Have you ever had something that you genuinely want to do but can't yourself start to take action even if it's urgent has consequences and a deadline and even when you logically know what exactly you need to do. And when you go online to solve this issue most productivity advice assumes that you can already start. It's all about planning your day just do it. And they say motivation comes after action. And yes, motivation often times follow action. But that advice is useless if you can't take the first action. Because the real problem isn't actually about productivity. It's about task initiation. And especially if you have ADHD, struggling with depression or chronic procrastination,

then that is the part that we need to focus on, task initiation. And as someone who got diagnosed with major depression as well as ADHD and struggled for years, I realized that there is a missing mechanism that's keeping us stuck that no one actually talks about. So the most important concept of this video that I want you to remember is that task initiation fails when the dopamine gap is too big. So if I would explain this simply basically that every activity gives your brain a certain level of stimulation. And when you try to switch a task or you know do something your brain compares what you're doing right now and what you are about to do next and your brain resist switching from a highly stimulating

activity to a low stimulation activity. So for you to initiate the next task, the next action has to feel either more rewarding, more interesting, or more urgent than the current one. So if you're here like scrolling, gaming, binging content, which all give high stimulation, and you're trying to do something like writing, studying, working, or getting admin work done, or maybe even going to the gym, which all have lower stimulation, then that jump can feel impossible because your brain is trying to avoid a massive drop in stimulation, and it's not really prioritizing. Obviously, this gap and struggling to go from high stimulation to low stimulation is difficult for everyone. But if you have ADHD,

depression or other issues, basically the effect can be stronger and it can be even harder for you because this part of the brain is essentially messed up. That's why essentially if you have ADHD, when you're locked into something, even when you're hungry, want to drink something or even you know you want to go to the toilet, you can hold it because what is in front of you right now is so stimulating that even a hunger cue is not enough for your brain to switch the context. Or on the opposite, if the task in front of you is boring, literally everything grabs your attention because they give more stimulation to your brain. Hence, they encourage your brain to do the activity instead of the current one. To give a

concrete example, imagine you're on the bed scrolling right now, okay? And scrolling feels like plus 300 stimulation. Whereas the task that you want to start, maybe opening a work document and working feels like minus 10. And trying to go from plus 300 to minus 10 in one move is a huge dopamine gap. and your brain is like absolutely not like I don't want to do it. This is why like telling your brain to just do the thing doesn't work because you're asking yourself to cross a gap that your nervous system is actively resisting. So what should we do to solve this issue then? Should we give up? No. Traditional advice says like dopamine detox, delete addictive apps and remove stimulation from your life. The logic actually makes

sense because if you remove high stimulation inputs, then the biggest possible gap shrinks and the starting boring but important tasks get easier because there's no steep difference between the stimulation that you get on a day-to-day basis. Which actually makes sense and it works. Like often times if you could quit social media and also remove other like unhealthy habits, then you're probably going to be way more productive because the gap between the different activities that you have in your day is not that steep. Therefore, the transition is not that difficult. Think about it this way. A lot of drug addicts struggle with anhidonia and they look for the next stimulation because

compared to their highest, now daily life is too boring. Now they seek for more and more which makes them get more addictive. Same as scrolling. So it does make sense to remove all these addictions. But it has three big problems. The first one is that it turns your life into a daily fight against billiondoll companies that are designed to grab your attention. And the second one is that it treats a systematic problem as a personal willpower problem. And the third one is that it does not teach you how to transition back to low stimulation work when the stimulation inevitably returns because it just teaches you to block them, but it does not really give you the ability to fight them even when there are distractions.

Because like when I actually blocked social media on my phone, which are blocked all the time, I should be extremely productive, right? But I actually found myself plugging my arm hair one by one with like a tweezer just to avoid the work that I was supposed to do. And plugging my arm hair was more stimulating than the work itself that I did it like for an hour. So it's not just the phone. Distractions have been always there. And throughout the history, people always procrastinated. Sure, like phones are very easy and addictive and it makes sense, but it's actually just one part of the equation. So the goal isn't to eliminate distractions forever, but it's to build

a reliable way to transition into low stimulation work even when distractions are right there. So there are actually two phases to this activation. So here's what I actually found works. Task initiation like just starting isn't actually one problem. It's actually two and you need a different tool for each one and there are two different distinct phases that you need to do. So the first phase is all about starting going from whatever you're doing to the desired action task initiation. And for this one, we're going to use a method called dopamine stepwise downshifting that I found and I named it myself and it sounds so cool. Dopamine stepwise downshifting. It's so nice, isn't it?

