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How to finish projects when your brain keeps starting new ones

The ADHD project graveyard is real. But the headstones are lying about why things died.

Everyone with ADHD has a graveyard. Half-knitted scarves, half-read books, half-built apps, half-written novels. The guitar you played obsessively for two weeks and haven't touched since March. The online course that's been sitting at 34% complete for so long that the platform has redesigned twice.

The standard explanation is that you lost interest. Your brain got bored, went chasing the next shiny thing, and left the old project to rot. Dopamine wore off, novelty faded, you moved on. There's truth in that. The ADHD brain's dopamine system is wired to light up for new things and dim for familiar ones, and that's well documented.

But I don't think novelty loss is the whole story. Not even close. And if you treat it as the whole story, you'll draw the wrong conclusions about yourself and reach for the wrong solutions.

The real killer is context loss

Fernando Borretti, a software engineer with ADHD, makes an observation that I think gets overlooked: projects often die not because you lose interest, but because you lose context.

Here's how it happens. You're working on something, making real progress, feeling good about it. Then life intervenes. A busy week at work, a holiday, an illness, or just a few days where other things took priority. No big deal. You'll pick it up again soon.

But when you come back to the project after a week or two away, it feels alien. You open the document or the codebase or the half-finished painting and you can't remember where you were or what you were thinking. The shape of the project that was so clear in your mind has dissolved. You'd need to spend an hour just re-reading your own work to figure out what comes next, and that re-entry cost feels enormous, so you put it off. And by putting it off, you lose even more context, which makes the re-entry cost even higher. It's a vicious cycle, and the project quietly dies while you tell yourself you'll get back to it eventually.

This is different from losing interest. You might still care about the project. You might still want it to exist. But the activation energy required to resume it has grown so large that it feels impossible, and your brain, faced with the choice between "spend an hour re-loading context on an old thing" and "start something exciting and new," will choose the new thing every single time.

Research on context switching supports this. Studies show that returning to a task after an interruption carries a measurable cognitive cost, and for ADHD brains, that cost is significantly higher. One estimate suggests ADHD brains take 45 to 60 minutes to fully re-engage with a task after a switch, compared to about 23 minutes for neurotypical brains. Now imagine that switch isn't minutes but weeks. The cost becomes prohibitive.

The solution is contact, not commitment

Borretti's approach to this is disarmingly simple: keep in regular contact with your projects, even when you're not actively working on them.

This doesn't mean working on everything every day. It means looking at everything regularly. He suggests making a recurring task, maybe daily or a few times a week, that just says "spend 15 to 30 minutes with this project."

And here's the key part: you don't even have to do anything productive during that time. If it's a piece of writing, open the document and just read it. If it's a coding project, look at the code. Don't write anything. Just read. If it's a creative project, sit with it. Think about it. Let the shape of the thing reform in your mind.

What you're doing is refreshing the cache. Keeping the mental model alive so that when you do have time and energy to work on it, you don't face that enormous re-entry cost. The project stays warm instead of going cold.

Borretti pairs this with a pomodoro reframe that I think is genuinely helpful. You're not committing to finishing the project. You're not even committing to making progress. You're committing to 25 minutes of contact. That's it. And often, once you've spent 25 minutes reading your own work and thinking about what comes next, you find yourself wanting to keep going. The timer was just the on-ramp.

Out of sight, out of mind

There's a related concept Borretti calls "visual field management" that connects directly to why projects die.

His rule is simple: to remember something, keep it in your visual field. To forget something, remove it. He keeps his todo list open on the left third of his screen at all times, so he can always see what he's working on, what comes next, and the list of active projects. Everything is visible, which means nothing quietly slips away.

The inverse is also true. If a project lives in a folder you never open, a tab you've long since closed, or a notebook you put in a drawer, it will vanish from your mind as completely as if it never existed. For ADHD brains, out of sight and out of mind are not just correlated, they're practically synonymous.

This is one of the reasons physical environments matter so much. If you're reading a book and you leave it on your bedside table, you'll see it every night. Leave it on a shelf in the other room and it's gone. If you're working on a sewing project and the machine is set up on the dining table, you'll sit down and work on it. Put it away in the cupboard and you'll forget you own a sewing machine.

The same applies digitally. Your active projects need to live somewhere you'll actually see them, not tucked into a folder hierarchy three clicks deep. A canvas where you can pin your projects visually and see them all at a glance does this naturally. So does keeping a running list of active projects in a workspace that you open every day. The point is that the tool should show you what's alive without you having to go looking for it.

When you do lose context (and you will)

Even with regular check-ins, there will be times when a project goes cold. You were ill for a month, or work got genuinely overwhelming, or life just happened. When you come back to something after a long gap, the re-entry problem is real and you need a strategy for it.

One approach: before you stop working on a project for the day, write a few sentences about where you are and what you think the next step is. Future-you will thank present-you enormously. This is like leaving yourself a note at the top of a climbing wall telling yourself which hold to grab next.

Another: if you didn't leave yourself a note, and you're staring at something that feels completely foreign, don't try to resume where you left off. Instead, treat the project as if you're encountering someone else's work for the first time. Read through it with fresh eyes. Take notes on what you notice, what's working, what isn't, what questions you have. You'll often find that this "fresh reading" actually generates better ideas than you would have had by just pushing forward from where you stopped.

And if you have a tool with semantic search, you can often recover context by searching for what you vaguely remember rather than knowing exactly where you filed it. "That thing about the pricing structure" or "the notes from when I was researching timber suppliers" will surface what you need without requiring you to have maintained a perfect filing system, which, if you have ADHD, you haven't.

The permission to go slow

There's something freeing about Borretti's approach once you really absorb it. He's not saying you need to work on every project every day. He's not saying you need to be more disciplined or more focused or more anything. He's saying: just don't let things go completely dark.

Fifteen minutes of contact, three times a week, is enough to keep a project alive in your mind. That's less than an hour a week. Over a month, it's maybe four hours. But those four hours are the difference between a project that's still breathing and one that's in the graveyard.

Some projects will still die, and that's fine. Not every idea deserves to be finished. But the ones that matter to you, the ones you'd be genuinely sad to abandon, deserve more than death by forgetting.

Keep them warm. Keep them visible. Keep them alive.

Inspired by Fernando Borretti's Notes on Managing ADHD.