Focus, starting, and ADHD

Feeling bad about being late is a consequence you can talk yourself out of in about four seconds. Telling a friend you are buying dinner if you are late is not.

Pick something small and real, and pick a person who will hold you to it without being unkind about it. Dinner, the coffees, the taxi fare. The size…

Put the stake outside your own head. Tell a colleague that if you are late to the meeting, lunch is on you.

The link between being late and buying lunch is arbitrary, and that does not matter at all. What matters is that it is real, it happens soon, and…

Say the plan out loud to somebody. A manager, a colleague, your wife, a coach. Hearing yourself explain it does something that turning it over privately does not.

The listener does not need to be an expert in any of it. Talking forces you to put things in order, and the gaps tend to announce themselves halfway…

Once a week, both calendars open on the table. Who is doing scouts, who has football, what is happening on Thursday. Twice a week if the house is busy.

The point is finding the collisions while there is still time to sort them out, rather than at eight on Thursday morning with coats half on. Keep it…

Choose one person and tell them you will send the finished thing by a set time. Not a conversation about how it is going, just the file, the photo, or the word done.

The sending is the whole mechanism, so keep it small and exact: what, and by when. It does not have to be someone qualified to judge the work, and it…

Let the child score themselves on the same sheet the teacher scores. Two columns, filled in separately, then looked at together.

At first the two columns can be miles apart, and that is the useful bit rather than a problem. Nobody is being caught out. Over the weeks the gap…

Good help leaves you more able to do it yourself next time. If the whole thing only works while the other person is in the room, something has gone sideways.

There is a real difference between someone building your schedule for you and someone sitting beside you while you build it. The second is slower and…

If a course has no fixed time, give it one. Write down which day and which hour you will watch it, put that in the calendar as though somebody else set it, and tell one person.

Five minutes every Sunday: when am I watching this, and when am I doing the work that comes after it. Then one short message midweek to whoever is…

When you agree to something, agree who follows up. Do you tell them if it slips, or do they check in with you?

Most of the hurt around late work comes from nobody having said. You assume they will ask, they assume you will speak up, and the silence in between…

Support does not have to stop at eighteen. Plan for it to thin out gradually through the twenties, at a level everyone has agreed rather than one that gets argued over every month.

A workable version names three things: what is still being helped with, how much, and when you will look at it again. Every six months is usually…

Some things only happen when another person is there, even if they are doing something entirely different. Ring a friend and clean your two kitchens together with the phone on the counter.

This works for studying, tidying, paperwork and the weekly shop, because what you are borrowing is presence rather than help. Agree a start time and…

If you keep it all in your head, it is worth asking who else is keeping it. Very often somebody nearby is doing the remembering, and neither of you has ever said so out loud.

This matters because from outside it looks like coping, right up until that person is away, unwell or worn out by it. Ask the plain question at home:…

A behaviour agreement needs six things in it: the goal, exactly what the child does, what they earn, what happens if they do not, signatures from everyone, and an adult who sticks to it.

Most of these fall apart over what was meant rather than over what was done, so write the specifics down to the level of what counts as finished. The…

Work the deal out with the child instead of handing it to them. Much the same rules, an entirely different feeling.

Let them argue for a bit longer on the console, or for Friday off, and give ground where you honestly can. The terms tend to land in roughly the same…

Some of what feels like a flaw in your character is really a job that can be handed to something outside your head: a calendar, a list on the wall, a person who helps you lay out the week.

Coaching for attention difficulties is mostly this, and nothing more mysterious. Someone sits with you, builds the week, works out what comes first,…

A bridge year can be a deferred place, a course at the local college, a job, or a stretch of genuinely doing very little. That last one is a real option and not a refusal to choose.

For someone who has just come apart, a fresh demand can restart the same collapse, so a few months with nothing scheduled is sometimes the…

If most of the difficulty is happening at home, most of the work needs to happen with the household in the room. Otherwise the hour of good conversation gets quietly undone by Tuesday.

In a settled stretch, seeing the young person on their own with occasional family time is fine. In a crisis, turn it round: everyone together,…

Sorting goes better fast than carefully. If every item stalls you, ask someone to sit in the room while you work, not to help but to keep the pace up.

A person nearby changes what the hour feels like, and they can be reading their own book the whole time. What they supply is momentum, which is…

Worry done on your own goes round in circles. Said out loud to one other person, it usually turns into a problem with edges, and sometimes into a next step.

The rule is short enough to remember at midnight: never worry alone. It does not have to be someone who can fix anything. A friend, a colleague, your…

If someone close to you has become the person who chases you, that arrangement is wearing you both down, even on the days it works. It is worth naming out loud and changing on purpose.

Once a partner or a manager supplies all the pressure, nothing inside you ever needs to. They end up tired and resentful, you end up handled like a…

Try not to ask why. If the person knew why, they would probably have sorted it out already, and the question tends to land like an accusation.

Ask what happened just before instead. What was going on, what they felt, what came after, what sort of day it had been. Those answers can be worked…

The more one person checks up, the more the other hides, and the more they hide the more the checking looks justified. Both are responding reasonably to the last move and nobody is having a good time.

Getting out of it usually means the monitoring comes down first, which feels like the wrong direction to whoever is doing the monitoring. A workable…

Who pays the bill does give a household some say. That argument weakens every year a child gets older, and it runs out entirely once they are an adult sitting in front of you asking for help.

With a sixteen year old at home on the family plan, parents setting terms is reasonable and worth saying out loud. With an adult, the same move…

Ask two questions and then sit with the difference. How much time on this would you like? And how much do you think is actually good for you?

Almost nobody gives the same answer twice, and the gap between the numbers is more persuasive than anything you could have told them, because they…

Fasten a time you keep missing to another person. Go up when your partner goes up. Ask a colleague to knock for you on the way to the meeting.

A person moving is much easier to notice than a number changing. Ask for it as a favour and keep it small and specific, because a vague request to be…

When someone reminds you often enough, things do get done. But the sense of time doing the work is theirs, which is why it all collapses the moment they stop.

Worth naming out loud in a household, because the reminding costs the relationship something and never builds the missing part. A better arrangement…

Take the Friday deadline and walk it backwards onto the days. What happens Monday, what happens Tuesday, written down where both of you can see it.

Children with this difficulty rarely generate the sequence themselves, and asking them to is asking for the thing that is hard. So supply it, on…

Moving between lessons is where things fall apart, so plan the move out loud before it happens. What to bring, where to go, and who will be waiting.

Before the child leaves maths, walk them through what comes with them and tell them to check in with the next teacher on arrival. That teacher greets…

With children, practise the hard social moment rather than explaining it. Act out asking to join a game, or losing one, a few times at home where nothing is at stake.

Keep it light and short, let them play both parts, and be the one who gets it wrong sometimes so it does not feel like a test. Pick the situation…

Relationships take a lot of the strain here, and the usual shape is one person quietly carrying all the planning while the other feels constantly told off. Both halves are worth naming out loud before resentment sets hard.

The practical work is splitting the load by what each of you is actually good at rather than down the middle, and putting the shared admin somewhere…