Have you ever had something that you genuinely want to do but can't yourself start to take action?
Even if it's urgent, has consequences and a deadline.
And even when you logically know what exactly you need to do.
And when you go online to solve this issue, most productivity advice assumes that you can already start.
It's all about planning your day.
Just do it.
And they say motivation comes after action.
And yes, motivation oftentimes follow action.
But that advice is useless if you can't take the first action.
Because the real problem isn't actually about productivity, it's about task initiation.
And especially if you have ADHD, struggling with depression or chronic procrastination, then that is the part that we need to focus on task initiation.
And as someone who got diagnosed with major depression as well as ADHD and struggled for years, I realized that there is a missing mechanism that's keeping us stuck that no one actually talks about.
So the most important concept of this video that I want you to remember is that task initiation fails when the dopamine gap is too big.
So if I would explain this simply basically, that every activity gives your brain a certain level of stimulation,
And when you try to switch a task or do something, your brain compares what you're doing right now and what you are about to do next.
And your brain resists switching from a highly stimulating activity to a low stimulation activity.
So for you to initiate the next task, the next action has to feel either more rewarding, more interesting or more urgent than the current one.
So if you're here like scrolling gaming, binging content which all give high stimulation and you're trying to do something like writing studying, working or getting admin work done, or maybe even going to the gym which all have lower stimulation then that jump can feel impossible because your brain is trying to avoid a massive drop in stimulation and it's not really prioritizing.
Obviously, this gap and struggling to go from high stimulation to low stimulation is difficult for everyone.
But if you have ADHD, depression or other issues, basically the effect can be stronger.
It can be even harder for you because this part of the brain is essentially messed up.
That's why essentially, if you have ADHD, when you're locked into something, even when you're hungry, wanna drink something, or even you know you wanna go to the toilet, you can hold it because what is in front of you right now is so stimulating that even a hunger cue is not enough for your brain to switch the context.
Or on the opposite, if the task in front of you is boring, literally everything grabs your attention because they give more stimulation to your brain.
Hence they encourage your brain to do the activity instead of the current one.
To give a concrete example, imagine you're on the bed scrolling right now, okay?
And scrolling feels like plus 300 stimulation.
Whereas the task that you wanna start maybe opening a work document and working feels like minus 10, and trying to go from plus 300 to minus 10 in one move is a huge dopamine gap, and your brain is like, absolutely not, like i don't want to do it.
This is why, like telling your brain to just do the thing, doesn't work, because you're asking yourself to cross a gap that your nervous system is actively resisting.
So what should we do to solve this issue then?
Should we give up?
No.
Traditional advice says, like dopamine detox, delete addictive apps and remove stimulation from your life.
The logic actually makes sense because if you remove high stimulation inputs, then the biggest possible gap shrinks and the starting boring but important tasks get easier, because there is no steep difference between the stimulation that you get on a day to day basis, which actually makes sense.
And it works, like oftentimes.
If you could quit social media and also remove other like unhealthy habits, then you're probably going to be way more productive, because the gap between the different activities that you have in your day is not that steep.
Therefore, the transition is not that difficult.
Think about it this way.
A lot of drug addicts struggle with anhedonia and they look for the next stimulation because, compared to their highest now, daily life is too boring.
Now they seek for more and more and more, which makes them get more addictive, same as scrolling.
So it does make sense to remove all these addictions, but it has three big problems.
The first one is that it turns your life into a daily fight against billion-dollar companies that are designed to grab your attention.
And the second one is that it treats a systematic problem as a personal willpower problem.
And the third one is that it does not teach you how to transition back to low stimulation work, when the stimulation inevitably returns.
Because it just teaches you to block them, but it does not really give you the ability to fight them, even when there are distractions.
Because, like when I actually blocked social media on my phone, which are blocked all the time, I should be extremely productive, right.
But I actually found myself plugging my arm hair one by one with like a tweezer just to avoid the work that I was supposed to do.
