The Article Wrote Itself. The Newsletter Did Not.
I love to write. I love to research. I will fall into a reading spiral about something only tangentially related to what I’m working on and emerge three hours later with seventeen tabs open, a page of notes, and a genuine feeling of productivity. My executive function strengths were built for exactly this - deep data intake, pattern recognition, hyperfocus on ideas that interest me.
Writing is not the problem.
Scheduling the newsletter is the problem.
Formatting the post. Updating the metadata. Resizing the image and finding the right tags. The administrative infrastructure that sits between a finished piece of writing and a published one is, for my brain, a specific and reliable form of cognitive purgatory. Every task is low-reward, low-interest, and completable in theory. In practice, I will have written an entirely new article before I update the settings on the old one.
This is not procrastination and procrastination is delay.
I am not delaying.
I am writing!
The problem is that the writing and the publishing keep occupying different days, and the administrative gap between them keeps filling with more writing, more research, more of the work my brain finds genuinely rewarding - while the thing that actually needs doing sits untouched, waiting for a version of me that finds metadata interesting.
That version does not exist. Surprise!
But understanding why - the specific neurological mechanism that pulls an ADHD brain directionally toward genuine reward and away from important but dopamine-poor work - changed what I do about it. Not by making the administration more interesting – because it will never be interesting and always a discipline. But understanding the drift accurately enough makes it possible for me to design around it.
The concept is called reward drift and I developed it while watching client after client berate themselves for “procrastination” as if it were laziness. Or engaging in the related concept of “procrastivity” as it was productive procrastination - in other words, laziness that just happened to be productive. Those two terms didn’t do the mechanism underneath the justice it deserved and promoted a self-judgement that only made things worse.
If the work you love keeps crowding out the work that needs doing, this one is for you.
