Creating with ADHD: Why We Stall at 70% (and How to Finish)

I have written somewhere between ten and twelve songs I have never recorded. Good songs. Every year or so I circle back to my guitar, play one of them, and think: why did I stop? Why haven't I recorded this?

I don't have a great answer. Work happened. Life happened. Family, relationships, and, if I'm honest, other creative projects happened. Something new and shiny always shows up right when the old thing needs the boring part done.

I'm a creator with ADHD, and if you are too, you probably have your own pile of songs, scripts, sketches, half-built websites and "I'll finish it this weekend" projects. This article is about why that pile exists, what the research actually says, and what has helped me finish things.

The 70% wall

My first video game is called Super Chicken. I built the first level with AI from one simple prompt. That level was so fun to make that I made another. Then another. Before I really noticed, I had a 20-level game.

Then I hit the wall. Not at the start, which was pure excitement. Not in the middle, where every new level felt like a win. I hit it in the final 30%: the polish. Bug fixing, balancing, menus, testing the same level for the fortieth time, getting it ready for app stores. The part where the work stops being invention and turns into maintenance.

That last stretch is where I've watched most of my projects, and most of my friends' projects, quietly die. Programmers even have a joke about it. Tom Cargill of Bell Labs put it this way, and Jon Bentley made it famous in Communications of the ACM in 1985: "The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time." (the ninety-ninety rule)

The end is always bigger than it looks. For an ADHD brain, it's also the least rewarding part.

What the research says about ADHD and creativity

First, the good news, and it's real. In a study of adults, researchers Holly White and Priti Shah found that people with ADHD scored higher on divergent thinking, the "come up with lots of ideas" kind of creativity (White & Shah, 2006). In a follow-up, the ADHD group also showed higher real-world creative achievement. Here's the part that made me laugh out loud: the ADHD group preferred idea generation, while the non-ADHD group preferred problem clarification and idea development (White & Shah, 2011).

We are, on average, starters. The research basically says so.

A later study by Boot, Nevicka and Baas found adults with ADHD reported more real-world creative achievements, and they came up with more original ideas when there was something on the line, like competing for a reward. The control group didn't get that boost (Journal of Attention Disorders). Stakes help us.

Why the finish line is so hard for an ADHD brain

It's not laziness. It's wiring.

Brain imaging work led by Nora Volkow found that adults with ADHD had lower markers of dopamine activity in the brain's reward pathway, and those differences were linked to attention symptoms (Volkow et al., JAMA, 2009) and to lower motivation scores (Volkow et al., 2011). Put simply, the "this feels rewarding, keep going" signal works differently.

Psychologist Edmund Sonuga-Barke described another piece: delay aversion, "a motivational style characterised by attempts to escape or avoid delay" (Sonuga-Barke, 2003). Polish is all delay. You do the work today and the payoff (a finished, released thing) is weeks away.

Knowing isn't doing

Dr. Russell Barkley, one of the best-known ADHD researchers, puts it like this: "Think of ADHD as a performance disorder. People with ADHD know what they need to do, but they struggle, greatly, at times, to transform intention into action." He also describes people with ADHD as often "time blind" (Barkley, ADDitude). That explains my songs perfectly. I know exactly what to do: book a session, record the demo. The gap is between knowing and doing.

Interest is the fuel

Psychiatrist Dr. William Dodson uses the phrase "interest-based nervous system" to describe how many people with ADHD get into focus: through interest, challenge or competition, novelty, and urgency. He also notes, "Novelty is short-lived, though, and everything gets old after a while" (Dodson, ADDitude). That's a clinician's framework rather than a lab-tested model, but if you have ADHD it will probably sound very familiar.

Put it together and the 70% wall makes sense. The start is all novelty and interest. The finish is all delay, detail and repetition. Same project, completely different fuel.

You're not alone

The CDC estimates about 6% of US adults, roughly 15.5 million people, currently have an ADHD diagnosis, and more than half of them were diagnosed as adults (CDC MMWR, 2024). Across 20 countries, World Health Organization surveys put current adult ADHD at about 2.8% and called it "vastly under-recognized and undertreated" (Fayyad et al.). And plenty of creators without a diagnosis hit the exact same wall.

7 ways to get your projects over the finish line

None of this is medical advice. These are the strategies with the best support I could find, plus what has worked for me.

1. Turn the last 30% into a list of tiny wins

Harvard researchers Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer studied nearly 12,000 diary entries and concluded: "Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work." (The Power of Small Wins, HBR). "Polish the game" is a wall. "Fix the jump bug on level 4" is a win you can feel by lunch. Break the finish into pieces small enough to check off today.

2. Write if-then start rules

Across 94 studies, plans in the form "If it's X, then I do Y" had a medium-to-large effect on actually getting started and reaching goals (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006). Mine: "If it's Sunday at 10 a.m., then I record one song demo." Decide the trigger in advance so you don't have to win an argument with yourself every time.

3. Add stakes and a real deadline

Remember the study where ADHD creativity rose under competition? Use that. Announce a release date publicly, enter a contest, book the studio time, tell a friend you'll show them on Friday. Urgency is one of the few things that reliably switches the ADHD brain on.

4. Build outside structure

In a randomized trial of adults with ADHD who were already on medication, a skills program covering planning, calendars and task lists, managing distractions, and breaking big tasks into steps worked clearly better than relaxation training, and the gains held a year later (Safren et al., JAMA, 2010). Structure isn't a cage. It's scaffolding for the parts your brain won't hold on its own.

5. Leave yourself a "next step" note

A large review found that people tend to go back to interrupted tasks, about two thirds of the time when they get the chance (Ghibellini & Meier, 2025). Make it easy. Every time you stop, write one sentence: "Next: export the level 7 build." Future you starts with momentum instead of a blank stare.

6. Bring novelty back into the boring part

This one is practical advice rather than a tested method, but it works for me: change something. A new tool, a new spot to work, a new playlist, or swap the order of your tasks. Trick the interest-based brain into feeling like it's starting again.

7. Automate the grunt work

This is the big one for me, and the reason I built BrandGoblin AI. A lot of the final 30% isn't creative at all: formatting, resizing, writing captions, cutting clips, making the thumbnail, writing the launch post. If a tool can do the dull part in minutes, the wall gets a lot shorter. That's the whole idea behind Video to Social (it turns a long video into captioned Shorts for you) and the Studio (on-brand graphics without opening a design app). Spend your energy on the parts only you can do.

Finish something small this week

Steven Pressfield opens The War of Art with this: "Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance." (source). Seth Godin is blunter: "If it doesn't ship, it doesn't count." (The Practice)

And Ira Glass has the best advice for the gap between the work you imagine and the work you make: "It is only by going through a volume of work that you're going to catch up and close that gap." (via James Clear)

So here's my challenge to you, and to me. Pick one stalled project. Write the next tiny step on a sticky note. Set an if-then rule for when you'll do it. Then finish that one step. I'm starting with one of those songs.

Where to get real support

ADHD is a medical condition. If you think you might have it, or you want help managing it, talk to a qualified clinician. Good places to start: CHADD, ADDA (for adults) and the CDC's ADHD pages.