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Why you can't start (and the three types of procrastination)

Not all procrastination is the same. Each type needs a different fix.

Most advice about procrastination treats it as one thing. You're putting something off, so here's a tip: break it into smaller tasks, set a timer, just start. As if all procrastination comes from the same place and responds to the same treatment.

It doesn't. And if you have ADHD, you've probably noticed this. Some tasks you can't start because your brain won't cooperate. Others you won't start because something about the task makes you feel awful. And others you can't start because you genuinely don't know what the right move is, and the uncertainty itself is paralysing.

Fernando Borretti, a software engineer with ADHD, breaks procrastination into three distinct types. I think this taxonomy is one of the most useful frameworks I've come across, because once you can name which type you're dealing with, the solution becomes much clearer.

Type 1: ADHD procrastination

This is the one most people think of when they hear "ADHD." You want to do the task. You know what it is, you know how to do it, you're not afraid of it. But you can't get yourself to start because your attention keeps sliding off it like water off glass.

You sit down to work and twenty minutes later you're reading about the history of the Ottoman Empire or reorganising your desktop icons. Not because the Ottoman Empire is more important than your deadline, but because your brain's attentional system isn't giving you a choice.

This type is, in some ways, the most straightforward to address. Not easy, but straightforward. The first-line treatment is pharmacological: stimulant medication works because it addresses the underlying dopamine regulation issue that makes sustained attention so difficult. Borretti is blunt about this. There's no virtue in trying to beat it through willpower alone. Chemistry is what he calls "the critical node in the tech tree," the thing that unlocks everything else.

After medication, it's systems. A todo list that actually works, timers to manufacture urgency, clearing your environment of distractions. These are the scaffolding, and they matter enormously, but for most people they only work once the chemistry is right.

Research backs this up. A 2022 systematic review found that emotion dysregulation is a core symptom of adult ADHD, not a secondary feature. The attentional system and the emotional system are tangled together, which means the inability to focus isn't purely cognitive. There's an emotional weight to it that medication can ease in ways that productivity hacks alone cannot.

Type 2: Anxious procrastination

This one is different. You know exactly what you need to do. You might even know how to do it. But you don't want to, because the task brings up feelings you'd rather not have.

Maybe it's an email you need to send and you're worried about how the other person will react. Maybe it's a form you need to fill out and you're terrified of making a mistake. Maybe it's a phone call you've been dreading because the last one went badly. The task itself might take five minutes, but the emotional barrier in front of it feels enormous.

Borretti's short-term advice here is simple and honest: do it scared. Accept the anxiety rather than waiting for it to pass, because it won't pass, it'll just compound. Sometimes you need someone in the room with you when you hit send. Sometimes you need to talk it through first. But at some point you have to walk through the door with your heart racing and do the thing anyway.

He also has a trick I think is genuinely brilliant. If the task itself feels threatening, because it exists in some external domain you don't control, bring it into an environment that you do control. His example: you have a government form to fill out and even opening the form makes you feel sick. So instead of filling out the form directly, you take the fields from the form and put them in a spreadsheet. Your spreadsheet, your fonts, your colours. You fill it out there, in your own space, on your own terms, and then copy the values across. It sounds almost silly, but the change of context changes the emotional charge. You're not filling out a government form anymore. You're filling out a spreadsheet, and spreadsheets are fine.

The same principle works for emails. If opening the email client gives you dread, compose the reply in a text editor or a note. You're not writing a stressful email, you're writing a text. You're drafting something, which is low-stakes by nature. Once it's written, copying it into the email client and pressing send is a much smaller ask.

For the long term, Borretti suggests writing down the things you consistently procrastinate on due to anxiety and looking for the common thread. What do they share? What's the deeper thing you're avoiding? By identifying the emotional root cause you can start working on it, whether through therapy, CBT, or just becoming more aware of the pattern so it has less power over you.

Type 3: Decision paralysis

This is the hardest one, and Borretti is honest about not having a perfect solution for it. Neither do I.

Decision paralysis procrastination happens when you don't know what the right choice is. You have a set of options, there are reasonable arguments for and against each one, and the uncertainty about outcomes is genuine. So you ruminate. You go back and forth. You think about it in the shower, on the train, at 2am. And the thinking never resolves into action because no amount of thinking alone can give you certainty about an uncertain thing.

The problem gets worse the more you think, because thinking in your own head has a fundamental limitation: you have a finite working memory. You can only hold so many threads at once. So you inevitably start going in circles, revisiting the same arguments, reaching the same non-conclusions, and confusing the act of worrying with the act of deciding.

Three things that help:

Talk to people. Friends, therapists, AI assistants, anyone who can introduce a perspective you haven't considered. Borretti makes the point that thinking by yourself has diminishing returns because you quickly exhaust all the thoughts you'll ever have about the problem. Other people bring genuinely new options and considerations. Sometimes someone mentions a possibility you hadn't even thought of and the whole thing collapses into simplicity.

Write it out. This is the big one. Treat the decision like an object of study rather than a swirling cloud of anxiety in your head. Sit down with a blank page or a canvas and make the thoughts into real, physical, manipulable things. Name the arguments. Number the options. Refer back to earlier points. When thoughts exist only in your head they feel infinite and overwhelming. When you write them down you can see that actually, there are four options and six considerations, and that's a manageable problem.

The act of writing also forces clarity in a way that thinking doesn't. You can't write a vague feeling. You have to turn it into words, and the process of finding the words often reveals what you actually think.

Use an AI thinking partner. Borretti mentions starting conversations with Claude to lay out his plans and work through problems. This is a genuinely underrated use of AI. Not for getting answers, but for having a thinking partner who doesn't get tired, doesn't judge, and can hold more context than your working memory allows. You explain the decision, lay out the options, and the process of explaining it to someone (even an AI) often clarifies things that circling in your head never would.

The meta-lesson

What makes this taxonomy useful isn't just that it names three types. It's that it stops you from applying the wrong solution.

If you're dealing with ADHD procrastination and you try to fix it with "do it scared," you'll fail, because the problem isn't fear, it's attention. If you're dealing with anxious procrastination and you try to fix it with a pomodoro timer, you'll fail, because the problem isn't starting, it's the emotions the task triggers. And if you're dealing with decision paralysis and you try to fix it with medication, you'll still be stuck, because the problem isn't your brain's chemistry, it's that you genuinely don't know what to do.

The first step, always, is figuring out which kind of stuck you are. Once you know that, the path forward is at least visible, even if it's still hard.

Inspired by Fernando Borretti's Notes on Managing ADHD.