How to overcome task paralysis

is a licensed clinical psychotherapist, board-certified coach, and ADHD-certified clinical services provider. He teaches psychology at Southern New Hampshire University, US. It’s Thursday afternoon and the report has been sitting unfinished since Tuesday.

You’ve opened it and closed it four or five times now, but can’t seem to make any progress. There’s also the dental appointment you’ve been meaning to schedule since January, and the email you finished writing last week that’s still sitting in your drafts for some unnameable reason. You’re not procrastinating as such, because that’s a choice – like when you put off the tax return to watch the game, knowing at some level that you’re trading tomorrow’s stress for tonight’s comfort.

This is about situations that run the other way. You’ve cleared the afternoon, closed the distracting tabs on your screen, told yourself today is the day, and still nothing moves. That strange bind, being unable to begin something you genuinely want to do, is task paralysis.

I’ve spent years as a therapist working with adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), who often experience this problem because of their difficulties with executive function – the ability to plan and execute tasks. But it’s not just people with ADHD who struggle in this way. Push anyone through enough stress, too little sleep, or too far past their limits, and the same executive function system can start to falter, causing task paralysis to set in.

For many of my clients with ADHD, the usual support tools like task planners rarely seemed to help. When I learned about goal management training (GMT), an evidence-based programme for strengthening executive function, it stood out right away as something different. It offered a toolkit with an actual sequence of steps and specific strategies for building relevant skills.

I trained in GMT, worked it into my clinical sessions, and watched it help people finally bridge the gap between knowing what they want to do and doing it. GMT originated in the 1990s, when the psychologist Ian Robertson developed it at Cambridge University for people recovering from brain injury, whose capacity to hold a goal and act on it had been compromised. They would know that a goal mattered, hold it in mind, and yet still drift the moment something more immediate tugged at them.