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
3 practicesGood 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…