This week I’m joined by Madeline O’Reilly and Jonathan Hassall to talk about their new online program called Decoding Doing that is based on a book they wrote with the same title. And that’s fair, Decoding Doing is a great title when we’re talking about procrastination.
And just a little background, Madeline is a clinical psychologist with a Masters in Clinical Psychology. Additionally, Madeline is a member of the Australian Clinical Psychology Association along with the Australian Professional ADHD Association and the Australian Association for CBT. Jonathan is an ADHD and Executive Function coach and also is a board member of the ADD Association (ADDA USA).
In our conversation today we go through the their five-stage model for working through procrastination. We’ll explore how our perception of motivation can often hold us back, and more importantly, how understanding our emotional and cognitive needs can help us break free from the procrastination cycle.
William Curb: All right, well, I'm thrilled to have you guys with me, and especially with the early hours, since you guys are based in Australia, and that time difference is rough no matter what. When you emailed me, you were talking about your book, Decoding Doing, and that sounds like a really interesting book to approach procrastination, because that's something that so many of us with ADHD struggle with, is like we have this idea of like how to start something, but we're like just lost after that thought. So can you tell me a little bit more about your book?
Madeline O'Reilly: Yeah, our book is about, I guess, the act of getting a task done, hence the title, Decoding Doing. We've really tried to build a model that explains how you get from the idea of a task to the end of a task. The book actually came out of many years of conversation around procrastination, because we really noticed that procrastination was a really common feature in our adult clients with ADHD, that they would often raise that as one of their top goals for treatment, and we were trying to understand how to support them not to procrastinate, rather than how to recover from procrastination as the strategy, if you like.
William Curb: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me, because it's especially was the idea of kind of like this ADHD paralysis where we like get stuck not doing, and if we can just head that off, it seems like it would be a much better place to start.
Jonathan: And Madeleine was saying that, you know, when we started, we started looking at procrastination, but like a lot of things with ADHD, we can over focus on the experience of the problem, rather than saying, well, hang on, we could circumvent this entire thing and do it a different way.
And you know, that ties into, you know, one of the things we talk about a lot in the book is about, you know, the myths that we build up with ADHD around why or how things happen. And again, it's usually the absence of a system. And in this case, we're talking about a cognitive system that we can put into place to make things happen.
William Curb: Yeah, the thinking about a problem is often a problem in itself. Yes. Could you speak a little bit more about these myths about ADHD that you were just mentioning?
Jonathan: Well, the biggest myth, particularly in relation to procrastination, I think is that of what motivation even is. So, there's a really good example of that. And if anyone's interested, I did a talk on this that's available on YouTube, that with ADHD, we interpret motivation as this big emotion that's attached to either something being very rewarding or appealing or very threatening. And then with both of those, it has to be happening very soon. So, you know, a classic example is the uni student that says, oh, I do my best assignments the night before their due and that sort of thing. Because that's how we think motivation works. So, we sit around waiting for the motivation to sprinkle itself down upon us magically. And or maybe we try and find some really fun attachment to doing something which is, you know, nice.
But really, the way most people motivate, who don't have ADHD, and people with ADHD generally have done this at some point, is that they just imagine themselves doing it. They see themselves doing it in detail. They see what it's gonna take. And they see when it'll work best for them and their lives. So, I talk about process, resources and context. And so, within that, once they can see that, they get this feeling of, oh yeah, it's doable and that's a good time to do it.
Now, that's actually a usable motivation. It's not expensive. It's not a big emotion. It's not reliant on the external thing. It's reliant on them projecting it. And they can call it up any time they want. They don't have to wait till right before it's due.
They can make that happen any time. And so, Madeleine and I looked at that and said, well, you know, okay, so that's a core idea about how you create motivation, as opposed to what we think motivation is with ADHD.
William Curb: That's a really interesting way to think about it too. And it's making me think about the issues that we often have with prioritization. Because it's like, oh yeah, we're making something a priority. And often with this, we're doing stuff that night before, that suddenly very easily becomes a priority because we can see that deadline right there.
