Late Shift Collaborative

Yep, that’s me with my pandemic blue hair, here to talk about INCUP. INCUP is an acronym from psychologist William Dodson who specializes in helping clients with ADHD. INCUP explains what motivates an ADHD mind to get things done. Here’s the breakdown:

I – Interest

N – Novelty

C – Challenge

U – Urgency

P – Passion

In this TikTok video, coach Connor Green points out that “consequences” aren’t on this list and that may of the strategies that parents, teachers, our internal parents and teachers, and friends use to try to keep ADHDers on task fail because they don’t put a task INCUP. The upside of this is that we can leverage INCUP to motivate us to get things done or to be wise in the selection of what we commit to.

Some of these overlap, so if you want to lawyer whether something is motivated by “Interest” or “Passion,” I will probably agree with whichever you pick, but let’s explore these a little more.

Interest: This is the internet research black hole. You start out looking up what kind of frog was in that commercial, and suddenly, six hours have passed, and you know all about the habitats and mating habits of all of the frog species in Central America. Frogs piqued your interest, and you focused for hours! Interest is powerful but fickle. It leaves as suddenly as it arrives.

Strategy: Interest is like a rainbow. You can’t count on it, and you can’t force it, but when it’s there, it’s incredible! The strategy for interest and rainbows is to enjoy them while you can. Building flexibility into your schedule and workflow so that if an interest rainbow appears, you can bask in it for the duration will pay off huge gains in productivity and happiness. An offshoot of this strategy is that if your daily workflow is completely homogenous, there will be very little room for these glimmers of interest. In choosing a job, career, hobby, or lifestyle, then, it makes sense to choose something with enough variety that interest will make it in.

Novelty: This is why even the most borings tasks are kind of satisfying the first few times you do them. It’s why that first date seemed so much better than the second one. Unlike interest, novelty is dependable. A new client, a new task, a new project will have a shine to it that we know will wear off.

Strategy: Leverage the novelty bonus. Get that project done while you are sill enamored with it. Call that client back. Set up the next thing. Remember that the work will be more fun if you do it now than if you let it sit. Don’t even switch. You got the assignment at the weekly staff meeting. Keep your notebook in your hand, don’t check your emails, don’t tackle yesterday’s to-do list, just start the new project. Its novelty will wear off soon, and then you can incorporate it into your big list. For now, ride the novelty wave.

Challenge: This one is dangerous in law practice. Here’s how it usually manifests: Opposing counsel is total jerk. They say something completely disrespectful about you or your client, and what’s worse, they’re wrong about the law! You’re not going to take that lying down. You’re going to war! This is challenge. It is reliable for bursts of productivity, but it requires a constant fueling. In the case of the opposing counsel, that fuel is anger, and anger is (a) hard to sustain for a lot of ADHDers (it’s frequently not INCUP) and (b) it can be unhealthy to live fueled by anger. Funnily, challenge is also the basis of the familiar game a lot of ADHDers play “I have to pee, but I have to get this task done before I’m allowed to go.” And then we squirm and dance until we finish the email and hit send and then run to the bathroom!

Strategy: Use challenge as a side dish. Game-ify tasks like, “Let’s see if I can get this done in an hour” or recruit a friend and say “I’ll race to you see who clears this queue faster.” Hook emotion-fueled challenges to passion. If you have an underlying passion for neuroscience, and someone on the internet says something you think is dead wrong, it will be a combination of challenge and passion that drives you to write a treatise with extensive citations refuting that yokel.

Urgency: Urgency is the heart of the procrastination loop. We have a task that we can’t motivate ourselves to do. It’s simply not INCUP, so we let it sit and sit and sit, and now it’s due by midnight tonight. We’re starting to feel some urgency, but the tank isn’t quite full, so we run a couple errands. Then we try to start, but we can’t. Now it’s 9:00 pm, and now we feel the urgency. Palms are sweating, heart rate is up, and we fly through that assignment and get it turned in at 11:59.

Strategy: Careful with trying to create fake urgency. You’re too smart for that, and you’ll see right through it. You can’t set an earlier deadline, but you can recruit a manger or even client to set a deadline for you. One strategy I use is to make something due at the next meeting. The social pressure of having to face a meeting when I don’t have my deliverable is enough to generate urgency for me. Sometimes, I set meetings just to generate the urgency. Urgency is why ADHDers are so good in crises. If you are making a decision about a career or a next step, consider whether the job provides genuine urgency (and, of course, whether you enjoy that from an emotional and stress tolerance standpoint.)

Passion: Finally, passion is the prize. It’s why, in every other area of your life, you struggle to sit still, but in your passion area, you have boundless attention. Motivation is easy for passion projects. There are three problems (1) it can be hard to find your passion, and if you haven’t that’s okay; (2) passions can fade, and that’s normal; (3) the reality of working for a living means that you will likely have to do things that you are not passionate about.

I hope this tour of INCUP is helpful! I think ADHDers, AuDHDers, folks on the autism spectrum, and other neurodiverse as well as neurotypical folks can probably use some of the strategies, and, as always, if you would like to like to make some strategies tailored for you, I would LOVE to help!