Not sure if just trying more methods will help you, but here are some that happen to consistently work for me:

• Always work with a list.
• When everything seems overwhelming and I can’t get myself to start, just pick ONE item from the list.
• If there is no list, just making the list will do. It may be empty. Done for now, enough, no need to start on it yet.
• Granular items.
  • Instead of “pack suitcase”, break it down like “get suitcase out”.
  • Split the task of “read X” and “understand X”. That stops obstructive thoughts like “I wouldn’t understand it anyway, and then I’d need to as … but can’t right now because …”.
• The only new breakthrough from this year: When even doing one item from the list feels like too much, only simulate doing them in your head: https://lemmy.ml/post/36147982
• I have a section of “structural improvements”. Those are things that, once done, improve my life, forever. E. g. getting this diagnosis. Getting a dishwasher. Getting a maid. Unlike, for example, clean the kitchen, which is temporary.
• implementation intention: Might feel overwhelming to “stop browsing right now”, but set a timer to stop in 5 minutes. Or “when the timer finishes, I’ll do the simulations on list items”.

Real habit building still does not work for me, though, even with a specialist therapist. That’d be the real deal.

The bullet journal system is nice because it doesn’t depend on consistency. There’s no overhead, it’s just a way of writing things down, so you only need a cheap pen and cheap notebook. Even if you lose them, just grab another. If you forget to use it for three month, the bujo doesn’t care. It’s there for you to use again when you remember.

If you look online you’ll see lots of people who plan their whole year out and call it a bullet journal. But that’s something they’ve built on top of a very dimple, elegant system, not the system itself. Don’t do that shit, it doesn’t work for people like us. Garbage notebook, garbage pen, bulleted lists, migration. Keep it simple.

Even f it only sticks for a week, that’s one week that’s way better than if you had done nothing. I say keep cycling through your methods, pick one that speaks to you (or pull one out of a hat every so often - gamling is fun when it doesn’t impact your economy or relationships!) and then pick another when it wears off or even on a schedule like every month or so.

If this means you only manage any functional strategy one week per month, that’s still twelve weeks of the year where your quality of life has improved compared to not (re)using any strategy. That’s three whole months! Massive improvement!

The thing that seems to work most consistently for me is other people. I need to body double irl or by phone, but it can’t be someone I live with because then the effect wears off and I get too comfortable having them around. Anything that becomes predictable and “routine” becomes ineffective, but social interaction is usually stressful enough to get me going and getting shit done.

Hyperfocus (short and intense unreachable to the world type attention, not the special interest long-term hyperfocus) is one other way, but that’s not reliable at all. I need to get my set and setting completely right to be able to aim and maintain my hyperfocus on the right task, which is where I need… body doubling. And it’s not really long-term solution either since it’s easy to burn out from, with the whole “forgetting to drink or pee or blink for 10 hours”.

For me, not writing things off as failures just because I didn’t stick with them has helped. I will pick back up with tactics that have failed over and over again, because eventually the doing of them will become habitual. There’s no real trick to it, it’s just that it takes a long, long time for behaviors to embed and become habits. I now have a fairly robust writing habit because I just keep writing as ideas come to me, even if they’re stupid or poorly formed or hard to translate into text, I’ll still find myself more inclined to sit down and scratch out a sentence or a paragraph or sometimes several paragraphs instead of just letting the thought slip by, and I think it’s because I keep doing it even though I don’t know that it’s “working” in that I don’t have any novels finished or even any stories that work as narrative fiction, just snippets and character workups and slice-of-life bits that may, one day, be a coherent story that people will be able to understand and want to read. I don’t even really enjoy writing, I find it tedious and difficult in a not-fun way. But I keep doing it because I want to be good at it and I like telling stories, and being a better writer helps me with that so I do find some joy in it, but the mechanical act of writing feels like brushing my teeth. I know it’s good for me, but I don’t especially enjoy it or even find it interesting most of the time.

I think there are a few different types of feelings that get lumped together into “wanting”, and I think it’s useful to disentangle them. I don’t “want” to write in the same way I want to smoke or watch TV or ride a roller coaster, but I do want to be a better writer in a different, less impulsive way, so I make myself write even though it feels kind of like brushing my teeth, or playing scales, or doing multiplication tables. It’s hard, often boring and rarely gratifying to look back at what I’ve written. But I want to be better at it so I just grit my teeth and do it anyway, and it does get easier to do the more you do it, in my experience.

And it is really hard. I have a ton of other, arguably more important things that I still haven’t been able to ingrain as a habit. To pick one because I’ve had it on my mind this morning: I have a really hard time being consistent with hygiene and skincare, even though I “want” to do it, I still go through periods where I neglect it and I haven’t found a consistent way to stay on that horse. I think the only thing to do is just to grit your teeth and start doing it again, knowing that it’s gonna suck for a while, and hoping that it might eventually suck less. And give yourself unlimited grace for failing. You can’t un-fail after failing, you can either try again or stop trying.

so now i have a mental library of all those tactics that work and very little motivation to try again, it’s going to last a week maybe, and then back to being a mess i go. is there any way to work against that? any point of view i failed to consider?

I think this is something that even those without ADHD struggle with. A change in perspective may help, but it will require exercising a considerable amount of willpower either way. One perspective that has helped me is: Motivation is not reliable. By its very nature, it is fleeting and will wax and wane. What I need is discipline, which is doing something even when I am devoid of motivation (which is most of the time).

For me, it’s difficult being consistent in the gym. I simply cannot rely on being motivated enough to consistently hit the gym several times each week. Though by exercising some degree of discipline, I will force myself into the gym even when I don’t feel like it, and that helps keep the habit up even when motivation is absent. It’s a slog, but I’m always happy with myself afterward for just trudging through.

Even when being disciplined, it’s okay to let yourself miss things here and there as long as you’re overall sticking to it. Some days you may go, “I missed my last 2 workouts, so today I’m going to just do one push-up which is better than nothing” and that’ll have to do for today. Small victories when you can get them. And not beating yourself up when you falter.

Discipline is like a muscle. The more you exercise it, the stronger it gets (ideally. I imagine this is a very uphill battle for those with executive conditions). Hope this helps.