Jonathan: Absolutely. I mean, it's so contextual. And the other feature with priority too is the idea that we have to be able to see everything in our life to decide what's the most important thing. When the reality is the most important thing, we'll shift from time to time. Depends what's happening, what the immediate demands are, but also what our capability is at that time.
Madeline O'Reilly: As the psychologist in the room, I get a bit preoccupied with self-esteem and self-belief and confidence and that kind of like the self in amongst it all. And something that I've noticed, which I think kind of contributes to what John was saying about ADHD and motivation and how it's viewed, is that in order to be able to call on that really kind of calm, centered sense of I can get this done, I know how to do it, that kind of steady motivation, if you like, like what John was describing. You do have to have some kind of sense of competence and confidence and knowledge, like being able to recall from the past times when you've done it, being able to know that you actually can do it and trust that.
And I think what complicates this with ADHD is all those years of experience of feeling like a failure or actually failing or not getting something done or all that feedback, which sets you up to find that hard to call on. So I think part of building that up is repairing some of that damage. And that's something that we actually, we put in the model and we made kind of a point of that's the final step, is to really notice that you have finished the task and actually allow yourself to notice, oh, I did it, like job done, build that sense of confidence and competence with that memory that's then in your system for you to call on whenever you need it next time and actually realise that feeling. I think it's important that it doesn't get skipped over.
Jonathan: And actually, there's the, Madeleine raises a good point there too that we haven't raised yet, which is Madeleine's a clinical psychologist. I'm an ADHD coach. So the two of us coming together, we find that the two professions link very nicely in the ADHD world, particularly because, you know, as Matt was saying, it's a lot of her focus is on self-esteem with ADHD coaching houses too, but ours is more the focus on who you want to be. And so this idea of like Matt's talking about recognising achievement, normally with ADHD, we only focus on the fail. We focus on the problem. And you know, you ask them with ADHD, you know, what went well in that?
They often will really struggle to think about it because they're too preoccupied with what didn't go well. That thing of building the self-esteem through that achieve component and extending that to the idea of, well, who am I when I do that? And who do I want to be when I do that? Is a really powerful way of connecting with a positive approach to doing things.
William Curb: Yeah, I think that's like a huge piece there is just, yeah, the knowing what you want to do and, you know, where you want to get to. One of the things I was thinking that popped in my head there was this idea of like defining when something's done being such an important piece, because, yeah, it's easy to look at all the negatives. If you don't know you're not at that place where you're like, oh, I finished this and I can look at I did this and it's just like, no, here's all the things that went wrong in the process. And also I still have, especially with stuff that's like a process to do.
It's not a, so like what's done today versus what's, you know, the very final done. Because like if I'm like trying to like work on exercising more, being like, hey, I went and worked out twice this week. And that was what my goal was. That's by defined done for you rather than there were five days I didn't exercise.
Jonathan: And I mean, the definition of done. In itself, I mean, we often assume that that's obvious. We will know when we're done, but it's not really that obvious as we're doing it. And if we don't have a clear definition of what done looks like in a very objective sense, so either I can tick that box or not, then we deprive ourselves of sort of that positive pull towards activation. Because when we can see the destination, it actually makes it so much easier to activate.
William Curb: Getting ourselves to move forward on those things. Absolutely. One of the interesting things I'm seeing here in the notes here is also just this like model of what procrastination and ADHD actually is. You guys think you can speak a little bit more to that? Sure.
Madeline O'Reilly: I guess the way we've structured our model, we've had what feels like a million iterations of it. But where we landed in terms of what we thought was important were these five stages of getting a task done. And I'll talk you through them briefly, but then we can kind of go into different ones if you're interested or see where we want to chat further. So the first one is the connect stage, which is that bit between noticing the thought of something to do and an urge or a drive to do something and actually committing that's a thing I want to do.