And plugging my arm hair was more stimulating than the work itself that I did it like for an hour.
So...
It's not just the phone.
Distractions have been always there.
And throughout the history, people always procrastinated.
Sure, like phones are very easy and addictive and it makes sense, but it's actually just one part of the equation.
So the goal isn't to eliminate distractions forever, but it's to build a reliable way to transition into low stimulation work even when distractions are right there.
So there are actually two phases to this activation.
So here's what I actually found works.
Task initiation, like just starting, isn't actually one problem.
It's actually two and you need a different tool for each one.
And there are two different distinct phases that you need to do.
So the first phase is all about starting going from whatever you're doing to the desired action.
Task initiation.
And for this one we're going to use a method called dopamine stepwise downshifting that I found and I named it myself.
And it sounds so cool.
Don't put me in step-by-step.
It's so nice, isn't it?
I'm so proud of myself.
But anyway, how it works is that essentially, instead of like trying to go straight from A to D, you take smaller steps.
You go to A to B, B to C, C to D.
So what are these?
A B C, Ds?
Like are we learning the alphabet?
No.
Essentially, A represents the activity that you're doing right now, which is probably high stimulation.
And D is the task that you want to start, lower stimulation.
And B and C are the in-between actions that feel easier to start.
And you do one small downshift step at a time.
And the only rule is that the next step must be less stimulating than what you're doing right now, but still easy enough to actually start, and you don't need to change your whole lifestyle or all the habits that you have right now.
Okay, I know this ABCD doesn't make sense, so let me give an example, okay?
So for example, like I'm scrolling on bed and I wanna get started to work.
Most productivity advice will tell you to start with the most important thing or hardest thing, so that other tasks feels easy and you feel accomplished and done on that day, so that that like feeling spills over other areas of life blah blah, blah.
I actually completely disagree with that and I do the opposite with this ABCD method.
So let's say I'm scrolling right now and I want to get to work, but the gap between them is too big.
What I do is that I downshift like this.
I move to my desk and keep scrolling there from bed to desk, because sitting makes it less comfortable, therefore it's less stimulating.
And from my desk and scrolling, then the next action that I do is that I open my PC in front of me like this
And then I opened the same social media app, whatever that is, on my PC, but on a browser.
Because on a PC, browsers are way less optimized and way less stimulating than on a phone.
After that, now we also dropped the dopamine a little bit, right?
And then the next action is I scan my task list and start with the lowest friction task something that is easy, that feels a bit rewarding, especially something that can be done like pretty easily, pretty quickly, and something that I like.
And then I chain a second easy task, then gradually step up difficulty once the momentum is there.
So, instead of starting with the hardest task, I slowly transition, especially in my location, and then I start with the easy, quick tasks and then I build my momentum from there.
By then my baseline stimulation is way lower.
So the starting real work is small enough jump that I can start.
So we went from 300 plus stimulation on the desk, 200.
And then on the desk, now we are browsing on our PC.
Now the stimulation is maybe 100 to 50.
And then we start an easy task, which is maybe like 50.
And then we do the second task, which is like 40.
And maybe the difficult task is minus 10.
Now we go from 40 to minus 10, which is only a 50 gap. right, in the start, the gap was 310.
By getting closer to the desired action step-by-step.
I found that it's way easier than just get up and sit down.
Obviously you might think like, this actually takes like such a long time, like why would I do that?
Then you probably don't need this method, because I found myself struggling, like literally just even going to the pee while I'm scrolling on bed is so hard that I just like hold it right.
And I'm scared of urinary tract infection.
So if you're someone just like procrastinating here and there, then obviously this method is not gonna work for you, because you don't struggle to extent that I do.
But if you find yourself like actually wasting days and hours, and hours, then this transition method really works.
So basically I explained how downshifting framework works, but actually the most important step, which is like finding the low friction task, can be extremely difficult because most people look at their to-do list and see like 30 40 things that they need to do and like maybe 10 things forgotten from past.
