ADHD an A-Z

How many times have you told yourself, “I’ll do it tomorrow,” only to watch tomorrow become next week—or even next year? In The Procrastination Playbook for Adults with ADHD, therapist and time management expert Risa Williams argues that procrastination isn’t laziness; it’s a complex emotional and cognitive pattern that can quietly hijack your time, focus, and sense of self-worth. Williams contends that by learning to “catch” procrastination before it catches you—especially its sneaky, subtle forms—you can transform your daily relationship with time, motivation, and progress.

At its heart, this book is about how adults with ADHD—and anyone who feels chronically stuck or overwhelmed—can learn to decode the invisible barriers between intention and action. It’s an interactive, conversational guide, complete with worksheets and self-assessment tools, designed to help you identify how procrastination manifests in your daily life, what triggers it emotionally, and how to dismantle it step by step.

The Fog and the Catching Game

Williams introduces the metaphor of the “procrastination fog”—a mental haze that interrupts your internal sense of time and progress. When you’re in the fog, you lose track of how long things have been left undone, and you rationalize the avoidance (“I’ll get to it later”) until months or even years have passed. This concept particularly resonates for people with ADHD, who experience what researchers call time blindness—a tendency to misjudge how much time tasks or days actually take. As Williams writes, time keeps moving whether you’re tuned in or not, which is why learning to notice when you’ve drifted into procrastination is crucial.

Her strategy is deceptively simple but profoundly effective: Call it out, plan it out, and take action. In other words, notice the cloud (“I’m avoiding this report”), name what type of procrastination it is (time mismanagement, perfectionism, fear of judgment, etc.), and take the smallest possible step forward—often through guided exercises in the book. You don’t have to overhaul your whole life overnight. Instead, you learn to make small, compassionate course corrections that gradually lift the fog.

Three Forces Behind Every Delay

Before breaking down the specific kinds of procrastination, Williams identifies three underlying factors that influence whether you follow through on tasks: stress, self-talk, and support. Stress magnifies overwhelm and disrupts executive functioning; harsh self-talk erodes confidence and motivation; lack of support isolates you into cycles of avoidance. She emphasizes that addressing procrastination means strengthening all three areas. You learn to regulate stress by identifying “stress signs” (irritability, fatigue, physical tension), to rewire your internal dialogue toward self-compassion, and to lean on “accountability systems” such as goal sponsors or body-doubling partners. These three forces, when optimized, form the foundation for long-term momentum.

Micro vs. Macro Procrastinations

Williams expands the concept of procrastination beyond big tasks like finishing a degree or writing a book. She distinguishes between macro-procrastinations (large-scale projects avoided over months or years) and micro-procrastinations (small repetitive delays such as avoiding laundry, ignoring emails, or skipping workouts). Interestingly, she finds that micro-procrastinations can trigger just as much shame and stress as macro ones because they accumulate daily guilt.

By teaching you to catch even minor avoidance patterns early, Williams helps you “retrain your procrastination radar.” You begin to see when you’re slipping into self-defeating loops, rather than waiting until they balloon into crises. Through this distinction, procrastination becomes something you can map and measure across scales.

Why Gentleness Beats Discipline

Traditional productivity advice often glorifies willpower and strict discipline—something that doesn’t work well for ADHD brains wired for variable motivation and emotional intensity. Williams flips the paradigm: kindness motivates, criticism paralyzes. By practicing kinder self-talk and realistic goal-setting, you invite progress rather than force it. This idea echoes the self-compassion approach of psychologist Kristin Neff and the incremental habit-building strategies in James Clear’s Atomic Habits—but Williams adds a uniquely therapeutic twist, helping you reframe procrastination as an emotional sensory experience rather than a moral failure.

The Workbook Model

A hallmark of the book is its interactive design. Using worksheets like “The Avoidance Onion,” “Extreme Thinking Glasses,” “Facts vs. Feelings,” and “Activation Energy,” Williams invites readers to visually dissect avoidance patterns, stress reactions, and thought distortions. Each page functions like a mini therapy session, guiding you through reflection (“Why am I avoiding this task?”), diagnosis (“Which procrastination cloud is this?”), and recovery (“What’s my first small, kind step forward?”). It’s essentially a map of emotional self-navigation—useful both inside and outside of therapy.

Why This Matters

The larger message of The Procrastination Playbook isn’t just about getting things done—it’s about reclaiming your relationship with time, stress, and self-confidence. As Williams says, “Time really flies when you’re avoiding things.” But when you learn to read the signs—the stress, the fog, the self-critical inner dialogue—you realize you have the power to slow time back down. In this way, procrastination becomes not a punishment but a teacher—a signal pointing to what needs care, clarity, and compassion.

