Here's my confession, written at the least flattering possible moment.
It's July. There's a tax payment due in a matter of days. I know roughly what I owe. The money is sitting in my account, ready to go. All I have to do is log in and send it.
And I can't.
Because to log in I need my Government Gateway password, and I have, of course, forgotten it. So the payment sits there, ready but unsent, while the deadline creeps closer and a very familiar guilt settles in. I did the actual return months ago. That was meant to be the hard part. And yet here I am in the middle of summer, beaten by a login and a payment I don't even really understand.
The tax return was never the hard part. It's the last click I can't make.
Here's the bit that would be funny if it weren't happening right now.
Last time, I forgot this exact password. So I reset it, felt briefly and enormously clever, and thought, right, that's future me sorted. Future me will just breeze in. Future me is me. Now. Locked out again, staring at a login screen like it's the first time I've ever seen it. This is working memory doing exactly what it does, and no amount of good intentions two or three months ago changes what my brain can actually hold until the next deadline.
And the truly absurd part is that I already know how this ends. I'll reset it today. I'll feel clever again for exactly four seconds. And in January, when I have to pay again, I'll be right back here, forgetting the new one, resetting it, promising future me something I have no way of delivering. It's not a one-off mistake. It's an annual tradition. Twice-annual, in fact, which we'll get to.
People talk about "doing your taxes" like it's a single thing you sit down and do. It isn't.
It's finding the figures. It's remembering which email I used. It's the login I've forgotten, then the reset, then the code sent to a phone I've left in another room, then the reference number, then a completely separate trip into my banking app to actually move the money. Every one of those is a small, separate step, and every single one is a fresh chance for my brain to bounce off and wander away.
For most people that chain is mildly annoying. For an ADHD brain it's a minefield, because you only need to trip on one link for the whole thing to stall. Each link demands its own act of getting started, and executive function is exactly what a chain like this taxes hardest. And it stalls at the worst possible spot, right at the end, when the difficult work is already behind you.
This is the part I find hardest to explain to people who don't live it.
Getting to the payment should feel like relief. Instead I'm frozen at the final click. Not because it's difficult, it's the easiest step of the whole ordeal, but because it needs the one thing I don't have, and starting the password reset feels like cracking the lid back off a box I only just managed to close. My brain treats "reset the password and pay" as if it were the entire tax return all over again, and it noses away from it.
So the money sits there. Ready. Unpaid. And every day I don't do the two-minute job, the shame quietly compounds, which makes me want to look at it even less, which is precisely how a two-minute job becomes a two-week one. That's the shame spiral, and it's the reason procrastination is better understood as emotion regulation than as poor discipline. It's the same trap I wrote about in finishing, not starting, only this time the unfinished thing has a deadline and a fine attached.
I did the hard part. I just can't get over the small bit at the end.
Let me lay out what I think happens, and you can enjoy watching me not quite be sure.
Right now, in July, there's a payment due. Some sort of advance on next year, I think. Then in January I have to log back in and pay again. Somewhere around April, once the new tax year turns over, I can actually do the next return. And then, reliably, I'll ignore all of it until it's July once more and the whole confusing merry-go-round comes back around.
I've paid the July one for years and I still couldn't explain it to you. It's called a "payment on account," a phrase that has told me precisely nothing across all the times I've dutifully handed the money over. All I really know is that there's a date at the end of July, it's looming right now, and if I miss it there's a fine, or interest, or some penalty I don't fully understand either.
And if it's any comfort to either of us, I'm in enormous company. HMRC's own figures show roughly one in five Self Assessment bills are paid late, and about 1.1 million payments on account were missed in a single January.
When a date is that far off, time blindness means it doesn't feel real until it very suddenly does. And when it does, I'm not just late. I'm late and baffled, scrambling to understand a thing I've somehow already paid several times.
Here's the thing I don't say out loud very often.
I don't actually understand how any of this works. Not properly. I've been filing and paying for years, and I still couldn't confidently tell you what a payment on account is, why it lands in July, or how the whole calendar is meant to fit together.
