A specific question, answered specifically.

How to finish projects when you have ADHD

Here's the part most ADHD productivity content skips: you don't have a finishing problem, you have a recovery problem. You can finish things. You can't finish things across consecutive days when one bad day breaks the chain.

What actually works

The trick is decoupling "today's progress" from "the streak." Most planning systems make finishing harder, not easier — they bake in a fragile streak metric, so once you miss day 4, you abandon the whole thing on day 5.

The protocol that works: - Pick a project you've abandoned in the last 3 months. Just one. - Write down what state you LEFT it in. Specifically. ("Stopped at chapter 2, page 14, after the section on X.") - Block 12 minutes tomorrow morning, before anything else, to do exactly one of: re-read the last paragraph, write a single sentence, or close the doc and move on. - That's the whole protocol. The point isn't to finish the project — it's to make re-entry cheap enough that you'll do it again the next day.

What doesn't work, and why

Streak-based apps. They reward consistency, but ADHD brains aren't consistently inconsistent — we're inconsistently inconsistent. The streak breaks, and the app punishes you, so you abandon the app, then the project. The full breakdown is in why streaks make ADHD worse.

"Just push through." Pushing through works once or twice. After that, the cost of every push is higher than the previous one. By push five, the project is associated with shame, not progress.

Buying a new system. The system isn't the problem. You already have at least three systems that would work — the problem is that none of them have re-entry baked in. The structured re-entry move is in the re-entry protocol for ADHD.

The Deskrune version

The ADHD Executive Function Kit was specifically built for this. The system assumes you'll miss three days and builds recovery in. Re-entry protocol, four-minute daily page, weekly review you can skip without breaking the week. $4.99 through May 31.

If you want a physical complement: a 60-minute Time Timer is the only timer that actually helps with the "actually start" problem (the visual disc is the thing). About $35-40 on Amazon.