Like this is the thing it's going on my to-do list. That's the connect stage. So you're really kind of emotionally connecting to the task I'm committed to doing it. Then we move on to the imagine stage, which is essentially a planning stage.
This is a big one where you kind of run through what is the method of doing this? Do I know the process? Do I have the resources?
Do I have the time and the context available? Like what do I need to get this task done? Then it's motivate. So that's what we were talking about before, like activating that sense of I can get it done, finding the emotional state you need to launch into the task. Then the final two stages are act and achieve. So the act stage is about doing the task, but that's really around also problem solving if barriers pop up, the unexpected stuff that arrives that tends to derail.
That's hard to predict. And then the achieve stage is noticing that you've actually finished and that you've done it and any learnings that you're going to take away from that.
Jonathan: And I think as you apply those stages, a really important thing with ADHD is the knowing versus the doing. So with ADHD, we're very quick at picking up a lot of information and thinking that, OK, now I have the answer.
So we've got the CMA code, C-A-M-A-A, as Mad was just going through. But then a really important part with ADHD is the experiential component. So as you're doing it, actually visualizing what it'd be like. So with the connect stage, really visualizing, well, what would that story be? If I did that thing, what would my life story beyond that moment be?
With if I didn't do it, what would my story be? So we can really see that connection as a really tangible meaning. Then the the imagined stage with the process, resources and context. Again, we're very good at visualizing things. We're not very good at organizing it.
So when I say organizing it, we fly at 30,000 feet, see the mountaintops, but we don't see the valleys in between. So if we can stop and really sort of, as Mad was saying, consciously work ourselves through that, think ourselves through. And sometimes with working memory challenges, we need to externalize that by writing a list on a page or looking at allocated times in a diary. But if we can do that, then it's easy to see not only what resources are needed and when it'll work best, but also that sense of motivation that I was talking about earlier.
William Curb: I love that too, because I've often heard that ADHD is this condition where we know what to do, but we don't know how to do it. Yeah. And for me, I'm like stepping back and I'm like, but that means we don't know what we're doing. We're jumping ahead too far. We're like, this is what I need to do, but we're skipping this important step of like the visualization of like, OK, if that visualization should include me starting to do the task and that will inform what I need to do.
Jonathan: Yeah, which very neatly loops back to the idea of who we are, our self-esteem and how we build that within this projected idea of us achieving.
Madeline O'Reilly: Just reflecting on that, the visualizing component. It's been interesting over a decade or plus years of working with adults with ADHD, you know, originally a lot of this, you know, the things you learn, you're taught at uni, your strategies that you kind of go into therapy with clients involve a lot of, you know, like fill in this form, do this chart, we're going to do this piece of work on this piece of paper, essentially, or now it would be an app, but essentially these structured tasks and often around planning and organizing.
That's as a psychologist where we would naturally go. But it's been interesting to see that with folks with ADHD, that is unfun as a general rule, unless they've created the thing, then it may be it's fun, but otherwise that just looks like work and unappealing. But using imagination and visualizing and actually just getting them to sort of like play around with like a dress rehearsal of the activity in their mind, maybe talking it out loud to someone who they can bounce it off of. That is much more accessible, it seems to me, in general, and much easier to kind of activate towards rather than the task of organizing pen and paper on a page, which is not to say that that wouldn't be helpful. And sometimes I think at the end of imagining it, maybe they do write a few things down, but it's a lot easier to get going on. I've found to just ask someone to create it in their mind, imagine themselves doing it as a way of planning.
Jonathan: And that's been the great opportunity with ADHD coaching and why it's been so successful, particularly in this area is that the whole approach of ADHD coaching is client centered and about, let's go on this journey together.
Let's be experiential. And as Matt was saying, we know with ADHD, verbal processing is a great way of organizing thought because language is an organizational tool. We have to put all these things bouncing around in our heads into a coherent order so the other person understands it.
