Have you noticed this about stuck work?
The problem isn't your "system"
I Need a Better System
You’ve said it before.
Or if you’re being honest, you’ll admit that you probably say it all the time.
Sitting at your desk, staring at a ticket you’ve opened and closed four times without doing anything.
I just need a better system.
It sounds like a plan. It feels like taking responsibility. It offers a glimmer of hope.
But something about it never quite resolves. Because you’ve had that thought before. You found a system. It worked for a while (or at least you pretended it did). And then it didn’t.
And now you’re back here, having the same thought, wondering why you can’t just be productive.
The System Finally “Works” (Until It Doesn’t)
I was speaking recently with a developer who had been living inside that loop for months.
He had read countless books.
Tried the notebooks, workflows, reminders…
And each time, something seemed to click. For a week or two the system seemed to be working.
But then it would stop.
I still haven’t found the right one!
And the relentless mission to find the right system would continue, along with an avalanche of pressure to figure it out already.
Meanwhile, the tickets piled up. Along with an overwhelming sense that things were slipping.
He felt broken in a specific way — like someone who was trying hard, doing everything right, and still couldn’t make the thing work.
So the explanation kept coming back to the same place.
I just need a better system.
The Part That Gets Missed
As we talked, I noticed a similar pattern.
The tickets weren’t being avoided because he has too many distractions, or doesn’t know how to plan his day.
They were ambiguous.
Too many open questions. Not enough information to know where to start. Problems that had already gone through several rounds of troubleshooting without resolution. Situations where it wasn’t even clear what done would look like.
When a task is ambiguous, the ADHD mind goes into freeze.
And when the mind is frozen long enough — when the same ticket sits untouched through enough mornings — the explanation stops being about the task.
It becomes about the person.
I should be able to figure this out. Something is wrong with me. I need a better system.
The system becomes the answer to a question that was never really about systems.
Pulling Up the Ticket
I asked him to pull up a ticket that was untouched.
And I asked him what felt hard about starting it.
He talked through it. The blockers. The open questions.
And at some point he stopped.
“I think I just need to follow up with one person to get clarity on their end.”
“I don’t have to fix the whole thing right now.”
I asked what he thought had just happened.
“I just talked through it with someone. And now it’s not so hard anymore”
I asked him if he’s ever noticed how often action follows conversation for him.
“That’s actually very normal for me.”
He’d been doing this for years.
But had never realized its impact.
It Was Never About Systems
The story he’d been carrying said the problem was a missing system.
That story had its own weight. Because if the problem was systems, the solution was discipline. Better planning. More consistency. Some version of himself that was more organized, more reliable, more able to just sit down and do the thing.
That version of himself had been the goal for a long time.
But what we had just watched told a different story.
The issue wasn’t a missing system.
The issue was that he never noticed how ambiguity leads to discomfort which leads to avoidance.
And how conversation reduces the discomfort of the ambiguity and prompts action.
Once the task left his head, the power of the ambiguity dissolved.
Along with the misdiagnosis of a better system.
What’s Actually Happening
This moment shows up constantly in my conversations with engineers.
A task sits on a board. Inside one mind, it accumulates weight — not because it’s impossible, but because it’s been alone in there too long.
Left alone with something ambiguous, the mind looks for an explanation.
Usually, the explanation it finds is itself.
But the moment the problem is spoken out loud — to a coworker, a manager, a partner, anyone willing to listen — its shape begins to change.
Not because someone else solved it.
But because ADHD minds don’t think clearly in silence. They think by talking.
And sometimes the only thing separating “this is impossible” from “here’s the next step” is a conversation.