I'm so proud of myself. But anyway, how it works is that essentially instead of like trying to go straight from A to D, you take smaller steps. You go to A to B, B to C, C to D. So what are these ABCDs? like are we learning the alphabet? No. Essentially, A represents the activity that you're doing right now, which is probably high stimulation. And D is the task that you want to start, lower stimulation. And B and C are the in between actions that feel easier to start. And you do one small downshift step at a time. And the only rule is that the next step must be less stimulating than what you're doing right now, but still easy enough to actually start. And you don't need to change your

whole lifestyle or all the habits that you have right now. Okay, I know this ABCD doesn't make sense. So, let me give an example. Okay, so for example, like I'm scrolling on bed and I want to get started to work. Most productivity advice will tell you to start with the most important thing or hardest thing so that other tasks feels easy and you feel accomplished and done on that day so that like feeling spills over other areas of life blah. I actually completely disagree with that and I do the opposite with this ABCD method. So let's say I'm scrolling right now and I want to get to work but the gap between them is too big. What I do is that I downshift like this. I move to my desk

and keep scrolling there from bed to desk because sitting makes it less comfortable. Therefore it's less stimulating. And from my desk and scrolling then the next action that I do is that I open my PC in front of me like this. Okay. And then I open the same social media app, whatever that is on my PC but on a browser because on a PC browsers are way less optimized and way less stimulating than on a phone. And after that now we also dropped the dopamine a little bit, right? And then the next action is I scan my task list and start with the lowest friction task. Something that is easy that feels a bit rewarding, especially something that can be done like pretty easily, pretty quickly and something that I like. And

then I chain a second to easy task. Then gradually step up difficulty once the momentum is there. So instead of starting with the hardest task, I slowly transition especially my location and then I start with the easy quick tasks and then I build my momentum from there. By then my baseline stimulation is way lower. So the starting real work is small enough jump that I can start. So we went from 300 plus stimulation on the desk 200 and then on the desk now we are browsing on our PC. Now the stimulation is maybe 100 to 50 and then we start an easy task which is maybe like 50 and then we do the second task which is like 40 and maybe the difficult task is minus 10. Now we go from 40 to - 10 which is

only a 50 gap right in the start the gap was 310. By getting closer to the desired action step by step I found that it's way easier than just get up and sit down. Obviously you might think like this actually takes like such a long time like why would I do that? then you probably don't need this method because I found myself struggling like literally just even going to the pee while I'm scrolling on bed is so hard that I just like hold it right and I'm scared of urinary tract infection. So if you're someone just like procrastinating here and there then obviously this method is not going to work for you because you don't struggle to extent that I do but if you find yourself like actually wasting days and hours then

this transition method really works. So basically I explained how downshifting framework works. But actually the most important step which is like finding the low friction task can be extremely difficult because most people look at their to-do list and see like 30 40 things that they need to do and like maybe 10 things forgotten from the past. All this list just like stares back at you. The issue with regular to-do lists is that they're all mixed together. Like the urgent stuff, boring stuff, admin stuff, even the things that you want to do, all of them are meshed up into

together. and it's just a chaos. And when you look at your to-do list, you just feel overwhelmed that finding an easy task out of that like a long to-do list is another work, then you're not going to follow my advice. So, what should we do instead? Organize the tasks by how they feel. And I actually call this my sprinting method. I know I come up with like so many names for my methods, but they just make sense in my mind. Okay, so what the sprinting method is that you take all of your tasks and sort them into categories. And not by activity type, but how they feel. Because even the same activities can feel different based on their urgency or how much you like them. Email from a

government about taxes versus an email about a project that you're excited to work on can feel very different. To reply to an email from a government, you might need way more energy, way more power. But for the thing that you want to work on, you don't really need that much of activation energy. The resistance is not that high. But the traditional method treats them same because they're the same email, but they're actually not. So that's the reason why we use a sprinting method where we categorize the tasks based on how they feel. So I actually have four different categories, but you can have whatever categories that you want and I usually recommend like three to five. So the four categories that I have are

urgent, deadline, admin, and creative. The first one, urgent, is whatever task, whatever that is, even if it's just like maybe cleaning up my house or an admin work or an important like project that I work on. If they are absolutely urgent and if they absolutely need to get done today and there's like a such a high consequences in my life then they go to here because the feeling of an urgent thing is extremely different. And then the second sprint that I have is deadlines. These are everything that's basically deadlines that are approaching. So these are like less urgent than the first one because the first sprint is the things that I absolutely need to get done whereas the second one is like oh it's better for me

to get started because it's kind of like you know getting closer. So there's like a buffer time and the sprint 3 is admin work and anything that I don't like doing is in sprint 3. So it could be emails, scheduling chores or maybe a document that I freaking hate that I need to read or any boring thing, okay, comes here that doesn't have an urgent thing, an upcoming deadline and then they're just like in sprint three. And then the sprint four is creative and fun sprint. This is my favorite sprint. I love creative work. I love ideas. I love coming up with things and I love like any other thing that I love and I genuinely am excited to do are in sprint form. Basically, they're categorized on however they feel. When

