You don’t have an attention problem. You have an externalisation problem.

Someone sent me a screenshot this week with the kind of headline that does numbers: “BREAKING: Claude has a hidden ADHD Executive Function Mode. Finish a week’s work in four hours.” Seven prompts followed, promising to hack your brain’s dopamine. The replies were a mix of people thanking the poster for changing their life and people asking where the settings menu was.

Let me save you the search. There is no settings menu. There is no hidden mode. Claude does not have a feature called ADHD Executive Function Mode, the same way your oven does not have a hidden ‘restaurant chef mode’ you unlock with the right words. What there is — and this is the part worth your attention — is seven genuinely useful prompts wearing a costume of fake exclusivity to get clicks. Strip the costume off and you find something real underneath.

what’s actually going on

Executive function is the set of mental jobs that decide what to do, in what order, and whether to keep going: starting, sequencing, switching, estimating time, holding several things in mind at once. When those jobs are effortful — whether because of ADHD, stress, exhaustion, or just a bad week — the failure looks like a focus problem. It usually isn’t. It’s a structure problem. The plan exists; it just won’t stay assembled inside your head long enough to act on.

A chat tool is good at exactly one thing here, and it’s not motivation. It will hold the structure outside your head and hand it back to you one piece at a time. That’s the whole trick. Not a dopamine hack. An externalisation device. The seven prompts work because each one takes a job your brain keeps dropping and pins it to a surface where it can’t fall off.

the seven prompts, read honestly

Here’s what each one is really doing, so you can use it on purpose rather than as an incantation.

1. Task Paralysis Shatterer — “break this into ridiculously small steps under a minute each, and tell me exactly where to put my hands first.” This defeats the blank-page freeze by shrinking the first action below the threshold where dread kicks in. The ‘where to put your hands’ bit is the clever part: it converts a decision into a movement.
2. Dopamine Menu Architect — a menu of 5-, 10-, and 20-minute activities sorted by the kind of stimulation they give. It works because choosing is itself executive load. Pre-deciding your options for an under-stimulated moment means you reach for a walk instead of a doom-scroll on autopilot.
3. Body Doubling Simulator — ask it to check in every ten minutes for the next half hour. Body doubling is a real, well-documented effect: people focus better when someone is present. A chat tool is a thin substitute for a human, but the external check-in still anchors you to the task you said you’d do.
4. Context-Switching Guide — a three-minute ‘palate cleanser’ between two unlike tasks. Switching costs are real; this gives the transition a ritual instead of a thirty-minute drift through your phone.
5. Interest-Based Filter — gamify a boring admin job by bolting it to something you’re currently obsessed with. This is the most honest one: ADHD brains are interest-driven, not importance-driven. Borrowing motivation from a live interest is a legitimate strategy, not a cheat.
6. Time-Blindness Auditor — “I think this takes 20 minutes; it always takes 2 hours — find the three sub-tasks I forget.” This externalises planning, the job time-blindness wrecks most. The hidden steps are almost always setup, switching, and cleanup.
7. Executive Function Externalizer — dump every open loop, then sort into Now / Later / Trash with a one-line next step for the Now items. This is the keystone. It’s a brain-dump plus a triage, which is most of what a paid focus app sells you, minus the subscription.

Notice what none of them do. None of them ask the model to diagnose you, medicate you, or replace the things that actually move the needle on attention — sleep, movement, treatment where it’s warranted, and a workload that isn’t quietly impossible. They’re scaffolding, not a cure. Used as scaffolding, they’re excellent.

set it up once, not seven times

The mistake is pasting these as seven one-off messages and losing them by Thursday. The point of a tool you live in is that it remembers. So build it once. In Claude, open a Project (top-left sidebar, New Project) and call it “Focus”. Paste all seven prompt patterns into the project instructions as named moves — “when I say ‘shatter this’, do the Task Paralysis breakdown,” and so on. Now every new chat in that project already knows the moves. You type two words; it does the rest.

That’s the difference between a viral screenshot and a system. The screenshot gives you seven prompts. The system gives you a workspace that does executive function for you on a keyword, every day, without you having to find the post again.

“A scattered brain can’t hold the plan and execute the plan at the same time. So stop trying. Put the plan somewhere it can’t fall out, and spend your attention on the doing.”

where this meets your health, not just your inbox

This isn’t only a productivity trick. The same externalising move is the core of running a personal health system at all. The reason most people abandon their tracking isn’t laziness — it’s executive load. Remembering to log, deciding what matters, sequencing the weekly review: those are the exact jobs an under-resourced brain drops first. Hand them to a workspace that remembers, and the habit survives a bad week. The open-loops dump becomes your Sunday review. The time-map becomes how you stop over-promising your evenings. Focus and health turn out to be the same problem wearing two outfits.

We turned the seven prompts into a proper workbook — the full standing instructions, the keyword triggers, and the project setup wired to your own health ledger — in the Claude Executive-Function Pack in the library. There’s also a ten-minute Setup guide if you just want the workspace built, and a done-for-you option if you’d rather we set the whole thing up around your life and hand you the keys. None of them are a secret mode. All of them are the unglamorous version that actually holds.