Easy Mode (Rebroadcast)

Hacking Your ADHD

William Curb

Mental Health, Health & Fitness

4.7 • 779 Ratings

🗓️ 3 April 2026

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Is it possible to take ADHD off "Hard Mode"?

We often hear that living with ADHD is like playing a video game where the difficulty slider is permanently stuck on "Hard." But while the challenges of executive dysfunction are very real, we sometimes make things even more difficult for ourselves by insisting on doing things the "right" (read: hardest) way.

In this classic monologue episode, William Curb explores the concept of Easy Mode. What would it look like if your morning routine felt effortless? What if your workspace didn't feel like a barrier to your productivity?

By utilizing the "Focusing Question" from Gary Keller's The One Thing, William breaks down how to find the lead domino that makes every other task easier—or completely unnecessary.

In this episode, we discuss:

The "Easy Mode" Vision: Defining what a low-friction life actually looks like (and why a perfect life might actually be a bit boring).
The Focusing Question: Learning to ask, "What's the one thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?"
The Domino Effect: Why focusing on small, strategic tasks creates the momentum needed to tackle the big ones.
Environment Design: Using the three parts of a task (Setup, Doing, and Cleanup) to reduce the cognitive load of starting.
Progress over Perfection: Shifting the goal from "fixing" your ADHD to simply sliding that difficulty scale down a few notches.

Mentioned in this episode:

The One Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan
The "Walls of Awful" concept (shoutout to Brendan Mahan)
Checklists & Automation: Tools to make remembering "unnecessary."

"Sometimes life is hard because our ADHD is making it harder, and sometimes it's because we're choosing to do things in the hardest way possible."

Find the full show notes and transcript at: hackingyouradhd.com/191

Support the show on Patreon: patreon.com/hackingyouradhd

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to Hacking Your ADHD. I'm your host, William Curb, and I have ADHD.
0:10.0	On this podcast, I dig into the tools, tactics, and best practices to help you work with your ADHD brain.
0:16.0	While ADHD is described as life on hard mode, that phrasing got me thinking about what life would look like on easy mode.
0:23.6	And more importantly, how can we make our lives feel more like that?
0:27.6	In this episode, we're going to explore what life on easy mode might look like and discuss actionable strategies to shift that dynamic
0:33.6	of living with ADHD so that it doesn't always have to feel like an uphill battle.
0:38.3	But we can take steps to shift our ADHD from making life a struggle to something a little bit more manageable.
0:43.3	From simplifying routines to harnessing the power of small changes,
0:46.3	there are a lot of ways that we can work on dialing down that difficulty level.
0:50.3	If you'd like to follow along on the show notes page, you can find that at Hacking Your ADHD.com slash 191.
0:58.3	All right, keep on listening to find out how Life Easy can be when you've got ADHD.
1:09.0	Our first step here is defining what easy mode would look like, and I feel like this is going
1:13.3	to be a bit different for everyone. But let's play along for a minute. We'll start with how we wake
1:18.1	up in the morning. It feels effortless to get out of bed. In fact, we've got that spring in our step,
1:22.7	and not only are we excited to wake up, we've got that energy to get going.
1:27.5	When we sit down to do our work, there is no lingering procrastination and our thoughts
1:31.5	are clear.
1:32.6	We can get right into what we want to be working on, and our productivity comes effortlessly.
1:37.2	It's hyperfocus without that feeling like we're drawing from our future selves.
1:41.4	Taking care of our health doesn't feel like a chore.
1:43.6	We know the right foods to eat,
1:45.2	and man, they taste delicious. We naturally make the healthy choice, eating well, and exercising regularly.
	...

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