Pick the task you've been dreading. Commit to 120 seconds. Then you get full permission to stop — and it still counts.
You do two minutes. Not the whole task. When the timer ends, you're officially allowed to stop, guilt-free. Most brains keep going — but that's a bonus, not the assignment.
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?
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.
Best Visual Timers for ADHD (2026)