And if they don't, let us know pretty quickly. So, you know, verbal processing, as Matt said, writing stuff down. So anything that's going to relieve our working memory, so we're not trying to hold it all up there and get overwhelmed. That step by step journey, what would that be like? And who would you be while you're doing that? Is, you know, one of the things that I love about ADHD coaching.
William Curb: Yeah, because it is something where, yeah, we, especially that working memory piece where we try to hold way too much in there and then we get, we're not organizing it.
And that's like why writing it down is so important. Like it's that forced organization of like, OK, I've had these ideas. How do they actually go together?
What are the other places in the steps? I was thinking of the act where you were talking about also how the derailment from the unexpected and how much that can really affect us, even in like weird ways. Whereas like this morning I had another meeting early in the morning that got canceled and then I was like, how am I filling this time now? Like I have stuff to do, but I wasn't expecting to use this time for something else. And it was took me a while to like reset and get engaged into what I needed to do now that I wasn't doing this other thing, which I didn't even really want to do anyways. And I was like, thankful it got canceled. I was like, oh, great, I have time to do this stuff, but now I have to actually do it. Yeah.
Jonathan: Well, and, you know, one of the things we talk about in the book in the act stage that it's it's the act of bringing the imagined into reality. So you're actually going through. And when you do that, you're invariably going to find some some bits that rub. There's going to be some things that don't go quite as smoothly in real life as they did in your head. Or as you discovered, you're going to come up against things where things change. So, you know, this is where we have that little acronym, Notice, Analyze, Choose.
So NAC. So the first problem with ADHD is we often don't stop to notice that, oh, I've hit a barrier. We can either keep trying to trudge through it and spinning our wheels or we end up procrastinating. We stop. And often it's not a big problem. It's often just a small problem. Like, you know, I don't have my hand on that form or or I don't know.
I don't know where that link is to that website I've got to go to. Or there never things or rarely things that we don't think we can solve because if we can't solve them, if they're new, they're usually novel enough to be interesting that we want to go and solve it. And I always talk about it's the pebble in the shoe, not the boulder on the path.
So it's that little pebble in the shoe that just feels a bit uncomfortable. So. Yeah, I'll just stop doing that now. So, you know, this thing about noticing it first is really critical.
Then the analyzing is really about saying like you did, like saying, well, what does this mean now that this has changed? What do I have to adjust? Do I have to go back to that, imagine, stage, and re-visualize where I go from here? Or is it just a short adjustment?
Do I just have to correct for this problem? And then that last bit, the C, the choose, is really critical, because that's another thing with ADHD. We can not be great at doing, is actually stopping and saying, oh, okay, now I definitely am choosing this different approach.
I'm switching now. So when you said, okay, now you have that free time, well, now I'm gonna use that free time for something else. This is about something else, and mean something else now.
William Curb: And I really love that. It's the pebble in the shoe, not the boulder in the path. Like that is so true. And I've experienced that, literally, nearly experienced that like exact thing where I've been like walking and been like, oh, I'm gonna go, like there's something in my shoe and it's really bugging me.
And I have to go home versus like, oh, I have to go over this fallen tree and get to the path. And that was nothing. Yeah, exactly. You said about also watching your capacity to actually do something, which I think is something, a lot of people with ADHD skip, is we often think about things in terms of simply time management. If I have time to do something, I should be able to do something, but not in terms of what I'm actually capable of doing at the time.
Jonathan: Yeah, which is interesting when we have a very distorted perception of time. Yeah. Anyway, you know, at times with ADHD fluctuates so dramatically because, you know, there's that attention working memory component, but also too, we tend to be much more emotionally present, which means that time goes fast or slow dramatically, depending on what we're being influenced by. So that whole capacity, again, going back to that imagining thing like Mad was saying, is about being able to see myself doing it. You know, visualizing means really experiencing it.
And when you can see that, then all of it comes into focus. You can see, well, okay, what was I doing, but what I'm going to be doing before that? What am I going to be doing after that? You know, will I need a break after doing that thing?
