Reward ideas for adults with ADHD

When I went looking for an ADHD reward system, almost everything I found was about children. Sticker charts, token boards, marbles in a jar, advice written for parents. The underlying idea is sound and it is one of the oldest findings in behavioral psychology. The examples were simply aimed at somebody else.

What I got told to use instead was discipline, which is a strange thing to recommend to the same brain the sticker chart was designed for.

Why the sticker chart does not translate

It is not the childishness. A sticker is worth something because an adult decided it was, and nobody is doing that for me now. A reward only works if the person receiving it actually wants it, and as an adult I am the only one who knows what that is.

The second problem is distance, and this is the one I got wrong for years. A reward arriving next month has never once changed what I did on a Tuesday. I assumed that was a failing of mine until I read the research on it, which turns out to be unusually consistent.

That last sentence is the one I keep coming back to. The pull got stronger when the reward was a real thing rather than an idea, which is the opposite of how most productivity apps are built. Badges, levels and streaks are all hypothetical rewards. What moves a Tuesday is something that arrives on Tuesday and that you can actually hold.

A reward you have to wait a month for is not a reward. It is a rumor.

What actually works as an adult reward

The ones that work for me share three traits: I genuinely want them, I can have them today, and taking one is not a decision I then have to defend to myself. These are the ones I keep going back to:

• Ten minutes of doing absolutely nothing, with the phone in another room.
• The good coffee, from the place that is slightly too far away.
• An episode of something in the middle of the afternoon, on purpose, without calling it a break.
• A bath, a walk with no destination, or an hour of the hobby you keep describing as a waste of time.
• A whole day off with no admin in it, saved up for over a few weeks.
• The trip, the guitar, the thing you have been telling yourself you will get around to.

Most of mine are rest. That was not a decision, it is just what I found when I wrote the list honestly, and it is the part most systems get wrong.

Give each one a price

A list of nice things is not a system, and mine sat there doing nothing until I priced it. A price is what lets me take the reward without arguing about whether I have earned it. I paid for it. The argument is over.

Pricing is simpler than it sounds. Work out roughly what a day of finishing things is worth in whatever unit you like, then set the cheapest reward at about half of that, so a day of finishing things always ends in reach of something. Then set the big ones far enough out that they take a couple of weeks and no further. A fortnight is about as far as I can see; past that I stop believing in it.

The mistake that quietly kills it

Almost everyone who builds one of these saves up and never spends anything. The balance grows, the rewards stay theoretical, and within a month the whole thing is decoration. If you are going to build one, decide in advance that you will actually take the small reward the first evening you can afford it.

Actto is built around this. You write the rewards yourself and set what each one costs, finishing a task earns points, harder tasks pay more, and points never expire or get taken away. When you have saved enough for something good it tells you to go and take it, because saving and never spending is how these systems usually die.