All this list just like stares back at you.
The issue with regular to-do lists is that they're all mixed together, like the urgent stuff, boring stuff, admin stuff, even the things that you wanna do.
All of them are meshed up into together and it's just a chaos.
And when you look at your to-do list you just feel overwhelmed that finding an easy task out of that like a long to-do list is another work.
Then you're not going to follow my advice.
So what should we do instead?
Organize the tasks by how they feel and actually call this my sprinting method.
I know I come up with like so many names for my methods, but they just make sense in my mind, okay?
So what the sprinting method is is that you take all of your tasks and sort them into categories, and not by activity type, but how they feel, because even the same activities can feel different based on their urgency or how much you like them.
Email from a government about taxes versus an email about a project that you're excited to work on can feel very different.
To reply to an email from a government, you might need way more energy, way more power.
But for the thing that you want to work on, you don't really need that much of activation energy.
The resistance is not that high.
But the traditional methods treats them same because they're the same email.
But they're actually not.
So that's the reason why we use a sprinting method, where we categorize the tasks based on how they feel.
So I actually have four different categories, but you can have whatever categories that you want.
And...
I usually recommend like three to five.
So the four categories that I have are urgent, deadline, admin and creative.
The first one urgent, is whatever task, whatever that is, even if it's just like maybe cleaning up my house or an admin work or an important like project that I work on.
If they are absolutely urgent and if they absolutely needs to get done today and there's like such a high consequences in my life, then they go to here.
Because the feeling of an urgent thing is extremely different.
And then the second sprint that I have is deadlines.
These are everything that's basically deadlines that are approaching.
So these are like less urgent than the first one, because the first sprint is the things that I absolutely need to get done.
Whereas the second one is like oh, it's better for me to get started because it's kind of like, know getting closer, so there's like a buffer time and the sprint three is admin work, and anything that i don't like doing is in sprint three, so it could be emails, scheduling chores, or maybe a document that i freaking hate that i need to read, or any boring thing.
Okay, comes here that doesn't have an urgent urgent, urgent thing, an upcoming deadline, and then they're just like in sprint three.
And then the sprint four is creative and fun sprint.
This is my favorite sprint.
I love creative work.
I love ideas.
I love coming up with things.
And I love like any other thing that I love and I genuinely am excited to do are in sprint four.
Basically, they're categorized on however they feel.
When I'm stuck and when I need to downshift and when I need to find something that is going to give me the initial stimulation, then I usually look into Sprint 4, because there are the things that I genuinely like, so that the initial resistance will be way lower.
Or I look into Sprint 3, where there are admin tasks.
Sure, they are boring and I extremely hate them, but oftentimes they're also very small tasks.
That needs to get done.
And once I built the momentum from either of these sprints, then I slowly moved towards my sprint one the urgent and big ones.
And when I'm usually doing like a sprint, I usually try not to jump between sprints so that I don't task switch.
But for the first phase of initiation, I can pick from whatever sprints that I work on.
So but like, how are you going to use a sprinting method and this task initiation, activation thing in your day to day life?
Everything that I mention is actually already built on and ready to use in a system that I created for ADHD people and also people that have chronic procrastination.
And I call this system a Kaizen system.
It's a notion-based productivity system that I built from scratch, coded parts of it and iterated iterated, iterated for years and lounged for people just like you.
I actually built it first for myself because any other traditional advice wasn't really working for me and I needed a specific solution that was working for my specific type of, And one of the things, one of the key things that I like about it is the smirthing method that I mentioned, because I think it makes the task initiation way easier.
And when you stare into 40 different tasks in your to-do list, it just feels so overwhelming.
But when you divide them into sprints, and also when you combine it with the dopamine downshifting method, not only it helps you to start your task, but also it makes it way easier to organize your day, plan your day and get your things done.
When you use a sprinting dashboard kaizen, you can see them on a visual board like a kanban board.
