Getting Things Doneadults
Why Tiny Tasks Can Become Weirdly Impossible
Sending an email. Booking a dentist. Returning a parcel. None of these are hard, exactly — so why do they sit untouched for weeks while much bigger things get done first?
Sian Trombley
10 min read
Updated AUG 22, 2026
You walk into the kitchen to make the call. It's one call — book the dentist, confirm a time, hang up. Your phone is in your hand. But on the way to the counter you notice the drawer under the toaster is a mess of dead batteries and rubber bands, and twenty minutes later you're elbow-deep in it, sorting things into small piles, the phone forgotten on the counter, the call still not made.
Nothing about that drawer was more urgent than the appointment. It wasn't even on your mind when you walked in. But somewhere between the door and the counter, your brain found it, latched onto it, and quietly swapped it in for the actual task — and you didn't clock the trade happening until it was already done.
This is one of the strangest and most misunderstood features of ADHD: task size has almost nothing to do with how hard a task is to start. A five-minute email can feel like wading through wet concrete, while a genuinely large, complicated project can get finished in an afternoon, seemingly on its own momentum. If you've ever felt embarrassed explaining this to someone — I know it's small, I don't know why I can't just do it — this is for you.
Size is not the variable that matters
Most people assume task difficulty scales with objective size or complexity: a bigger task takes more willpower, a smaller one takes less. That's a reasonable model for a brain that starts tasks by weighing cost against benefit and then acting. It is close to useless for describing what actually determines whether an ADHD brain starts something.
The relevant variable isn't size. It's activation — a kind of ignition cost that has almost no relationship to how long a task will actually take once you're in it. Researchers and clinicians who work with ADHD often describe this as a problem of task initiation, sitting alongside difficulties with planning, sequencing and sustained attention, all part of what's broadly grouped under executive function. The tasks that resist activation tend to share a specific signature: they're brief, they're not inherently interesting, they have no obvious immediate reward, and they involve some faint friction — a phone call instead of a text, a form with a login you can't remember, a package that needs finding a box for.
None of that shows up when you write "call dentist" on a list. On paper it looks identical to a hundred other one-line items. But your nervous system isn't responding to the words on the list. It's responding to the felt weight of doing the thing, and that weight is generated by an entirely different set of factors than size.
What this looks like in real life
The tasks that tend to get stuck
- 01Emails that require a decision, not just a reply — flagged as read, revisited, flagged as read again, for a week.
- 02Booking any appointment that involves a phone call rather than an app, especially if it means talking to a stranger.
- 03Returning a parcel: finding the receipt, printing a label, finding a box, actually leaving the house with it.
- 04Putting away a single load of clean laundry, versus doing an entire deep clean of the bedroom without being asked.
- 05Submitting a form that's already filled out and just needs one click — sitting open in a tab for three days.
The task that takes five minutes and the task that takes five hours can require the exact same amount of activation energy to begin.
Why the drawer wins
It's worth being precise about what happened in that kitchen, because it isn't random and it isn't a character flaw. The phone call had all the hallmarks of a low-activation trap: it's brief, faintly uncomfortable, has no interesting content, and its reward — an appointment booked weeks from now — is too far away to register as motivating in the moment. The drawer, by contrast, offered something the call didn't: a visible problem with a visible, satisfying, immediate resolution. Sort the batteries, and you can see it's sorted. That's a much easier hit of completion than a phone call that just ends.
This is sometimes described in terms of a brain that responds more readily to interest, novelty, urgency and immediate consequence than to importance alone — a pattern researchers have linked to how reward and motivation circuits process delayed versus immediate outcomes in ADHD, though it's worth being cautious about reducing this to a single neat "dopamine deficit" story; the picture that current research supports is broader and less tidy than that. What matters practically is simpler: your brain isn't malfunctioning when it prefers the drawer. It's following the incentives actually present in the room, and the phone call didn't offer any until it was already very overdue.
There's also a self-worth layer that tends to make this worse, not better. Because the task is objectively small, struggling with it invites a specific kind of shame that bigger struggles don't. It's easy to tell yourself a story about a demanding job or a hard season of life explaining why the big project stalled. It's much harder to find a story that explains why you couldn't return a parcel for six weeks, so the conclusion people often land on instead is something closer to I must just be lazy or broken. That conclusion isn't accurate, and it isn't harmless — it adds a layer of dread to the next tiny task, which raises its activation cost even further.
Try this
Lower the ignition cost, not the task
You generally can't make yourself want to do the boring task more. You can make the moment of starting cost less.
- 01Attach the tiny task to something you're already doing — make the call while the kettle boils, not as its own standalone event.
- 02Do the smallest physical first move only: open the app, find the number, put the parcel by the door. Let momentum decide the rest.
- 03Add one small, immediate reward that has nothing to do with the outcome — music, a coffee, doing it standing outside instead of at a desk.
- 04If a task has stalled for weeks, assume the problem is activation, not motivation, and change the entry point rather than repeating the same failed attempt.
The evidence
What's supported and what's still a working concept
Task-initiation difficulty is well documented as part of the executive-function profile associated with ADHD, alongside working memory, planning and inhibition. The idea that interest, novelty and immediacy of reward shape motivation more strongly than a task's long-term importance is a widely used descriptive framework in clinical and coaching contexts. Specific claims about dopamine mechanics are more contested and shouldn't be treated as settled fact.
Barkley's Taking Charge of ADHD; Faraone et al. 2021, World Federation of ADHD International Consensus Statement, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews
A task that's small on paper can still be genuinely hard to start. That isn't a contradiction you need to resolve — it's just how activation works.
This article is general educational information, not therapy, diagnosis or individual medical advice. If something here matters for your situation, a qualified professional who knows you is the right next step.