By the end of the book, you don’t just learn how to complete that project or form that habit; you emerge as what Williams calls a pro-active procrastination catcher—someone who no longer gets lost for years in clouds of avoidance but instead notices, names, and navigates their way to the finish line one mindful step at a time.

Williams starts with what she calls the stress factor—the idea that chronic stress doesn’t just coexist with procrastination, it actually fuels it. Research quoted in the book (from Fuschia Sirois and Timothy Pychyl) shows that people often procrastinate tasks to regulate negative mood in the short term. You avoid what stresses you out to get temporary relief, only to feel even more stressed later. This creates the endless loop: stress leads to procrastination, procrastination creates more stress, and the cycle tightens.

Spotting Stress Signs

To break the loop, Williams suggests learning to read your own “stress signs.” She divides them into internal (how stress feels inside your body) and external (how it shows up in your behavior). Internal signs include tension, headaches, or racing thoughts, while external signs might look like irritability, skipping meals, or misplacing items. Once you can identify these early cues, you can pause, check in, and apply stress-reduction techniques before procrastination fully sets in.

Practical Calming Rituals

Williams offers science-backed ways to lower stress quickly: short walks, deep breathing practices like box breathing, laughter, yoga stretches, exposure to green or blue spaces, or listening to calming music. (She cites studies from Akimbekov and Razzaque, among others, showing that these activities help regulate the body’s stress response.) She encourages choosing a few options that reset both body and brain so that clarity can return. Her reminder is simple: when you bring down stress, you restore executive functioning—your brain’s ability to prioritize, plan, and begin tasks.

The Body–Brain Connection

Many people treat the brain as if it’s floating separately from the body, but the book insists that physical depletion leads directly to mental fog. Adequate sleep, hydration, nutrition, and rest aren’t optional—they’re the fuel for motivation. Williams frames this as “making space for clarity”: each stress-lowering action clears mental bandwidth, preparing you to take your next small step toward progress.

Another major obstacle Williams tackles is destructive self-talk, what she calls the self-talk factor. If stress clouds your brain, negative internal dialogue can completely shut down your momentum. Adults with ADHD, she notes, often internalize criticism from childhood—teachers, parents, and peers who demanded they “try harder.” Over time, that external criticism becomes an inner tyrant.

The Problem With Harsh Self-Talk

Negative internal scripts (“I’m lazy,” “I always mess up,” “I’ll never finish”) undercut your confidence before you even start. Williams connects this phenomenon to the finding that children with ADHD hear up to 20,000 corrective statements by age ten (Dr. Michael Jellineck). As adults, those words echo in your self-narration, keeping you stuck in avoidance and frustration rather than empowerment.

Neutral and Kind Reframes

The goal, she says, isn’t to trick yourself into unrealistic positivity but to move toward neutral and ultimately kind self-talk. Examples: “These instructions are complicated, but I’ll figure them out if I go slowly.” Or, “I can take this in steps, and it doesn’t have to be perfect.” Neutral statements ease emotional reactivity; kind ones inspire action. Williams echoes Newberg and Waldman’s research about neuroplasticity—the more you repeat positive or neutral phrases, the stronger those neural pathways become.

Consistency Is Everything

Changing self-talk can feel awkward at first—it’s like arguing with your own thoughts. But consistency reprograms the brain over time. The equation she offers is simple: Critical self-talk + stress = procrastination. Shifting either variable—by reducing criticism or managing stress—can disrupt the loop and rebuild confidence.

The third factor shaping procrastination patterns is support. Many high-achieving adults with ADHD believe they should be able to figure everything out alone—an assumption that breeds burnout and isolation. Williams argues that accountability is not weakness; it’s a structure for sustaining momentum.

Why Accountability Works

Research cited from the American Society of Training and Development shows that 95% of people complete a goal if they check in consistently with an accountability partner. That’s nearly double the success rate of those who don’t. Williams calls this the “goal sponsorship effect”: once someone witnesses your progress, it becomes real. You shift procrastination from an invisible mental fog to a shared venture.

Forms of Support

Support can take many forms—friends providing weekly check-ins, therapists helping you unpack emotional resistance, or “body doubling,” where someone simply sits nearby while you work. These gentle social pressures help ADHD brains sustain focus more comfortably. If external support isn’t accessible, Williams recommends self-accountability journaling: listing tiny weekly steps in bullet form and celebrating visible progress.

The takeaway is profound—procrastination thrives in isolation. When you invite others into your process, even symbolically, you create mirrors that reflect progress back to you and keep procrastination clouds from regrowing unnoticed.

People often think of procrastination as simply “putting things off,” but Williams exposes its many disguises—visible and subtle, helpful and harmful. Recognizing which kind has caught you determines how you’ll move forward.

