Why It’s Important to Stay On Topic If You Have ADHD

Is It Better to Finish What you Start or Go With the Sudden Inspiration?

Sometimes those of us with ADHD can get lost by jumping from one writing project to another when inspiration hits.

There’s a story that my mother has frequently told over the years from when I was in nursery school. One day, she came to pick me up early and observed me through the window. I was sitting by myself off to the side working on something while all the other children were seated around the teacher who was reading a story. When my mother later asked the teacher if something was wrong, she said that I was just a child who needed to finish what I started.

Since I’ve been writing more seriously, I’ve had a problem. Perhaps this will sound familiar. I get up, make my coffee, and sit down to figure out what I will write that day. Once I have my topic down, I shower, get dressed and return to the computer to get going. Each morning I am determined to be organized and deliberate about my writing. I commit to finishing the piece I start with any stray thoughts or new ideas written down in my writing journal to explore later.

This process actually went more smoothly when I first started writing on Medium. But then I found that when I returned to the ideas that had sprung unbidden to mind while I was writing something else, I wasn’t able to recapture the inspiration that had made the topics seem so easy to write a post about. Sometimes, I would forget the points that I had wanted to make which had seemed so obvious when the idea struck, so much so that I hadn’t seen the need to write them down.

Jumping Ship

When this began to happen more frequently, I sometimes let myself stop writing the article I had planned to write when I woke up, and begin to explore this other topic. Unfortunately, for those of us with ADHD, ideas pop into our heads seemingly from out of nowhere quite frequently. It’s very enticing to jump from idea to idea and hard not to because more recent ideas seem to occur with more inspiration than whatever we are working on at the moment.

When we allow ourselves to be seduced by the bright, shiny, new idea, this can become a pattern ending in enough frustration to shut down our desire to write at least in the short run. This is because each new inspiration becomes tarnished as it turns into work and no longer looks so enticing, especially when another new idea comes along.

When we have abandoned several ideas in a row and feel like none of them were able to maintain our interest we may be likely to feel like we’ve wasted a lot of time with nothing to show for it. When this repeats itself over and over because we continue to pursue this path, we can end up with what we think to be writer’s block or impostor syndrome,

Too Many Ideas Can Be As Disruptive as Too Few

Yet the reality is not that we lack ideas. When you have ADHD you suffer from the opposite malady — too many ideas. An abundance of ideas, coupled with difficulty maintaining attention and jumping from thing to thing, means we are forever changing our focus. Each time we do so, we are required to redirect the center of our attention which takes a lot of effort, and to leave behind the other idea at least for the time being, while not looking to the next idea waiting in the wings.

We also have to negate the voice in our head which often starts in childhood and sounds like the adults in our life, which says that leaving something unfinished behind is a symptom of our problem and one that will prevent us from being successful in our chosen life goals. When we try to reason with this voice by telling ourselves we will return to the idea once we finish the new one this voice will often tell us we are just making excuses.

Stay the Course

Because of these factors, the difficulty redirecting our focus, the thoughts we have about impostor syndrome and writer’s block, and the critical voice in our head which reflects early criticism of our problems, letting ourselves jump topics may not be the best strategy for productivity.

Once we let ourselves switch to a new topic we feel inspired to write about, we are more likely to repeat this. Instead, writing the ideas down while accepting that when we come back to them we may not still have the clear picture of how to develop them that we initially had is still the best strategy.

Continuing on a linear path, meaning that we finish what we start, may feel like we are losing the potential to write a number of articles that we have flashes of inspiration while writing the first one. Even if we are not able to develop any of the ideas that we jot down, seeing one idea through to completion is better that starting ten articles we never finish while experiencing the negative mood and self talk this can result in.

Suggestions for Maintaining Your Focus When You Have ADHD

• Don’t let yourself jump topics no matter how inspirational and unique you may believe the shiny new idea to be.
• Come up with a topic you know you can write about and put it at the top of your document in bold letters, highlighting it in a color that makes it stand out.
• Write shiny, new ideas down in a writing journal but don’t spend time developing them — the time you take to explore them will feel like it is wasted if you can’t ultimately write them up
• If you find that you can’t later develop the ideas you jotted down, cut yourself some slack and remind yourself that you successfully completed an article and will come up with other ideas
• Watch your self talk, and don’t let yourself wallow in impostor syndrome over ideas you may not be able to develop — Inspiration is a flash from beyond clarity and may not always be something that you can bring down fully into the practical world
• If you have trouble with any of this, review the articles you have published and let yourself take pride in their growing number
• If you find that the ideas you wrote down but don’t seem to be able to develop still bother you, choose one of two that seem to have the most potential and jot down three subtopics that you can easily address. You can find additional suggestions about this here:

The Takeaway

Each writer needs to find the most effective way to be productive and generate new articles regularly. For those with ADHD this can be more difficult because of the constant intrusiveness of new ideas that can seem more inspirational and interesting than whatever we are working on at the time. Maintaining our focus on a single idea until we are done, despite perhaps thinking we are letting better ideas fall by the wayside, can often mean the difference between a handful of finished, well written articles and a hard drive full of articles begun but never completed.

Natalie C. Frank has her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology. She specializes in Pediatric Psychology and Behavioral Medicine.

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