Glossary
The ADHD & planning dictionary
Every term you'll meet in the ADHD productivity world, defined in plain language — with links to the full guides where one exists.
ADHD tax
The real financial and emotional cost of ADHD symptoms — late fees, forgotten subscriptions, expired food, missed deadlines, redone work.
Attention residue
The fragment of your attention that stays stuck on the previous task after you switch — why "one quick message" wrecks the next twenty minutes.
Body doubling
Working alongside another person whose mere presence makes starting and continuing tasks easier — a staple ADHD strategy.
Brain dump
Emptying everything on your mind into one external place, unfiltered and unsorted — the capture half of every planning method that works.
Cognitive offloading
Using the external world — lists, alarms, notes, apps — to do what working memory can’t hold. The science behind every list that ever helped.
Dopamine menu
A pre-made list of healthy, engaging activities to reach for when your brain demands stimulation — instead of doomscrolling by default.
Energy matching
Assigning tasks by the state they require — deep work in peak hours, light wins in the dips — instead of pretending all hours are equal.
Executive dysfunction
Impairment of the brain’s management layer — initiating, organizing, remembering, sensing time — producing a gap between knowing and doing.
Hyperfocus
Intense, tunnel-vision absorption in one activity for hours — ADHD’s double-edged sword: superpower on the right task, time thief on the wrong one.
Implementation intention
A when-then plan — "when X happens, I will do Y" — that hands decisions to situations instead of willpower. One of psychology’s best-replicated tricks.
Most-startable task
The task with the lowest activation cost — concrete, small, decision-free. When you’re stuck, start there instead of with what’s "important."
Task initiation
The executive function that turns intention into action — the "starter motor" that ADHD brains most often struggle with.
Task paralysis
Being unable to start a task despite wanting to and knowing exactly what to do — also called ADHD paralysis or ADHD freeze.
Time anxiety
Chronic distress about time — feeling perpetually behind, dread of being late, guilt about "wasted" hours — planning from panic instead of intention.
Time blindness
A reduced ability to sense time passing and feel the future as real — common in ADHD, behind chronic lateness and deadline ambushes.
Waiting mode
The inability to start anything before a scheduled event — a 3pm appointment that quietly consumes the entire day.
Zeigarnik effect
The tendency of unfinished tasks to stay mentally active and keep intruding on your attention — why open loops nag until they have a plan.