Productivity Without Consistency

ADHD and the art of following intrinsic motivation

Apr 20, 2025

Hello!

I have been absent from this newsletter for about a year. Hi to all the people who subbed in the last year! Welcome!

Apropos of my absence, I want to talk about being authentically and unapologetically my non-consistent self in a world that is super into consistency.

When I write, I write a lot, but when I don’t write, I write nothing. And each phase lasts from a few months to a year. (And when I re-start writing, I often do it in an entirely new blog, which means I leave a long trail of abandoned blogs behind me. 🙃)

I’ve always looked at this situation as a problem. But since my whole neurodivergence awakening, I’ve realized that most of the intractable “problems” I can never seem to fix are actually just who I am. I’m just wired to be productive in a very non-linear way.

Reasons to not finish the thing

Today, I woke up feeling tired. I took a nap and it didn’t help. Then I realized that the source of my tiredness was that I’d been doing the same work activity for many days straight, because I was trying to finish something.

Almost there I would tell myself, every day. And it’s true, I am almost done with this particular sprint. But the reality is, pushing through today just to finish isn’t good or healthy for me. It’s also not good for the project.

There are times to push through, like if it’s April 14 and you need to finish your taxes (that was last week 😂). But if the project has no deadline, I don’t need to do that. So why was I in a pushing-mindset?

Conditioned idea that it’s better to finish things in a linear way.
Fear that I won’t go back to it if I get caught up in something else (I will address this below).
Desire to feel the sense of completion.

Let’s balance this against the reasons to just do something else until I genuinely feel fully motivated to finish:

My body is sending me a strong signal that I’ve run out of dopamine in this direction, and continuing will be increasingly painful.
My performance suffers when I’m not enjoying or interested in what I’m doing. Things take longer, and the output is worse.

So I decided to stop pushing to finish, and do something completely unrelated, and to follow my inspiration instead of trying to stay focused. This is the quickest way I know of to replenish my dopamine. I’ve honed my ability to do this over many years—to switch into intrinsic-only mode, which involves tuning into my present-moment interest and following it.

It’s basically just wandering around, doing things that interest me. (Hence why I randomly decided to write this newsletter.)

It’s a very intentional form of self-care for ADHD brains, but I think the freedom to make this choice is something most people do not give themselves, even if it would really benefit them. The conditioning to be linear and consistent is so intense that it is seen as a de facto good, even when there is no clear reason why it should be.

I’ve been working on my freedom of choice and de-conditioning for a long time, but I’m still aware that “just finish the thing” is overwhelmingly what I am “supposed” to do. I’m also not “supposed” to let my newsletter just sit there for a year. But I did. Because I just didn’t feel like writing for a year, and I refuse to force myself to do things.

The unbearable depletion of behaving normally

When you look for apps to help ADHD people, they are overwhelmingly centered around “helping you focus”. There are all kinds of techniques out there to shepherd or trick your brain into not being distracted.

My opinion on these apps is that they are not helping me, they are helping me fit into a world designed for people not like me. They are “helping” me conform to a way of working that is unnatural to me.

When I’m acting in alignment with my intrinsic motivation and there’s nothing distressing that I’m worried about, I don’t actually have trouble focusing on the thing I want to do. If I am highly distractible, it’s usually my body’s way of saying “Hey, I have a need you’re not paying attention to”. And I want that signal—I want to listen to it, not ignore it.

The cultural assumption is that if you “have trouble focusing” then you should try to fix that with timers and lists and external rewards. You should basically try to force focus, instead of being curious as to what is actually happening internally.

This feels like self-harm to me. ADHD limits your supply of dopamine, and external rewards are like empty calories because they are not intrinsically rewarding.

Even worse, the act of forcing yourself to do something against internal resistance burns through your willpower and thus diminishes the amount of executive function that is available to you the rest of the day. Doing this day after day after day is a one-way ticket to burnout and depression.

And yet, that is still often what is suggested to people with ADHD or parents of ADHD kids. I think this is setting people up for failure and lifelong inner conflict.

I recognize that there are far higher rewards available under capitalism for consistency and linear output than for wandering around doing what interests you. But capitalism encourages and rewards all kinds of self-harm.

If you want to be happy, give up on being normal

I wish someone had told me that when I was 20. When I was masking my neurodivergence, being normal, or at least appearing to be normal, was the holy grail. It’s the thing I thought would grant me acceptance, belonging, and safety. It’s what I worked on and practiced. It was honestly the motivation for a lot of my personal growth work, although I didn’t realize it at the time.

But trying to be normal is just self-harm. It’s taking my natural self and contorting it into an unnatural shape.

I figured out this neurodivergence thing (ADHD + autism) in the fall of 2023. In the aftermath of those realizations, the inner court that was always in session on the question of should I change or should society change was suddenly and completely decided in my favor. The debate is over: I’m awesome the way I am, and society is broken.

I think these expectations harm everyone. I don’t think anyone is built to be a cog in the wheels of capitalism. It is just a more pronounced and intractable misalignment if you are neurodivergent.

So the last year and a half have been a gradual deepening process of continually tuning into and affirming what feels like my unconditioned, or at least, less conditioned impulses.