So instead of 47 individual tasks staring at you, you just see four categories based on how they feel.
You can decide on what kind of categories that you want, however you want, and you can customize it as you want as well over 700.
Actually, over 1000 people are already using the Kaizen system.
And when you get it, you can also join to our Discord community where you can see how other people with ADHD and other productivity issues customize their workflow.
And you can also ask me questions directly if you struggle to use the system.
If you want to try it, go to RudyOhama.com.
The link is also going to be in the description.
And if you're watching this early, use the code DOPAMINE at checkout for 10, but be quick because it's going to be only available for the first 100 people.
If you can't invest in it right now, that's completely fine.
You can also do it like with other apps, or maybe you can use like a pen and paper with a journal and you can try to create the same thing.
But if you don't want to spend time trying to build it because it actually took me months to build it, maybe because I'm an overthinker then Kaizen.
With Kaizen, you can already get started today.
It's essentially like a shortcut.
So if you're interested, check out rodeohama.com.
Okay, so now let's talk about the phase two.
Now you're used to downshifting.
To get into work, you did the easy task and maybe you built a little bit of momentum.
Actually, there is another problem waiting for us.
Even after you started and built a little bit of momentum, the bigger tasks can feel still impossible.
Especially, like you know, there are like projects and things that you've been keeping off like for a while.
And for me personally, it's always the tasks. submitting my taxes.
Every single freaking year I submit my taxes late, that I pay like a fine thousands of dollars to the government.
And I still don't learn from it.
You know, there are like some tasks like that.
And even after you build a momentum with an easy task, they can still feel impossible.
Essentially, the dopamine gap actually shows up again between the tasks, right?
Even if you're doing something productive, maybe the thing that you hate, the stimulation is so low.
It's so boring.
You hate it so much that like...
You know, there are so many times that I were crying while doing my taxes that even between productive tasks the gap is too big.
So how do we solve this issue?
Because if you only work on the easy tasks because they feel good, then you'll find yourself at the end of the day just doing the unimportant, easy tasks, and it's just lying to yourself.
So what is the solution?
People often like break bigger tasks into smaller tasks and chunk them up so that it's easier to start.
But for me personally, already having a to-do list or already having a productivity system requires a lot of effort for me.
And now breaking that big task into smaller chunks is just too much work for my ADHD brain to ask.
So what do we do instead?
Time bound small chunks.
So, instead of breaking the project into smaller steps, you actually do a 15 minute micro focus session with a visual timer on, just like this one that I'm using while filming.
How this works is that you set a timer for 15 minutes and it has to be visual like this one, okay?
Not just numbers a visual timer from whatever brand that you like, and then you're going to decide what you're going to be focusing on for the next 15 minutes.
You can work on whatever you want.
The goal is basically the initiation, not just completion, and when the timer ends you decide you're either going to continue for another 15 minute micro focus session or you take a short break for 15 minutes and come back.
You're not allowed to negotiate whether you're going to stop the micro focus session or not while it's going.
If you set it once, you have to finish it.
And you basically keep doing this 15 minute micro sessions while you work.
So let's say there's like a tax submitting instead of telling yourself I'm going to submit the taxes.
The next task is that you just say I'm going to set a 15 minute timer and I'm going to do.
I'm going to see like how much I can do get done in this 15 minutes.
And that's it.
The goal is not getting the task tax documents submitted, but working on it for 15 minutes.
Why this actually works is that the first one is the low activation energy.
15 minutes is small enough that your brain doesn't resist it.
If you struggle with it, you can also do 10, by the way.
The required energy to start is dramatically lower than to committing to finishing the whole thing.
And the second one is that urgency actually creates focus.
When you set a visual timer like this and it's in front of you while you work, it actually creates this pressure and deadline for your brain because essentially, in 15 minutes you're trying to like finish at least, like to here, or see how much you can get done.
And you take it very seriously, okay?
And when you think there is a time pressure actually and you can see it visually.