Visible Forms

Visible types are easier to catch because you can see them happening. They include task avoidance (“I hate this job and don’t want to start”), time management issues (underestimating or misusing time), poor task prioritization (doing peripheral chores instead of the key task), and what she calls the “half-way drift”—getting nearly done with something and never finishing it (like writing 75% of a paper and leaving it incomplete for months). Her humor makes these relatable; she admits forgetting to mail forms for her passport even after filling them out—the perfect example of false progress.

Subtle Forms

Subtle procrastinations include perfectionism, waiting for motivation, analysis paralysis, time sinkholes (getting lost in social media or unnecessary research), and self-protection (avoiding tasks to protect yourself from failure or judgment). These are trickier because they masquerade as productivity—like over-researching or fine-tuning rather than starting. Williams provides “call it out, plan it out, take action” formulas for each, helping readers notice the emotional motive underneath every delay.

She normalizes procrastination as universal—“Even high-achievers procrastinate something”—then reframes catching it not as moral correction but as emotional literacy. The more fluently you can identify your procrastination cloud’s shape, the more confidently you can steer your ship out of the fog.

Breaking free from the fog requires what Williams calls activation energy—the smallest burst of effort needed to start a new motion. Borrowing the term from chemistry, she compares this to the spark that ignites a reaction: if you can generate just enough activation energy, the momentum will carry you.

Tools That Spark Action

She offers an impressive range of strategies:

• Timers and Pomodoro sessions for focused bursts of twenty-five minutes
• Music timers where playlists act as time boundaries
• Brain warm-ups (crosswords, journaling, or short walks to “prime” the mind)
• The 15-minute rule: doing any task for just fifteen minutes to bypass inertia

She emphasizes that starting—even briefly—creates the neurochemical boost of progress. Motivation doesn’t arrive before action; it grows because of action. This idea challenges the common ADHD myth that you should wait to "feel ready." Instead, you move first, and readiness follows.

Rewards and Self-Treats

To reinforce activation energy, Williams integrates planned rewards. After each tiny achievement, you celebrate—a coffee outing, an episode of a favorite show, or simply acknowledging completion. This gamification makes momentum sustainable. She quotes Ferris Jabr’s research that downtime actually replenishes the brain’s motivation and creativity, anchoring her reward system in neuroscience.

Through these techniques, procrastination stops feeling like self-sabotage and starts feeling like self-science—a series of experiments in how your particular brain starts and sustains focus.

Ultimately, The Procrastination Playbook teaches that sustainable productivity grows from compassion, not pressure. Williams uses tools like “The Avoidance Onion” and “Extreme Thinking Glasses” to help you dissect emotional and cognitive layers fueling avoidance. When you peel back those layers—fear, perfectionism, uncertainty—you find not laziness but self-protection.

The Avoidance Onion

This worksheet walks you through why you resist certain tasks. For example, one client avoids writing because they fear not being good enough. Beneath that fear lies a core belief: “I’m a terrible writer.” By uncovering and challenging the belief (“I am learning how to write better each time I practice”), the emotional resistance lessens.

Extreme Thinking Glasses

This metaphor highlights how exaggerated thoughts distort reality. Through “just the facts” reframing, you replace “I’ll never finish this” with “This will take two hours; I can do an hour tonight.” A small factual anchor dismantles the spiral of overwhelm. (This approach parallels cognitive behavioral therapy techniques.)

In the end, her approach is deeply humane: progress happens not through forcing but through forgiving, not through control but curiosity. By practicing kindness, you transform productivity into emotional self-care—each finished task becoming proof not only of capability but of compassion toward yourself.

The final stage of Williams’s framework is what she calls becoming a proactive procrastination catcher. You learn to spot the fog early, before it drains weeks of your life. This means observing internal cues of avoidance (guilt, frustration, resistance) and external behaviors (cleaning instead of working, compulsive scrolling, dodging your desk). Once caught, you respond with the plan: recognize, refocus, and restart.

Recognition and Reflection

Williams encourages quick journaling moments—three-minute reflections on what’s happening internally when you start drifting. This builds self-awareness muscles so procrastination becomes a detectable pattern rather than a mystery. Over time, you come to view procrastination as data, not defect.

Refocus and Restart

Once awareness arises, you reset gently: one small action, one gentle phrase. You can say, “I’m procrastinating right now—and that’s okay. I’m choosing one small thing to start.” This reframing converts guilt into curiosity. As Williams reminds readers at the finish line, the goal isn’t to never procrastinate again; it’s to never stay stuck in it for long.

Her closing advice echoes throughout the book: you already have the tools you need. You’ve learned to read the clouds, steer the ship, and celebrate each micro-step. This transformation—from paralysis to proactive catching—marks not only time reclaimed but self-trust restored.