn’t care what order you assemble it in. Eventually, all the pieces need to come together to create the whole, so if there’s an easier way in that lets you move out of overwhelm and build traction, go for it!

Because in my experience anyway, while some projects absolutely do have a “right” order, for example, I’m not going to frost a cake before I bake it, in many cases there are at least parts of a project where the order doesn’t matter either. Even with the same baking example, it probably doesn’t matter whether I look on Pinterest for recipes or do a Google search first. Either one will get me moving forward.

So again, there’s often at least a few parts of a project where the order isn’t critical, and this is especially true when it comes to moving through the overwhelm and taking that first step. Of going from 0 to 1%.

In this scenario, I think finding any way in is a win, because what a project needs at the very beginning is just a few pieces fitting together. That’s what builds momentum. And I truly believe that if we can move from nothing to something and build momentum in any way that feels doable, it’s far more effective than spending hours and days crafting a theoretically optimal plan with everything detailed perfectly, but never actually taking that first step.

Tip three: start with what you know for sure. You might not have every step mapped out yet, and that’s okay. After you map out your general picture on the cover of the box, find the piece of the project you already recognize, name what you know for sure belongs there, and begin.

4. Zoom Out to See the Piles, Then Zoom In to See the Nuance

The final lesson about navigating ADHD project overwhelm from working on this puzzle is about seeing the nuances by allowing ourselves to zoom out first, and then zoom in. Here’s what I mean.

Remember those rough color piles I made at the very beginning, when I was flipping pieces face up? Blue, green, brown, tan. Well, once I moved away from continuing the border, I zoomed out to look at the map, and then zoomed in and worked on the lake.

And once I got into that specific area of the map and started working with the blue pieces more closely, I realized pretty quickly that my blue pile wasn’t actually one pile. There were two completely different blues in there. Sky blue and lake blue. Different shade, different texture, and they belonged in entirely different parts of the puzzle.

Mind you, I’d been looking at those pieces for several days as I tried to smash together the border. But because I hadn’t zoomed in and decided to focus on the lake intentionally, the distinction between the different blues wasn’t clear because it didn’t really matter at the time. That distinction only appeared because I chose where to focus and I got close to it.

Once I knew I was looking for lake blue specifically, the search got so much faster. I knew the very specific colors and pieces I was looking for, I could scan a pile quickly, and I stopped picking up all the different blue pieces to see if they’d fit. Instead, I could sort the blue into two piles, which reduced the pieces I was working with by about two-thirds. That is a significant amount, so I had far fewer pieces to consider, which made finding the matches much easier.

Getting Close Is What Creates the “Later” Pile

Getting close also helped me prioritize the pieces by creating a legitimate later pile. Those sky blues went into their own spot on the table. They’re equally important pieces; I can’t finish the puzzle without them, and they were not for right now.

So how does this connect to our projects? I think a lot of what makes project overwhelm feel so heavy is that we don’t let ourselves make that “later” pile. Everything stays equally urgent because we haven’t gotten close enough to anything yet to get a rough timeline or see what can wait for now.

And we can’t make that later pile until we sit in the discomfort of staring at all the different pieces long enough for the distinctions to show up. At first, everything will probably feel fuzzy or blurry. Nothing has gone wrong when that happens. I started with three broad color piles, and that was enough to begin. Then I refined them as I noticed more nuance, and that nuance only showed up once I got close.

Our projects work the same way. Your first pass of identifying the steps might be four big, vague categories: research stuff, writing stuff, admin stuff, and the stuff I have no idea how to categorize. Then you pick one of those buckets, get close to it, and notice how it splits into smaller pieces you couldn’t see from the outside. And then those split again. And it happens naturally as you allow yourself to take imperfect steps, trying out different pieces as you go, as they gradually start falling into place and the picture begins to form.

Why “Just Break It Down” Stalls Out for ADHD Brains

I think this is part of why “just break it down” stalls out on us so often. We struggle with sequencing as ADHD brains, and when we combine that with all-or-nothing thinking, we find ourselves trying to break everything down into the final level of detail when that detail isn’t visible yet. So we sit there trying to generate step seven of a plan when we can barely see step two, and then we decide we’re bad at this step.

But the reality is that you’re just standing too far away to see the smaller steps yet. Or you haven’t given yourself time to see the various shades of blue to notice the difference in the pieces of your project.

So the question to sit with here is: what’s one small section I could get close to, trusting that the detail will show up once I’m there? How can I zoom out first to see the general piles, and then zoom in on one for greater clarity? We go broad first and refine as we go by taking the next best step in that moment, knowing we’ll learn more as we keep moving forward.

Tip four: zoom out first to see the broad categories, then get close and let the nuances show themselves. Once you’re inside one recognizable section, expect your broad categories to divide into finer ones. It’s those new details that make the project workable, and they only become visible once we get closer to that section, just like the big blue pile only separated into lake blue and sky blue once I leaned in and focused on one section.

That same thing happens with overwhelm. From a distance, it all looks like one big blur, one wall of too much. It’s only when we get close enough to sort through the blur that the next doable step becomes clear. We looked at this from another angle in episode 372 on the mindsets that fuel ADHD overwhelm, and again in episode 373 on the overwhelm of life admin.

Your Invitation This Week

This week, I invite you to pick one project you’ve been circling. You know the one, where you open the doc, look at it, and close the doc. Choose one of those projects and try out any of these four strategies:

• Notice your default opening move, and get curious about whether it’s actually the easiest entry point or just the familiar one. If your project’s version of the border is uniform, like mine was with the Harry Potter puzzle, you might consider a more recognizable, easier entry point instead.
• Sketch your box lid. What are you creating here? What’s the end goal of this project, and how will we know when we get there? Give your brain a rough picture of what you’re creating so you have a reference whenever you feel stuck.
• Find one section you can actually recognize, and start there. You don’t need to know every step yet. Just start with what you know for sure belongs.
• Get close to that one section and see what distinctions show up that you couldn’t see from all the way across the table.

And take those first steps from 0 to 1% as you gain traction and build momentum toward making this project happen.

I’d love to hear which one you tried.

Work With Me:

• Learn more about private coaching here
• Join We’re Busy Being Awesome (group coaching)
• Enroll in Overwhelm to Action – step by step course for ADHD Brains

Resources From This Episode:

• Overwhelm to Action LIVE
• Harry Potter Hogwarts Map 1500 Piece Puzzle
• Episode 371: 10 Things My ADHD Brain Can’t Live Without
• Episode 364: 3 Questions to Get Unstuck from ADHD Indecision
• Episode 372: 7 ADHD Mindsets That Make Overwhelm Worse
• Episode 373: Life Admin: A Sneaky Culprit for ADHD Overwhelm

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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