The hardest part of any task, for me, has never been doing the task. It’s the wall I hit before the task — the one where I know exactly what needs to happen, I genuinely want it done, and yet my brain refuses to produce the first move. People who don’t have ADHD sometimes call this procrastination, which always stings a little, because it isn’t a choice. It’s a missing rung on a ladder. The work is up there, I can see it, and the bottom step just isn’t there.
Over the last year I’ve started using AI assistants to build that missing step. Not to do my work for me — to get me started. I want to write down what’s actually helped, because most of the advice out there is either “just use a to-do app” (I have eleven, thanks) or breathless hype about robots taking your job. The reality is quieter and more useful than both.
It externalises the part of my brain that’s offline
Executive function is the bundle of mental skills that lets you plan, prioritise, start, and switch. Mine is unreliable in a very specific way: it’s brilliant at 11pm on a hyperfocus night and completely absent on a Tuesday morning when I have one boring email to send. An AI assistant is, for me, a place to put that function when my own copy isn’t loading.
The single most effective thing I do is ask for the next physical step. Not the plan — the step. “I need to migrate this service and I’m frozen. Give me the very first concrete action, something I can finish in five minutes.” It comes back with “open the repo and read the current deploy config,” and somehow that’s enough. The ladder has a bottom rung again. I climb one. Then I ask for the next.
Body-doubling that doesn’t need another human
A lot of ADHDers work better with someone else in the room — “body doubling.” The other person isn’t helping; their presence just makes the task feel real and keeps me anchored. The problem is that a human body double is a scarce resource. My wife has her own life; I can’t summon a colleague every time I need to fold the metaphorical laundry.
Talking through a task with an assistant scratches a surprising amount of that itch. I narrate what I’m doing, it reflects it back, and the act of externalising keeps me on the rail. It’s not the same as a person — I’m not going to pretend it is — but for the small, dull, friction-heavy tasks, it’s enough company to keep me moving.
Reframing the wall of overwhelm
Some days the problem isn’t one task, it’s forty, all shouting at once, and I can’t hear any of them. My instinct is to freeze. So I dump the whole mess into a chat — every loose thread, in no order — and ask it to group them and tell me which three actually matter today. Seeing the chaos turned into a short, ranked list does something to my nervous system. The noise drops. Decision fatigue is real, and offloading the sorting leaves me enough fuel for the doing.
Where it falls short — and where it can quietly hurt
I want to be honest, because this topic gets sold as a miracle and it isn’t one.
It will not build the habit for you. The assistant gets me over the starting wall, but if I lean on it for everything, my own initiation muscle gets weaker, not stronger. I try to treat it like a crutch for a sprain — useful while I heal, not a replacement for the leg.
There’s a dopamine trap, too. Tweaking prompts and admiring a beautifully organised plan feels like progress and produces zero actual work. I’ve lost whole afternoons to building the perfect system instead of doing the thing the system was for. If you have ADHD, you already know this monster. The AI just gives it a shiny new costume.
Be careful what you paste. Work code, client details, anything personal or medical — assume it could be stored or used to train a model unless you genuinely know otherwise. I keep a hard line between “things I’d say out loud in a coffee shop” and everything else.
And it confidently makes things up. For anything factual — a command, a config, a claim — I verify before I trust. A tool that helps me start is worth a lot. A tool I follow off a cliff is not.
The honest summary
AI hasn’t fixed my ADHD, because my ADHD isn’t broken — it’s just wired for a world that wasn’t built for it. What these tools give me is a scaffold: a way to borrow executive function on the mornings mine doesn’t show up, so I can get to the part I’m actually good at. Used with a bit of suspicion and a lot of self-awareness, that’s been genuinely freeing.
If you try it, start tiny. One frozen task, one question: what’s the first step? See if the ladder grows a rung.