Unfinished Courses and Certificates in ADHD

Imagine a list of courses. Next to each one there is a progress bar, and not one of the bars has reached the end. Some were entered once on the day of sign-up, some were dropped when they were almost finished.

You do not need to have ADHD to own this list. But when someone with ADHD looks at it, they often say the same sentence: "I can't finish anything."

In my field, digital strategy, almost every month a new tool, a new platform and with it a new training comes out. I love learning something new. This article is about the unfinished things that pile up behind that love.

In the article on the hobby graveyard in ADHD I wrote about pursuits whose materials wait in the closet. Courses are a little different: most are taken for work or career, they are paid for, they promise a certificate, and when left unfinished they bring along the feeling of "I can't even invest in myself."

Everyone drops them

First, a somewhat comforting piece of data. Reich and Ruipérez-Valiente looked at the data of courses that MIT and Harvard offered on edX between 2012 and 2018. Fifty-two percent of those who signed up never started the course. Among all participants, the completion rate had fallen to 3.13 percent in 2017-18, and no improvement was seen over six years (Reich & Ruipérez-Valiente, 2019).

This study does not look at ADHD. But it shows that an unfinished course is less a personal flaw than the ordinary outcome of this way of learning. A course that you progress through on your own, that nobody outside is following, that stays accessible forever, goes unfinished for most people.

Why the moment of signing up feels so good

The moment I press the sign-up button I feel a strange lightness. As if I had begun learning. As if I had completed what was missing.

The study by Dai and colleagues on the "fresh start effect" offers a framework that explains this feeling. Online searches for diets, gym visits and commitment to goals rise after temporal landmarks such as the start of a new week, month, year or semester, a birthday or a holiday. According to the authors, these landmarks leave past flaws in the "previous period" and push people to look at their lives from a broader place (Dai et al., 2014).

Signing up for a new course is also a small landmark. The earlier unfinished ones are left behind for a moment; the new me will finish it this time. In the glossary this feeling has two relatives: the new notebook effect and the Monday fallacy.

The problem is that a landmark does not guarantee that motivation will start and last. By the end of the first module the novelty fades and the certificate is still very far away.

Signing up feels like the start of learning; most of the time it is only the start of the plan.

The distant reward in ADHD

This is exactly where the ADHD side comes in.

The meta-analysis by Marx and colleagues brought together 37 group comparisons covering a total of 3,763 participants. Participants with ADHD chose a small but immediate reward over a large but delayed one more often than controls; the effect was between small and medium. The tendency became more pronounced in tasks where real rewards were given (Marx et al., 2021).

The reward of a course often arrives weeks, perhaps months later: the certificate, a new work skill, knowledge that will be useful one day. The reward of the other options within reach that same evening arrives within seconds. In the glossary this is reward delay. I described the rest of the motivation system in the article on dopamine and motivation.

What those who reach their goal do

Kizilcec and colleagues examined together the self-regulation strategies of online course participants and their behavior inside the course. Goal setting and strategic planning were the strategies that predicted participants reaching their own course goals (including getting a certificate) (Kizilcec et al., 2017).

The part of this study that made me think most was the phrase "personal goal." Not everyone signs up in order to finish a course from beginning to end. Some want one module, some want to learn a single topic. When I do not write down my goal at the start, I count myself a failure even if I watched two modules and met my need.

Questions I ask myself before signing up

In which job, and when, will I use this knowledge? If the answer is "one day," I write the course on a list for now and do not sign up.

Does the course have an end date? Courses with a live session, a group or a homework deadline are much more finishable for me. "Lifetime access" feels to me less like freedom and more like a permit for endless postponement.

How many courses do I have open right now? If I have one, I do not start a new one. The one-open-course rule is simple, but it is also the rule I break most.

What is my goal? The whole course, three modules, a single skill? I write this not on the sign-up page but in my own notes.

Does it have a place in the calendar? Which day of the week, how many minutes? If there is no place, there is no course.

For exam preparation I compared the choice between a course, a study center and studying alone in a separate article.

Discount moments

The riskiest moments for buying a course, for me, are campaign periods. A time-limited discount triggers the feeling "if I don't buy it now I'll miss it" and all the questions above get skipped. The pull of a sudden decision and the pull of an immediate reward combine at these moments.

I have a simple rule for myself: when I see a discounted course, I wait a day. If the next day the answers to those questions are still clear, I buy it. Most of the time I do not find the same excitement the next day, and this shows me what the course was really appealing to: the need to learn, or the feeling of a fresh start. This is the course version of the wait-a-day habit used in shopping.

Small changes that make a course finishable

Even after signing up, there are a few things that can change a course's fate.

Tying the course to a job. I try to use what I learned in a real job the same week. Trying the method described in a module on a project that week turns the distant reward of the certificate into a near one: "I learned this and it worked today."

Shrinking the modules. If a module is an hour, I split it into three twenty-minute sessions. It is hard to find a place in the calendar for an hour-long session; twenty minutes can be found most days.

Not taking it alone. Taking the same course with a friend, or watching at the same time for one hour a week with cameras on, adds a follower to a course that nobody is following. I described the logic of this method in the article on body doubling.

Planning the last module from the start. The end of courses is usually the most boring part: the final project, the exam, uploading documents. Setting aside a date in the calendar for the last module at the starting moment, when I am most excited, is much easier than finding that date later.

Not making the certificate the only goal. Sometimes a certificate is really needed: for an application or a document to show. But most of the time what I am looking for is a skill more than a document. Knowing which one I want determines how much effort I put into which part of the course.

Taking a break versus quitting

I also learned to make a distinction: not entering a course for three weeks does not mean having quit it.

In ADHD interest fluctuates. One period a heavy workload, one period exhaustion, one period another interest can come in front of the course. The sentence "I haven't been in for three weeks, so I've left it unfinished again" often is what makes me really quit. Yet a break is a state you can return from. What makes returning easier is writing down where I left off: the last lesson I watched, the one sentence that stayed in my mind, the next step. When I come back I do not start from zero. The fear of leaving something unfinished sometimes spends more energy than the unfinished state itself.

Making peace with the unfinished

There are still unfinished courses on my list and I will not finish all of them. Accepting this felt better than trying to finish them.

A closing list instead of a finishing list. For every unfinished course write two lines: what did I take from this course, and do I want to continue? Consciously mark the ones you do not want to continue as "closed." While an unfinished course sits like a debt that is always waiting, a closed course becomes a decision made together with the piece you took from it.

Sometimes a person signs up not because they love learning but because they blame themselves for not having learned. Separating these two made it easier for me to choose which course I would really start. If the guilt that builds up over unfinished courses is getting heavy, the article on shame and self-compassion looks at that side.