I'm stuck and when I need to downshift and when I need to find something that is going to give me the initial stimulation, then I usually look into sprint 4 because there are the things that I genuinely like so that the initial resistance will be way lower. Or I look into sprint 3 where there are admin tasks. Sure, they are boring and I extremely hate them, but oftentimes they're also very small tasks that needs to get done. And once I built the momentum from either of these sprints, then I slowly move towards my sprint one, the urgent and big ones. And when I'm usually doing like a sprint, I usually try not to jump between sprints so that I don't task switch. But for the first phase of initiation, I can pick

from whatever sprints that I work on. So, but like how are you going to use a sprinting method and this task initiation activation thing in your day-to-day life? Everything that I mention is actually already built on and ready to use in a system that I created for ADHD people and also people that have chronic procrastination. And I call this system a Kaizen system. It's a notion-based productivity system that I built from scratch, coded parts of it and iterated for years and lounged for people just like you. I actually built it first for myself because any other traditional advice wasn't really working for me and I needed a specific solution that was working for my specific type of brain. And one of the things, one of the key things that I like about it is the

sprinting method that I mentioned because I think it makes the task initiation way easier. And when you stare into 40 different tasks in your to-do list, it just feels so overwhelming. But when you divide them into sprints and also when you combine with the dopamine downshifting method, not only it helps you to start your task, but also it makes it way easier to organize your day, plan your day and get your things done. When you use a sprinting dashboard on Kaizen, you can see them on a visual board like a comb board. So instead of 47 individual tasks staring at you, you just see four categories based on how they feel. You can decide on what kind of categories that you want, however you want and you can

customize it as you want as well. Over 700, actually over thousand people are already using the Kaizen system. And when you get it, you can also join to our Discord community where you can see how other people with ADHD and other productivity issues customize their workflow. And you can also ask me questions directly if you struggle to use the system. If you want to try it, go to rudioama.com. The link is also going to be in the description. And if you're watching this early, use the code dopamine at checkout for 10%. But be quick because it's going to be only available for the first 100 people. If you can't invest in it right now, that's completely fine. You can also do it like

with other apps or maybe you can use like a pen and paper with a journal and you can try to create the same thing. But if you don't want to spend time trying to build it because it actually took me months to build it, maybe because I'm an overthinker, then Kaizen with Kaizen you can already get started today. is essentially like a shortcut. So if you're interested, check out rurioama.com. Okay. So now let's talk about the phase two. Now you are used to downshifting to get into work. You did the easy task and maybe you built a little bit of momentum. But actually there is another problem waiting for us.

Even after you started and built a little bit of momentum, the bigger tasks can feel still impossible. Especially like you know there are like projects and things that you've been keeping off like for a while. And for me personally, it's always the submitting my taxes. Every single freaking year, I submit my taxes late that I pay like a fine thousands of dollars to the government and I still don't learn from it. You know, there are like some tasks like that. And even after you build a momentum with an easy task, they can still feel impossible. So essentially, the dopamine gap actually shows up again between the tasks, right? Even if you're doing something productive, maybe the thing that you hate, the stimulation is

so low, it's so boring, you hate it so much that like, you know, there's so many times that I were crying while doing my taxes that even between productive tasks, the gap is too big. So, how do we solve this issue? Because if you only work on the easy tasks because they feel good, then you'll find yourself at the end of the day just doing the unimportant easy tasks and it's just lying to yourself. So, what is the solution? People often like break bigger tasks into smaller tasks and chunk them up blah so that it's easier to start. But for me personally, already having a to-do list or already having a productivity system requires a lot of effort for me. And now breaking that big task into smaller chunks is just too much work for my ADHD brain to

ask. So what do we do instead? Timebound small chunks. So instead of breaking the project into smaller steps, you actually do a 15inute micro focus session with a visual timer on just like this one that I'm using while filming. How this works is that you set a timer for 15 minutes. And it has to be visual like this one. Okay? Not just numbers. A visual timer from whatever brand that you like. And then you're going to decide what you're going to be focusing on for the next 15 minutes. You can work on whatever you want. The goal is basically the initiation, not just completion. And when the timer ends, you decide you're either going to continue for another 15inute micro focus session or you take a short break for 15 minutes and come

