A researcher in her fourth year told me, on a Tuesday call, that she owned six books about ADHD and productivity and had finished none of them. She had highlighted the first chapter of each. The highlighters were on the desk behind her, lined up by colour.

Six books, and what she was short of was three things that would work this week, and permission to ignore the rest.

That is what Pick Three is. One hundred strategies, each on its own card, sorted by the feeling you're stuck in rather than by theory. You read the index, pick the Part that matches your week, and choose three. Then you close the deck.

100 cards in nine Parts:

1. Getting started when starting feels impossible

2. Focus, attention and the 3 pm collapse

3. Beating time blindness and planning

4. Writing when the words won't come

5. Emotions, motivation and the inner critic

6. Energy, sleep and the body that has to do the work

7. Transitions, task-switching and the lost afternoon

8. Systems, memory and research decisions

9. Supervisors, community and asking for help

Every card has the same shape: when to use it, what it works against, and how to do it in a paragraph you can read while the kettle boils.

Thirty-eight cards carry a star. Those are the ones I hand out most in coaching calls. Forty-one are marked uncommon, meaning strategies you will not have met in the ADHD lists already open in your tabs, like the Reviewer 2 Letter, the Saturation Stop-Rule, the Supervisor Translation Table, the Methods Diary, and A Eulogy for the Thesis You Planned.

Open the Start Here page. Find the sentence that sounds like your week. It sends you to a Part. Read those ten or fifteen cards, pick three, and put the rest away. One of the three goes on your lock screen. On Monday you pick again, or you don't, and either way the deck is still there.

Reading all 100 in one sitting is the one thing I'd ask you not to do.

Doctoral researchers with ADHD, diagnosed or self-identified, at any stage from proposal to corrections. It also works for people without ADHD whose PhD has made them behave as if they had it. Most of the cards were written for the second and third year, which is where the fourth-year researcher above had got stuck.

It is not a course. There is nothing to log in to and nothing to keep up with.

A 113-page PDF, one card per page, sized to read on a phone. It also prints at home if you'd rather hold the cards. Files arrive by email straight after purchase, and every future update to the deck is free.

Lock-screen cards. The 38 starred strategies as phone wallpapers in Navy and White, plus a blank "My three this week" card. Pick one and set it. You'll see it 100 times a day without trying.

Your First Card, for the first 30 buyers. Send me three sentences about where the thesis is. I send back a two-minute voice note with the card I'd start with tomorrow, why, and what the first ten minutes look like. Recorded for you, once, by me.

I'm Maria Stefanidi, an ADHD-informed coach for doctoral researchers, working online from Athens. Every card in this deck came out of a coaching call before it went onto a page. Some of them took a year of watching the same thing go wrong before I knew what to call it.

Is it a printed deck? Not yet. This is the digital version. A printed edition is planned for 2027 and buyers of this version will hear first.

Can I share it with my research group? Please don't; it's licensed to one person. If a doctoral school wants a licence for all its researchers, write to me and we'll sort one out.

What if I'm not sure it's for me? Take the free "Which three?" quiz first. It takes six taps, asks for no email, and hands you three cards from the deck. If those three land, the other 97 will too.