That's why you need a visual one.
Your brain produces noradrenaline, which gets basically activated under pressure, which helps you to focus and keep you alerted.
And the third important one, which is the biggest reason why this one works, is that completion shortens the dopamine loop feedback.
Normally, unless you finish the entire task, right?
Like unless you submit the taxes to the government, you don't actually get that sense of completion.
For hard, long tasks, especially projects where one task maybe take like hours.
The dopamine feedback loop is painfully long.
But with high stimulating activities usually the dopamine feedback loop is very short.
For example, with scrolling right social media, with every swipe you get a feedback of a content.
So the loop is very very, very short that it keeps you hooked.
But with long project, with boring ones, the feedback loop is too long for our brain to feel stimulated.
We When you break down your work into 15 minute like micro sessions, and you accomplish them, it gives a signal to your brain that you accomplished something and your brain releases dopamine and reinforces action, which makes you want to keep going.
Because scientists have found that dopamine isn't just like released by receiving a reward.
It's actually released in response to a reward.
Prediction error.
When you complete something and it feels better than expected, your brain works that behavior as worth repeating.
And that creates a feedback loop of effort goes satisfaction and it creates momentum.
And a 15 minute sprint gives you that loop every 15 minutes instead of once you finish the task.
So you shorten the feedback loop way faster.
The one way that I found actually to make this stick and make this addictive, because I abandoned every single product review method that I created.
So I decided to gamify this.
And how do you gamify?
This is basically you keep like a journal or you can also do this on Notion, by the way where you track how many 15 minute micro sprints that you have done.
So, for example, I have this like physical notebook calendar that I wasn't using, that I decided to use for my mini sprint.
You can see that I am logging.
I am basically putting a mark every time that I finish a 15 minute block.
And every time I finish, I color one.
And I can visually see how many I finished in a given moment and each week.
You can also do it like on a calendar view, when you can write down like how many of them you got done.
Physical or digital doesn't matter.
And with each thing, what you're trying to do is that, instead of trying to get more chunks done, what you're essentially trying to do is getting more things done with fewer amounts of micro sessions.
So trying to reduce that chunk as much as you can.
So instead of saying like, oh, I did 20 yesterday, I want to do like 25.
You say, I want to accomplish all the to do's that I have within 15 mini chunks.
Then you become way more efficient and you start to measure the right metric not how long you worked, but how much you got done.
And if you treat 15 minutes like actually valuable time blocks that you can use, then you find more time to get things done.
Because most of us like if you have 20 minutes between like each thing, then we find ourselves scrolling.
But if you're already implementing the 15 minute block, then every time you have more than 15 minutes you can just tell to yourself I'm gonna get one block done and I'm gonna like color my notebook.
So it becomes way more addictive, way more fun in my opinion.
So I highly, highly, highly recommend this method.
So let's summarize the whole video.
Our whole point, when we are struggling to take action, is all about reducing the gap between what we are doing right now and the desire of action.
And you can do this in multiple ways, right?
First, you can follow the traditional advice of dopamine detoxing so that your daily baseline is lower.
The second one, is you can do the dopamine stepwise downshifting so that you slowly transition.
And while working on a boring task that you don't wanna do, you can use this 15 minute micro focus sessions so that you shorten the dopamine loop and you increase the stimulation of the activity.
And to make this happen on a day-to-day basis, you gotta check out my Kaizen system under the ohamacom.
And also don't forget the discount code dopamine for 10% off.
If you are in the first hundred people, you can get it.
Don't forget about it.
And let me know how this goes.
I want you to try this method, okay?
Instead of going for another video when scrolling for another hour, do a micro focus session.
Okay, and if you're watching this video right now and thinking, but how am I supposed to plan my days?
How am I supposed to figure out what I'm going to do in a day?
Then you have to watch this video, because I go in depth how you can plan your day, figure out what you need to do and be extremely godlike, productive.
See you.