back. You're not allowed to negotiate whether you're going to stop the micro focus session or not while it's going. If you set it once, you have to finish it. And you basically keep doing this 15minute micro sessions while you work. So let's say there's like a tax submitting. Instead of telling yourself, I'm going to submit the taxes. the next task is that you just say I'm going to set a 15-minute timer and I'm going to do I'm going to see like how much I can do get done in this 15 minutes and that's it. The goal is not getting the task tax document submitted but working on it for 15 minutes. Why this actually works is that the first one is the low activation energy. 15 minutes is small

enough that your brain doesn't resist it. If you struggle with it, you can also do 10. By the way, the required energy to start is dramatically lower than to committing to finishing the whole thing. And the second one is that urgency actually creates focus. When you set a visual timer like this and it's in front of you while you work, it actually creates this pressure and deadline for your brain because essentially in 15 minutes you're trying to like finish at least like to hear or see how much you can get done and you take it very seriously. Okay. And when you think there is a time pressure actually and you can see it visually that's why you need a visual one. Your brain produces nor adrenaline which gets basically

activated under pressure which helps you to focus and keep you alerted. And the third important one which is the biggest reason why this one works is that completion shortens the dopamine loop feedback. Normally unless you finish the entire task, right? Like unless you submit the taxes to the government, you don't actually get that sense of completion. For hard long tasks, especially projects where one task maybe take like hours, the dopamine feedback loop is painfully long. But with high stimulating activities usually the dopamine feedback loop is very short. For example with scrolling right social media with every swipe you get a feedback of a content. So the loop is very short that it keeps you hooked. But with long project with

boring ones the feedback loop is too long for our brain to feel stimulated. When you break down your work into 15minute like micro sessions and you accomplish them, it gives a signal to your brain that you accomplished something and your brain releases dopamine and reinforces action which makes you want to keep going. Because scientists have found that dopamine isn't just like released by receiving a reward. It's actually released in a response to a reward prediction error. When you complete something and it feels better than expected, your brain marks that behavior as worth repeating. And that creates a feedback loop of effort go satisfaction and it creates momentum. And a 15-minute sprint gives you that

loop every 15 minutes instead of once you finish the task. You so you shorten the feedback loop way faster. The one way that I found actually to make this stick and make this addictive because I abandon every single productivity method that I created. So I decided to gify this. And how you gify this is basically you put you keep like a journal or you can also do this on notion by the way where you track how many 15inute micro sprints that you have done. So, for example, I have this like physical notebook calendar that I wasn't using that I decided to use for my mini sprint. You can see that I am logging. I am basically putting a mark every time that I finish a 15minute block. And

every time I finish, I color one and I can visually see how many I finished in a given moment and each week. You can also do it like on a calendar view when you can write down like how many of them you got done. Physical or digital, doesn't matter. And with each thing, what you're trying to do is that instead of trying to get more chunks done, what you're essentially trying to do is getting more things done with fewer amounts of micro sessions. So trying to reduce that chunk as much as you can. So instead of saying like, "Oh, I did 20 yesterday. I want to do like 25." You say, "I want to accomplish all the to-dos that I have within 15 mini chunks." then you become way more efficient and you start to measure the

right metric, not how long you worked, but how much you got done. And if you treat 15 minutes like actually valuable time blocks that you can use, then you find more time to get things done. Because most of us, like if you have 20 minutes between like each thing, then we find ourselves scrolling. But if you're already implementing the 15-minute block, then every time you have more than 15 minutes, you can just tell to yourself, I'm going to get one block done and I'm going to like color my notebook. So it becomes way more addictive, way more fun in my opinion. So I highly, highly, highly recommend this method. So let's summarize the whole video. Our whole point when we are struggling to take action, it's all

about reducing the gap between what we are doing right now and the desired action. And you can do this in multiple ways, right? First, you can follow the traditional advice of dopamine detoxing so that your daily baseline is lower. The second one is you can do the dopamine stepwise downshifting so that you slowly transition and while working on a boring task that you don't want to do, you can use this 15minute micro focus sessions so that you shorten the dopamine loop and you increase the stimulation of the activity. And to make this happen on a day-to-day basis, you got to check out my kaizen system under the.com. And also don't forget the discount code dopamine for 10% off. If

you are in the first 100 people, you can get it. Don't forget about it and let me know how this goes. I want you to try this method. Okay? Instead of going for another video when scrolling for another hour, do a micro focus session. Okay? And if you're watching this video right now and thinking, "But how am I supposed to plan my days? How am I supposed to figure out what I'm going to do in a day?" Then you have to watch this video because I go in depth how you can plan your day, figure out what you need to do, and be extremely godlike productive. See you.