Study Tips That Fail for ADHD
and What to do Instead
The internet is filled with study tips, hacks and strategies for students. The problem is often these suggestions don’t account for the uniqueness of ADHD brains. When ADHDers try these tips (and then watch them fail) they feel like they are the problem. That’s not the case, you’re just trying to use strategies that weren’t built for your brain! Here are four common study strategies that often fail for people with ADHD, and what you can try instead.
“Eat the frog”
AKA getting the hardest thing on your to-do list out of the way. The idea here is that you get your most dreaded task over with, leaving the rest of your day feeling lighter so you don’t have it looming over you.
When it comes to ADHD, this ends up becoming a source of procrastination. You’re telling yourself you have to go do that thing you really don’t want to do, so you end up putting it off until the day is almost over. You might get it done once the sense of urgency kicks in, but that means you didn’t get to anything else on your list.
Instead: start with an easy win. This will help give you that sense of “I can do things” and a little burst of dopamine to get the momentum started. We need fuel and momentum to get through hard things! Pure willpower isn’t a strategy.
The Pomodoro Method
This is a classic study method where you focus for 25 minutes, followed by a 5 minute break, and then this cycle is repeated a few times. But with ADHD, just starting is often the hardest part of it all. With the standard pomodoro method, you’ll find yourself having to gear up and restart every half an hour!
Instead: try a modified version of the pomodoro method, like 50 minutes of work followed by a 10 minute break.
Time Blocking
Standard time blocking is rigid and based on external measures of time. As many ADHDers struggle with time management (and just generally orienting themselves in time), this strategy is not in your favour. You may forget to account for transition time needed, misestimate how much time things take, and/or not notice when it’s time to start what you’ve blocked off.
When you don’t set yourself up for success and something goes wrong, you may feel like you’ve failed before you even started the task!
Instead: habit stacking can be a way to make time feel more concrete. Habit stacking is essentially when you tie new habits or routines around things that are already established in your day. For example, if you have a class at 2pm, plan to organize your emails once the class is over.
To-Do Lists
Don’t get me wrong, you definitely need a way of noting down and remembering everything you need to get done.
However, a lengthy to-do list can easily become overwhelming and another source of procrastination. When you look at a huge long list of things you’d rather not do, it becomes easy to think “this is a lot, I’ll get to it later”.
Instead: Identify your “must do” tasks for the day, and separate them from your main list. It’s also important to be specific in what you actually need to do, and write down the starting point, not the outcome. For example, instead of writing “do essay” on your list, you would write “start outlining the essay for history class”.
Study tips help, but personalized ADHD strategies are truly where it’s at.
That’s where ADHD coaching comes in! You can learn more with a free, no pressure discovery call.
