The 2-Minute Launcher
Pick the task you've been dreading. Commit to 120 seconds. Then you get full permission to stop — and it still counts.
Name the exact first thing, not the whole project.
Two minutes. That's the whole deal.
You started. That was the hard part.
Two minutes. Done.
You have full permission to stop right now. No guilt, no asterisk. Starting was the assignment, and you completed it. So — how's the momentum feeling?
Everything past two minutes is house money. Stop whenever.
That counts.
How this helps your ADHD brain
The wall between you and a dreaded task isn't the task — it's the activation energy. ADHD brains under-produce the dopamine needed to initiate boring or aversive things, so "start the report" feels physically impossible while "do literally anything else" feels magnetic. That's paralysis, not laziness.
This tool shrinks the commitment until it's smaller than the resistance. Two minutes is short enough that your brain can't argue with it — and the explicit permission to stop removes the hidden threat ("if I start, I'll be trapped in this forever") that keeps you frozen. In practice, most people blow past the two minutes: once you're in motion, staying in motion is cheap. But stopping at 2:00 is a real win too, because you proved the starting circuit still works.
If the task feels too big to even name a first step, run it through the Task Unsticker first, then launch the tiniest piece here.
Want a timer that lives on your desk?
Best Visual Timers for ADHD (2026)
Read the guide