Task Switching in ADHD: Moving From One Job to the Next

An episode ends. I need to get up and wash the dishes. I know it, I am not unwilling, and I have the time.

But I do not get up. Twenty minutes later I am still sitting there, and I could not tell you what I did in those twenty minutes.

For a long time I took this state for laziness. If it were laziness, I should have been enjoying it; yet those twenty minutes do not feel good at all. It is more like being stuck somewhere.

Its name is transition difficulty, and in ADHD it is almost as common as not being able to start.

The problem is not laziness, it is the gap

From the outside, moving from one task to another looks like a single movement. From the inside there are three separate jobs:

1. Letting go of what you are doing right now
2. Pulling your mind away from that task
3. Setting up what the new task requires

All three fall within the domain of executive functions, and the meta-analysis by Willcutt and colleagues (2005) shows that this domain is consistently strained in ADHD. In Barkley's (1997) model too, stopping one behavior and putting another in its place stands at the center of the matter.

The second step is especially important. The phenomenon Leroy (2009) calls attention residue says this: when you leave one task and move to another, a part of your mind keeps staying on the old task for a while. This happens to everyone. In ADHD this residue lasts longer and is harder to clear.

A transition looks like a movement, but it is actually a job. Because you do not count its duration, the day always comes out short.

Which transitions are harder

They are not all equally hard. The ones that jam most often for me:

• From enjoyable to compulsory. When the reward gap is big, the resistance is big too.
• While focused. When I have sunk into a task, a call from outside feels almost like a physical discomfort. I handled this separately in the article on hyperfocus.
• While idle. Moving to a task from a state of doing nothing is also hard, because there is no momentum. This is called waiting mode: there is an appointment in two hours and nothing can be done in those two hours. This is the state that eats the most time for me.
• Without changing place. Moving from one task to another at the same desk can be harder than changing rooms. When the environment stays the same, my mind keeps staying on the old task too.
• After finishing something hard. In the emptiness after completing a big task, I cannot move on to anything. It is as if the system shuts down and takes hours to turn back on.

What makes transitions easier

Setting aside time for the transition. Putting fifteen minutes between two tasks in your calendar. Seeing this as wasted time is common; in fact you are making visible the time you were already spending. Once it is visible, guilt does not pile on top. This was the only change that made my calendar realistic.

Writing the first move of the new task in advance. "Move on to the report" is a big command. "Open the file and read the heading" is a small movement. Writing the first move before the previous task ends takes the transition out of being a decision.

Using a signal from outside. An alarm, a timer, the end of a song. The mind telling itself "get up now" is expensive; a signal from outside is free. The one that worked best for me was playing a single song and getting up when it ended; I can snooze an alarm, but I cannot snooze a song that has ended.

Building a transition ritual. When the same movement is repeated each time, the mind knows what is coming: filling a glass of water, tidying the desk, opening the window. A transition ritual is small on its own and strong when repeated.

Physically changing place. Standing up, walking out of the room and back in, sitting in a different chair. Moving the body helps disperse attention residue. On the days I try to make a transition while staying in the same seat, nothing happens; when I get up and fill a glass of water, the transition often completes by itself.

Building the day in blocks. Grouping kinds of work and putting a transition allowance between them costs less than switching type six times a day; I went into detail in the article on pomodoro and time blocking.

Try stopping before you finish. Leaving a task in the middle, not at the place where it would be complete, makes returning easier. Going back to a half-finished sentence is much easier than going back to a blank page. When I first heard this it sounded illogical; today I always do it with long texts.

The two hardest transitions of the day

In my own day, two transitions are clearly more expensive than the others.

Morning, from bed to work. There is a gap between waking up and starting to work, and if that gap is left uncontrolled it eats an hour. What worked for me was deciding the first move the evening before. In the morning I do not want to decide; in the morning I only want to carry out.

Evening, from work to life. Closing the computer does not finish the work. My mind stays there a while longer, and during that time the person who is at home is not me. I try to solve this with a ritual: writing down in three items what I will do tomorrow and then closing the computer. I described the details in the article on end-of-day closing.

When I fixed these two, the small transitions in the rest of the day became easier too. I think the reason is this: when the day starts well and ends well, the jams in between do not turn into a catastrophe; they stay just jams.

The hidden cost of transition difficulty

The most expensive side of this matter is not the lost minutes.

The real cost is what you feel in that time in between. While I waste those twenty minutes I am watching myself, and I do not like what I watch. When I say at the end of the day "I got little done today," what I am actually saying is "today I got stuck in between three times."

The second cost is not being able to plan. Because I do not know how long transitions will take, I always build the day optimistically. I plan five tasks, I can do three, and in the evening I call myself inadequate. But what I had not counted was not the tasks, it was the gaps.

The third is that it is not visible to others. Saying "I'm getting ready" is not accepted as an explanation. So most of the time I do not explain at all, and I prefer to look late.

When it does not hold

All of these methods work when you have energy. On days when you are sleepless, repeatedly interrupted or overloaded, the transition time gets longer and no alarm is enough.

The most reasonable thing to do on those days is to reduce the number of transitions. Putting tasks of the same kind back to back costs less than switching type five times a day. Gathering all the phone calls into one hour is a good example of this.

I also learned this: on a bad day, waiting out the transition costs less than forcing it. Sitting ten more minutes and then getting up is better than arguing with myself for twenty minutes and then getting up.

Where I arrived

Transition difficulty is experienced as a problem of willpower and solved like a problem of timing. When I set aside time for the transition, the day lies to me less.

The part about starting itself is in the article on task paralysis, and the practice of lowering the threshold is in the article on the two-minute rule.

I wrote down one day of that transition in the diary: From work to myself, from myself to work.