And the uncomfortable part is that I can't cleanly blame the system for that. Maybe nobody ever sat me down and explained it. Or, far more likely, someone did, once, in a letter or a form or a dull five minutes of someone's time, and it was just boring enough that my attention slid clean off it. That's the honest version. The information was probably right there in front of me, and I simply wasn't interested enough to hold onto it.
The trouble is that tax doesn't care whether I found it interesting. The bit I glazed over years ago is the exact bit biting me today. That's the quiet cost of an ADHD attention span, if you'll forgive the pun. The boring-but-important thing doesn't get absorbed in the moment it's offered, because interest is what drives an ADHD brain, not importance, and then it comes back, every single year, wearing a deadline and a threat. Not understanding it isn't stupidity. It's what happens when the explaining is done in the driest possible way, at a moment my brain had already left the room.
The honest answer isn't "become someone who remembers passwords and reads letters from HMRC properly." I've met me. That person isn't coming.
What would actually help is not meeting this as one enormous dreaded wall at the deadline, but as a handful of tiny steps spread across the quiet weeks before, when there's no panic attached. Find the login early. Reset the password on a calm Tuesday, not a frantic one. Break the last click off from the rest so it isn't guarding the exit. On the days it still won't happen, a bit of body doubling gets more admin out of me than any amount of resolve.
And, honestly, it would help to have the confusing bit explained at the one moment I might actually take it in, which is never when the letter arrives and always when I'm sitting there stuck at 11pm.
That's genuinely why we're building Loops.
It turns a horrible, looming, all-at-once task into small actions a day, it can talk me through the bit I've never understood at the moment I finally care about it, and it gives you one person who gets to see me chip away at the thing I'd otherwise avoid until the last possible minute. It won't remember my Government Gateway password for me. But it might stop me arriving here, every July and every January, at the same locked door.
If you're sitting on a payment you can't make, or a return you can't face, I promise you're not some sort of disorganised failure.
For what it's worth, leaving it to the wire is practically the national sport. On this year's January deadline, HMRC said nearly half a million people filed on the final day, and more than 27,000 in the final hour.
The task was never really the problem. It's the password you can't hold onto, the last step that guards the door, the calendar that never got explained in a way that stuck, and the way the whole thing lands as one impossible wall instead of a series of small, survivable steps. Those are ADHD problems, not character ones, and they're far more fixable than "try to care more."
Right, I'm going to go and reset that password now. I'll pay it today. And yes, come January, and then next July, I'll almost certainly be right back here, and honestly, that's fine. The answer was never to become a different person who finds tax fascinating. It's to build the thing that carries me through the exact bit I always get stuck on.
It's July. There's a tax payment due in days, the money is ready, and I still haven't sent it, because I've forgotten my Government Gateway password. Again.
This isn't laziness. Doing your taxes with ADHD is hard for specific, predictable reasons:
The ready-but-unpaid payment is the proof. The caring was never missing. What's missing is a way through a multi-step, password-gated, poorly-explained task that an ADHD brain is almost designed to bounce off, especially at the final click.
Not more willpower, and not becoming someone who reads tax letters closely. What helps looks like:
A payment you can't make, or a return you can't start, doesn't make you a disorganised failure.
The task was never the real problem. The password, the last step, the baffling calendar, and the all-at-once wall are, and those are ADHD problems, not character ones.
You don't need to care more or become a different person. You need the thing broken small, the blockers sorted early, the confusing bit explained when it counts, and someone who sees you do it.
Matt has worked in design and marketing for 14 years and is fascinated by how AI will shape the future of both. Diagnosed with ADHD in his early thirties, he writes and researches the ideas that help him better understand his own brain.
At Loops, Matt helps train the AI coach, speaks with users and shapes the app around how people with ADHD actually think and work. It's the kind of tool he wishes he'd had years before his diagnosis.
Outside work, Matt lives with his wife, dog and cat, grows pine trees and dreams of one day owning a patch of land to plant them on.