Will I feel like starting another stage straight away? Because, you know, invariably when I worked with clients and they start using calendars, and I could just, I could hear the universal shiver out there when I said the word calendar. But when they start using calendars, the first thing they do is they try and pack everything in, one after the other, because it's just really arbitrary, logistical thing of our guy, just one thing after another, and there's that amount of time.
But the reality is, anyone out there will build space into a diary because we don't just switch from one task to another. And it matters what happened before and what's going to happen after. So this whole relationship with time is really important. And, you know, this is one of the reasons Madeline and I also run a online program, a group program, that's built around the book that we run over three months. And one of the reasons we're doing it that way, and, you know, people get live access to both of us through the program as well as the self-directed content, is because as we discovered today, there's all these little components to it to unpack. Now, you could do it by reading the book, but it's even more helpful if you can have, you know, a clinical expert sitting there with you, alerting you to these little features that are not always obvious, like how we manage time.
Madeline O'Reilly: And can I add something to about capacity? I guess our theory underpinning the model, as such, or one of our theories, would be that, and it's in the book, I think, we talk about this and unpack it a bit, but that really when you do procrastinate, like once procrastination starts going, i.e. you've redirected away from the task, probably what's going on, you know, subconsciously or in there, but you're not really observing it, is there's an unmet need of sorts. So, you know, you're tired or hungry or spent or exhausted or, you know, just really have an urge to move or there's some sort of need that's driven you somewhere else. And I think that starts to relate to capacity because we do need to be able to observe that need in ourselves and we do need to be able to factor that in in our planning, but also be flexible enough in the moment to respond to it, kind of as though it's a barrier, as though it's an unexpected barrier to action that we didn't plan for, but, oh, dear, I'm exhausted, so I'm going to have to change my plan for today in order to meet that need and then make, essentially, a new plan based on that. Because if we don't, we just wander into procrastination and then essentially we're lost and it's pretty hard then to come back from that.
William Curb: I mean, I love this idea of the procrastination being symptoms of like these unmet needs because I know a lot of us have this real hard time with this interoception of understanding how we feel. And so we're not realizing that we're feeling spent. And so if we can kind of like, oh, this procrastination, you know, if I can like maybe root out, is this because I'm feeling spent or maybe I'm just really dehydrated or something. You know, there's something underpinning why I'm procrastinating. It's not a moralistic thing about me being lazy.
Madeline O'Reilly: Yeah. And then we circumvent the whole like feeding yourself up. I'm a bad person. I can't do that. And then again, we protect the self-esteem.
Jonathan: And a great way of doing that is, I mean, this is where mindfulness is really useful and just thinking about how we bring in sort of incremental strategic mindfulness where we check in on ourselves regularly and tied into that, too, is acceptance. Is that, OK, I just feel tired now. Now, it's only 10 o'clock in the morning.
I shouldn't feel tired. But then we open ourselves to what can I do about that? And, you know, it's not always going to have a sleep. It might just be going to the opposite, going to some movement or have something to drink or whatever. But I mean, if we don't stop and notice it and accept it, then we're never going to solve it. And we end up getting derailed, as Madeline was saying. Yeah.
William Curb: And I also just see this through this lens, too, of like when I'm procrastinating, I'm also not really usually enjoying what I'm doing either. You know, I'm doing something that's not a actually recovery based thing. I mean, I'm scrolling social media or something, which is not to say that has no place in my life. But if I'm just doing it to prolong whatever break I'm having, I'm like, well, what if I took a real break? Maybe that would be much better pretending I need to, you know, like what's going on? Can I make this something that's actually I hate putting everything in terms of productivity, but, you know, something that is enjoyable, at least.
Madeline O'Reilly: Well, this is something that replenishes the need.
Jonathan: And it's a fundamental underlying thing here is that achievement feels good and that achievement can be about that productivity task that everyone is agreeing is good to do. But the other part of achievement that's unspoken in adult life is that we have an expectation that each of us will take care of ourselves because we're adults. I don't have to worry whether Mad took care of herself overnight and had a good night's sleep. I mean, I hope you did, Mad.
