ADHD productivity glossary

Some of these terms come from clinical research. Others were invented on Reddit and TikTok by people describing something real that psychology hadn't named yet.

I've flagged which is which, because the difference matters when you're talking to a doctor. Saying "I have ADHD object permanence issues" to a psychiatrist will get you a blank look. Saying "I forget things exist when I can't see them" will get you somewhere.

Terms are grouped, not alphabetized, because related concepts are easier to understand together.

Core clinical concepts

Executive function (clinical)
The set of mental processes that let you plan, start, sequence, and finish things. It includes working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility. Russell Barkley's model treats ADHD primarily as an executive function disorder rather than an attention disorder, which is why "just pay attention" has never helped anyone.

Executive dysfunction (clinical)
When those processes don't fire reliably. You know what to do, you want to do it, and the mechanism that translates intention into action doesn't engage. It is not a motivation problem, and treating it like one is why so much advice fails.

Working memory (clinical)
The mental scratchpad that holds information while you use it. Reduced working memory capacity is one of the most consistently documented ADHD findings. Practically, it's why you walk into a room and forget why, and why multi-step instructions evaporate halfway through.

Time blindness (clinical origin, popular usage)
Difficulty perceiving the passage of time and estimating duration. Barkley describes ADHD as involving "temporal myopia," a kind of nearsightedness about the future. In practice: 20 minutes and two hours feel similar, and a deadline three weeks out doesn't feel real until it's three hours out.

Hyperfocus (clinical usage, contested)
Locking onto a task so completely that hours disappear and external input stops registering. It gets sold as ADHD's superpower. It's more accurately a regulation failure that happens to point in a useful direction sometimes. You don't choose the target, and you often can't exit on demand.

Emotional dysregulation (clinical)
Emotional responses that arrive faster and hit harder than the situation calls for, and take longer to come down from. Not in the DSM criteria for ADHD, but widely documented in the research and reported by most adults with ADHD as one of the hardest parts.

Interest-based nervous system (clinical-adjacent)
William Dodson's framing: ADHD attention is activated by interest, novelty, challenge, and urgency rather than by importance. It explains why you can research a topic for nine hours and cannot answer a two-line email that matters more.

Rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD) (community term with clinical backing)
Intense emotional pain triggered by perceived rejection, criticism, or failure. Also Dodson's term. It is not a formal diagnosis and you won't find it in the DSM, but it describes something a large majority of ADHD adults recognize immediately.

What it looks like day to day

Task initiation (clinical)
The specific executive function that gets you from "I should do this" to actually doing it. The most common single point of failure, and the thing almost no productivity app addresses directly.

Task paralysis (community term)
Frozen in front of a task, sometimes for hours, often while fully aware of the cost. Distinct from procrastination in that you're not avoiding it in favor of something enjoyable. You're stuck.

Activation energy (borrowed from chemistry)
The friction cost of starting. Every step between you and the work adds to it: opening the app, finding the file, deciding where to begin. Lowering activation energy is the single most useful design principle for an ADHD-friendly system.

Waiting mode (community term)
You have a dentist appointment at 3pm and the entire day before it is unusable. The upcoming event occupies all available cognitive space. No clinical name exists for this yet, which is strange, because everyone with ADHD knows exactly what it is.

ADHD tax (community term)
The money ADHD costs you directly. Late fees, replaced lost items, expedited shipping because you forgot, unused subscriptions, cancellation fees for appointments you missed. It adds up to real numbers and it's rarely accounted for.

Doom pile / doom box (community term)
The pile of unsorted objects that grows because each item requires a decision and decisions are expensive. "Didn't organize, only moved."

"Object permanence" (community term, and a misnomer)
Used in the ADHD community to mean "out of sight, out of mind," for objects, tasks, and sometimes people. Worth knowing that the actual developmental concept from Piaget refers to something entirely different in infants. The community usage describes a real experience. The label is borrowed incorrectly, so don't use it with a clinician.

Revenge bedtime procrastination (community term, originally from Chinese internet slang)
Staying up late to reclaim personal time you didn't get during the day, even though you know what tomorrow will cost. Not exclusive to ADHD but extremely common with it.

Masking (clinical usage)
Suppressing ADHD traits to appear neurotypical. Exhausting, often invisible to others, and a major contributor to burnout. More frequently documented in women and in people diagnosed later in life.

Context switching (from computing)
The cost of moving between tasks. Everyone pays it. ADHD brains pay more, and pay it more often, because the switches are frequently involuntary.

Strategies and tools

Body doubling (community term, growing research interest)
Working alongside another person, in the room or on a video call, doing unrelated work. The presence alone often makes starting possible. It's the cheapest, weirdest, most reliably effective ADHD intervention I've found, and I have no satisfying explanation for why it works.

Dopamine menu (community term)
A pre-written list of things that give you a small reward, sorted by cost and time, made in advance so you're not deciding from scratch when you're depleted. The name is looser than the neuroscience, but the technique is sound: decisions made ahead of time are decisions you don't have to make while dysregulated.

Task breakdown (general)
Splitting a task until the first step is small enough that starting isn't a decision. "Write report" becomes "open the doc." This is the thing AI is genuinely, unambiguously good at.

Time blocking (general productivity)
Assigning work to specific calendar slots instead of keeping a list. Effective for ADHD when the blocks are generous and flexible. Actively harmful when the schedule is tight, because one overrun collapses the whole day and then you abandon the system entirely.

Externalizing (clinical concept, practical application)
Moving cognitive load out of your head and into the environment. Timers, visible lists, alarms, whiteboards. Barkley's central practical recommendation: if working memory is unreliable, stop relying on it. Nearly every ADHD tool that works is doing some version of this.