Doom piles and the deferred decision.

A "doom pile" — sometimes unpacked as Didn't Organise, Only Moved — is what's left when the brain runs out of bandwidth to decide where each thing belongs. You get a burst of tidying energy, sweep everything into a box or corner "to deal with later," and move on. The trouble is that later is slippery for a time-blind brain, so the pile never gets resolved — it just becomes part of the landscape. It isn't mess so much as a stack of unmade decisions.

Tidying a room isn't one task — it's initiation, prioritising, sorting, switching, and follow-through, stacked on top of each other, on a chore that offers almost no immediate reward. So you start on the desk, spot something that belongs in another room, wander off, and the job strands half-done. And ADHD's out of sight, out of mind wiring quietly makes it worse: put something in a drawer and it ceases to exist, so you leave things out where you can see them — which is exactly how surfaces fill up. The mess then feeds shame, and shame feeds avoidance.