Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD
Focus, starting, and ADHD
Most advice about focus is written for a brain that starts easily. This area is not. It covers what ADHD actually is, how to make a start when starting is the hard part, how to bring a future consequence close enough to feel, and how to stop paying for it in shame.
What works for this
Implementation intentions
Putting things off is mood repair rather than laziness: delay removes the bad feeling straight away and the cost lands later. So the move is not more willpower, it is a plan specific enough to run without a decision.
One move, today
Write one sentence: when it is [time] and I am at [place], I will [the first small action]. Naming when and where is the part the evidence supports.
What matches
8 practicesFeeling 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…
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…
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…
You can screen for a processing difficulty with no test at all. Just notice, in ordinary conversation, whether the child is answering what you actually said.
A child who drifts off topic, answers a slightly different question, or needs things said twice may not be avoiding you or daydreaming. The words may…
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…
A lot of what people now know about ADHD came from a video. Some of it is genuinely good, some of it is not, and asking someone what they have been watching is a fair question to open with.
Creators who live with ADHD have done real good here. They have made people feel recognised and made asking for help less frightening, and some…