But I know she'll take care of that herself. So and I think there's this unspoken thing that with adults with ADHD, that gets lost in the translation from child to adult, where we, like you said, that having a rest is an achievement, you know, taking care of yourself, retooling yourself, eating, you know, doing some movement when you've been sitting in front of a computer for three hours is all achievement based because you're actually achieving something. You're achieving your own functionality. And again, then we tie back in that idea of acceptance and that internalized view of the world.
So I look at the world from who I am and who I want to be and what my goals are rather than thinking, what is the world thinking about me? Because then then tied to with how we function emotionally, you know, we can end up in a spiral of trying to perform and not being able to meet it. And you can see where you get to with ADHD about being trapped in this self doubt and this idea of, well, I can't deliver what the world is expecting of me.
William Curb: It is funny with like the expectations, because also what I've noticed is it's usually not actually external expectations that are actually it's my internal view of what those external expectations are. Yeah, absolutely. I'll be like, oh, yeah, this is and I'm like, oh, people aren't thinking about me that much.
That's right. So one of the other places that I was really interested to ask you about is you also looked at this from like a neuroscience perspective, which I think is a really interesting way to like look at how would you even start doing that with a procrastination?
Jonathan: Well, I mean, you know, with anything with ADHD, you know, there's always the focus on the problem when we look at research around ADHD and that's valuable. That's important. I've always found that the greatest value, though, is to look at what we consider average neurological functioning.
So what are we expecting to see in most people and how does that work? And then apply that to what we're talking about here now, you know, from my world, I came originally from pharmaceutical world. And so, you know, it was all neurochemistry. So it was all about understanding relationships with dopamine and noradrenaline and that sort of thing, which, you know, is a core part of it. And that's core part of the neuroscience. But then when you start getting beyond that and you start looking, well, OK, if we look in sort of average function or some people call normal function or typical function, then we start looking at things like neural networks. So we start looking at things like default mode versus task positive network, which effectively at one level, we're talking about emotional triggered or responses or an association versus attention and logic.
And then the ability to create the emotion that's useful to you when we look at then, you know, how that ties into behavioral expression is where we ended up with. Is that now there's stuff that is relatively accepted as proven. There is stuff out there that is new, like the neural network stuff is last decade, basically, but even much, much later in terms of clinical application.
But when we look at it, it all supports what we've seen behaviorally with people with ADHD and people with ADHD are a fantastic opportunity for understanding neuroscience because we can perform and not perform in the same day. We're not broken. We're just inconsistent. We have the ability and usually have done the performance at some time.
In fact, many times. But the difference is we're waiting for the perfect conditions to be delivered to us to make it happen. Whereas by looking at the neuroscience, and this is what effectively Seamer is, we can say, OK, if we break that down to, well, how does it happen for people without ADHD? Wow, whether they realize it or not, they have this structure that they adhere to. And that's what guides them through the process. And then there's the neurological payoffs from that that you do get dopamine availability increases that you do get a reward response from these sorts of activities.
And then so you get this self perpetuating model. For example, the active visualization actually has a neurochemical effect in the brain, which is great. But you've got to know to do the behavior first.
William Curb: Yeah, it is the knowing what to do, feeling like we know what we need to do.
Jonathan: And understanding that it's not magic, that there is what can feel like magic. And I'm happy to feel magical. But I mean, the reality is that when we do things, we have an effect on our emotions and our thoughts. I mean, one of the things I mean, I think is another big myth is the belief that our emotion will create the action. And I've actually come to believe it's the other way around that we either do it and we then we experience a feeling from it or we imagine doing it. And we still experience the same feeling. So it's it's about the different. And you know, if you think about with ADHD and again, going to that neural network model that, you know, we sit seem to sit in that default mode where we're being triggered by the world.