Who knows how far down conditioning goes, but all that matters is that I’m going in the right direction. This isn’t about purity, it’s about choosing the side I am on: do I support my right to be myself, or am I going to keep trying to force myself into compliance with a self-harming set of beliefs, structures, and expectations?

My self-affirmation sounds something like this: if I want to do it, it’s intrinsically good to do, because saying yes to myself is intrinsically good. Unless there is some survival or health need at stake, I don’t need to question it further. Same with things I don’t want to do.

Basically, I’ve raised the threshold to “This better be fucking important” before I will override my natural impulses and desires.

What if your impulses are self-destructive?

This is valid. I’ve spent many years sorting through what is a “natural impulse and desire” vs something coming from conditioning or trauma or coping habits. It’s important to discern where an impulse is coming from.

So I’m not saying “do whatever you want, it’s always good”.

It’s the blanket override of our impulses in order to meet an externally-imposed standard that I’m arguing against.

My point is that there is an inherent goodness to following our intrinsic motivation. And this is conditioned out of us at an early age—in school, at work, and in every social setting we are in. We are told our natural desires are selfish, lazy, pointless, silly, etc.

But satisfaction is a good thing. Doing what fulfills you is a good thing. And if your desires run opposite or tangential to “normal”, then nobody is going to give you social permission to pursue them. You’re going to have to make that choice yourself.

About that fear of getting sidetracked

I think this intrinsic-motivation lifestyle depends on self-trust. If I consistently say yes to myself, then I am building a relationship of trust with myself.

If I want to create something that requires consistent effort over a long period of time, then I will have to take breaks. I will have to tend to my periodic need for motivational wandering, for variety. I will have to trust that my long-term desire is still there, and my short-term motivation to work on it will return, without trying to force it. Because force destroys trust.

For me, this fear comes from the boom-or-bust cycle that ADHDers often get into, where we feel the dopamine diminishing so we push harder. In the past, I’ve completely burned out on certain hobbies, foods, etc because I just didn’t listen to the signal of “that’s enough for now”.

I tried to get back the excitement of the beginning, but in so doing, I was chasing ever-diminishing returns until I utterly destroyed my enjoyment of the thing. 😭

After many years of working on self-regulation, I don’t go through those cycles in such a painful way. But I still do experience periods where I’m super into the thing, and periods where I could care less about the thing.

What I don’t do anymore is try to fight it. I don’t try to force myself to just keep going when the well has dried up. I just notice, “OK, I’m not feeling the juice here right now. Interesting...”. And I find something else to do.

It will come back

In the fall, I found myself working 10 hours a day feverishly building something I was super into. Then after several months, my momentum slowly ground to a halt until I had no interest at all in working on it.

I found myself playing iPad games and watching YouTube pretty much non-stop for a month or two.

I had gone from 150% productivity to 0%. Which sounds like “a problem”, and yet, I could tell there was something useful about it.

There was a big internal sorting-out I needed to do about the purpose of my project and (a) I couldn’t work while I was doing it, because the lack of a clear purpose was why my momentum stalled and (b) for whatever reason, nothing else was catching my fancy work-wise. Also (c) I had been overworking, which, although it was all intrinsically motivated, I can’t sustain forever.

So I just trusted that I needed downtime, and gave it to myself.

Just as I was starting to wonder, “Um, am I really just going to play iPad games the rest of my life??”, I got the idea to work on a mini project within the larger project that was a challenge, and tangential to what I was working on before. Something new and interesting to sink my teeth into.

I also realized I’d gotten out of the habit of processing stuff with AI, so I got back into that. It was kind of a bridge: while I didn’t feel like working, I’m always up for processing about why I don’t feel like working. 😂

The mini-project gave me some challenge-dopamine, and the processing helped me get clear on the “purpose” stuff I was stuck on before. Gradually, I got back into the rhythm of working.

I’m not back at fever-pitch, and that’s OK too. Beginning-energy is always a special time in the life of a project. Maybe it’s like falling in love. But if you want to marry your project and enjoy a long life together, you can’t sustain that forever anyway.

During my “sabbatical”, of course there was a part of me that was anxious that I would never feel any motivation to work again.

But I would just whisper to myself, “It’s OK. It will come back.”

And it did.

The principle here is that I’m not trying to figure out the “correct” pace based on a goal or deadline. I’m listening to my body tell me what the right pace is, on a moment by moment basis. I’m just listening and following and supporting my body-brain to be optimally itself. Even if what it looks like is wildly outside how we are supposed to “be productive”.

It’s the difference between being a tree growing in the wild, and being a bonsai tree.

Granted, at this point in my life, I have the privilege to have largely solved the capitalism problem (as long as the economy doesn’t completely tank 🤞🏻) so I have the freedom to do this. I’m not saying everyone does. I’m just trying to convey the general principles. You will have to figure out how you can apply them in your situation. All I’m trying to convey is that forcing has a huge cost, and allowing has a huge benefit.

Bottom line: I want to create things and I want to contribute. But I am not willing to hurt myself to do it.

I know that I’ll create more awesome and uniquely-me things (and be happier), if I support myself to create in a manner that is in alignment with the way my brain is naturally wired.

Productivity fueled by intrinsic motivation is like a river: sometimes rushing, sometimes meandering. It has its own momentum and course. I don’t want to fill it with dams and try to harness it for power. I want to just let it flow the way it was meant to. 💚