The ICNU Acronym and ADHD Productivity

As always, if you’d rather watch a video about ICNU and ADHD, you can do that here.

Soooo I suppose we should start with a quick explanation of what ICNU is.

To be honest, I’m not sure where it originated, but I saw it on Reddit, because that’s where all good information comes from, of course. There, someone was explaining ICNU and ADHD, and how they connected to productivity and its polar opposite, Executive Dysfunction. It was so bang-on that I’ve seen it many others talk about it, and for good reason.

ICNU stands for Interest, Challenge, Novelty, and Urgency, and basically, if a task you’re trying to do is missing one of these four things, it’s highly possible that you’ll freeze up and refuse to do it. Now of course, every Executive Dysfunction situation isn’t tied to a lack of these things specifically, but it’s often a good place to start.

If you find that your hold up is probably ICNU related, then you’re going to want to sit down and write out which of those four (or which two of the four, three of the four, etc) your situation is lacking. Below, I made you a little worksheet to download and print/edit in PDF editors as much as you’d like, no strings attached. Go for it.

Once you’ve figured out what the problem may be, it’s time to address it. Obviously the way that ICNU and ADHD connect is unique in every situation, but here are a few more universal suggestions I have for telling your Executive Dysfunction to fuck off. In so many words.

If the situation is lacking interest:

On a scale from 1-4, Interest is one of the harder ICNU pieces to change, because you’re an adult, and adults can’t exactly be like, “Hey, Boss, I hate doing these reports so I decided to just draw a frog instead because I like frogs.”

Unfortunately, whether you work for yourself or for a boss, interest only plays a small part in daily tasks. So you have to add the interest where you can. You can do this by either:

A) Making the task itself interesting, or

B) Finding interest connected to the task.

As I’ve already mentioned, adding interest to a task can be hard and maybe even impossible. But if you can make it interesting (say, by watching funny videos while brushing your teeth, or writing an essay about a topic you like), that’s perfect.

If you can’t do any of that, though, it’s still possible to smack the ICNU in its F.A.C.E. And you can do this by looking at the unwanted task as a way to get to a task or step that is interesting later on down the road.

For example, say that you need to send a boring-ass email to a coworker. It’s not interesting in the slightest. BUT, you know that if you send that email, it’ll serve as a step towards that co-worker approving something you need so that you can get to the meat of a project that you find really interesting. Suddenly, that email feels like less of a burden, because doing it means you get to be interested REAL soon.

A caveat: Make sure that you don’t use this to just jump ahead to the fun stuff. If you suddenly get a great idea or something that is tied to that later step that you’re more interested in, put it in your brain dump and then DON’T TOUCH IT until you get to where it’s relevant.

This is also why it’s important for you to write down every step in a project before you start, but I’ll go over that in another article another time.

If there’s no Challenge:

ADHD brains need a rush. A lot of the things we need to do every day do not give us that rush. That’s why you’ll see people Googling “how to be productive with ADHD” when they should be doing their laundry — because it feels like something so simple shouldn’t take so much work to do.

But it’s so BORING. And therein lies the problem.

Challenge, the “C” in that helpful little ICNU ADHD acronym, is exciting and fun, and very closely tied to interest. If it’s too easy, it’s too possible for us to zone out, and the next thing we know, we’ve bought a bunch of cool things on the internet, but we haven’t sent out that proposal like we were supposed to.

So in order to kick Executive Dysfunction in its butthole, you have to make things challenging, which is actually a little easier to do than adding interest — and it may actually even make things more interesting anyway.

Adding challenges is actually pretty easy. I’ve given a few suggestions before, and they’re probably the simplest. These are adding timers, getting an accountability partner, or setting goals or records for yourself that you have to beat. Depending on the task, you can even try for accuracy percentages, sizes, approval ratings…anything that gives the task a bit of a kick.

Just a warning, though, that you’re asking for another Executive Dysfunction flare-up if you add too much of a challenge to the situation. Trying to add a challenge that ignores your time, energy, or other needs can result in you freezing up anyway, now due to things seeming too complicated and sure-to-fail.

If theres no novelty:

This is, unfortunately, the hardest one to address. Which sucks, because ADHD thrives on newness and novelty. But you can’t really make something new. Unless you know how to time travel. In which case, please do me a favor and tell middle-school-me that those granny glasses weren’t doing me no favors.

So then…how do we address the “N” in ICNU?

We have to make new what we can make new. Maybe you can’t change the task, but you can change the location, the process, or the tools you use. This doesn’t always work, obviously. You can’t go out and buy a new, fancy toothbrush every time you need to brush your teeth. So in that case, try to address the other three factors to make up for the lack of this one.

If there’s no Urgency

And now, we come to the “U” in ICNU, and it’s the easiest one to address.

Usually, urgency gives us a huge dopamine rush all on its own; it’s such a good motivator that there are articles out there that teach you how to make your own urgency in order to get moving. I won’t spend too much time on that part, because it’s a pretty easy thing to do.

What I will emphasize is that, sometimes, putting too hard a deadline on something that doesn’t really have a deadline won’t work. It won’t because you’re too smart to fall for it, and because you start feeling annoyed or stressed about things hanging over your head that you may not be up to doing right now.

So, if I may make a suggestion (too bad, I’m gonna anyway), sometimes the answer is going to be to set deadlines, but to actually make them LOOSER, not TIGHTER.

For example, when I wrote my book, I told myself that I had to write every day, but I allowed myself some wiggle-room. I told myself that if I ever felt blocked or sick or tired or just not up to writing, I’d allow myself time off — just not anything more than 48 hours. Having that made it lower-pressure, but still urgent, and I found that I was much more willing to sit back down at the end of my 48 hours.

So if you find that tight deadlines work badly for you, on projects you can control, try looser ones that are still well-defined. Instead of telling yourself to GET IT DONE by whatever date, try to promise yourself to get certain amounts done, with a day in between, or a week, or whatever floats your boat.

ICNU is very closely tied to ADHD, but it’s not the only reason why you might be having Executive Dysfunction problems. Still, start here, and see where it takes you. And hey…if you need extra help, it might be time for us to work together — check out how it works, and let me know.