The Five-Minute Floor — why small starts beat 'real' sessions
If you can't make yourself start, the fix isn't a bigger plan or a more motivating goal — it's lowering the activation floor. ADHD dopamine-based encoding treats "boring but important" as invisible; a commitment of 300 seconds is small enough that the nervous system doesn't argue. ADHDefg's whole toolkit is built on this: start at 5 minutes, and momentum from the writing movement usually carries the session further than you intended. That's not laziness you were fighting — it's task initiation friction, and you can stack it in your favor.
Do this in under 5 minutes
Run the 5-minute Kickstart timer →One thing worth knowing
"Research synthesis converges on external structure beating internal willpower: self-imposed small deadlines and external timers show large effective gains in task initiation with ADHD."
— ADHDefg editorial synthesis of executive-function research (see article Sources section) (reliability check)
Keep reading
- ADHD Workplace Accommodations — RTO Playbook — If return-to-office friction is your blocker this week, this is the guide to read.
- The ADHD Starter Stack — 12 one-line tactics — five of them user-testable in under a minute.
- ADHDefg community Q&A — Every published guide and interactive tool, newest first.