So like you were saying before, William, the externalized perception, we then associate it with our history. Now, as Matt was saying before, if our history is we have a lot of unreliable performance and we don't trust our performance, then we're going to be very, very risk adverse. So it's going to actually stop us from trying out new approaches. And then with the difficulty accessing attention means that every time we sort of start to think, oh, maybe there's a whole look is a logical way I could do it. If we don't do something to make that feel real, like visualize it and commit to it and have it stuck on the wall and say, OK, I know I normally wouldn't do it this way, but today I'm going to do it. I'm going to follow that list and do it that way until we do that. We're never going to experience that change and we're not going to get that neurological effect. So if you want to change your brain, change what you do.
William Curb: Definitely feel that it was like when I'm I will often try and jump start my day with going out for a walk or something and just having that movement. Just even just going up and down the street, great for getting me ready to do.
Jonathan: Absolutely. And tell me, William, what else do you get from that walk?
William Curb: Often I get sunshine. I get depending on if I'm listening to something, I might have like some sort of music or listen to a podcast, get be listening to this. Oh, this is a great idea. And I'm like, you know, really thinking about something. And there's the interesting effect of not being inside and having like that big thought outside area.
Jonathan: There you go. Mads, point earlier about the achieve. You were focusing on the movement, which is great. But there was so much more that happened on that. Now, if we remind ourselves of that, wow. So you went from movement to, wow, the sunshine under an open sky. I'm having big thoughts. I'm having new ideas. I'm enjoying listening to music. Well, that sounds like a really wonderfully stimulating environment to be in.
Madeline O'Reilly: Oh, it sounds really valuable.
Jonathan: Yeah, I want to go for more of an achievement.
William Curb: Yeah. All right. Well, we're coming up on time here. Is there anything you guys want to hit before we go?
Jonathan: Well, I think for me, it's look, I know the ADHD journey is a challenging one. It's also can be incredibly rewarding. You all out there and nothing but untapped potential, regardless of all the wonderful things you've achieved so far. So my big thought would be look for tools like these. Like Madal and I have spent years developing this tool and there are great other tools out there too. But the key is if you're going to engage with them, do it the ADHD way. Fully engage, throw yourself off the cliff out it and say, OK, I'm just going to do what they're suggesting I do. I'm going to internalize and I'm going to imagine myself being there. And I'm going to imagine myself, visualize myself living this experience. And then you're going to see the effect that we hope you get.
William Curb: Now, if people want to find out more about the book, Decoding Doing and more about you guys, where should they go?
Madeline O'Reilly: Yeah, we've got a website, DecodingDoing.com. And you can find out where to buy the book on there. You can find out about the program if you want to join that at any point in time. Or if you want to reach out, give us some feedback. We love to hear feedback, what you liked, what you didn't like, you know, how it's going, implementing it in your daily life. They're more than welcome to contact us through that website or through our emails. Happy to chat about it and the future with anyone. My work is a clinical psychologist in Sydney and it's Madalyn O'Reilly, clinicalpsychology.com.
Jonathan: And I'm an ADHD and executive function coach. And so mine is connect to ADHD.com.
William Curb: Awesome. Well, I will have all that in the show notes for everyone. And thank you guys so much for coming on. I really enjoy this conversation.
Jonathan: Oh, and thanks for having us. And, too, William, I noticed you're going to be at the conference in November. Yes. I will be too. So if anyone wants to come and chat, please come and grab me at the conference.
William Curb: Same here. Yeah, I'm happy to talk to anyone.
This Episode's Top Tips
When planning a task visualize the steps. Don’t just think about the goal, picture the process of how you’ll get there. And be prepared for interruptions or barriers. When they come up, pause, analyze the problem, and choose your next step.
Don’t just rely on time management—factor in your energy and emotional capacity when planning your day. While time plays a factor in what you can get done, your energy levels are an equally important factor to consider.
Often when you’re procrastinating, it’s a signal that something else—like rest, food, or movement—is needed. When you find yourself in a cycle of procrastination try slowing down and seeing what else might need to be addressed.