With ADHD, Stop Trying to Make the Right Decision. Make a Good One.
Adults with ADHD stall on decisions while waiting for certainty that one option is correct. This article argues that “right” is a judgment about outcomes and therefore unavailable at the moment of choosing, and that not deciding is itself a decision, almost always the wrong one, which hands the choice to whoever moves first. It presents the ADHD evidence without inflating it – a small-to-medium difference on decision tasks, reflecting suboptimal rather than risky choice, plus steeper delay discounting that makes relief the hidden reward in both impulsive commitment and indefinite postponement – and states plainly that the popular claim about too many options is not well supported, relocating the problem to the absence of a stopping rule. The bulk of the piece is method: size the decision before giving it a process, write criteria before looking at options, eliminate down to three rather than searching for the best, pair a deadline with a default, sort by reversibility, take the first sufficient option, break a tie with Occam’s razor by preferring the option that needs fewer things to go right, and name the first action and when it happens. A worked example runs all of it end to end. It closes on evaluating a decision afterward by process rather than outcome, which is what breaks the loop in which every bad result becomes evidence of defective judgment.
