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
4 practicesBefore handing anyone a new system, make sure they can say back why it should work better than what they are doing now. A strategy with no reason attached gets dropped the first time it is inconvenient.
Ask them to explain it to you in their own words and listen for whose reason it is. If the logic is only yours, it will hold for about a week. It is…
Strategies for ADHD are visible. A timer on the table, a list on the wall, an alarm going off in a meeting. If someone has not yet made peace with having ADHD, each of those is an announcement, and it will quietly get dropped.
So ask, before handing over another tool: how do you feel about the diagnosis itself? Sometimes the honest answer is that they still half hope it was…
Ask what they think this will cost them in effort, then say what you think. People rarely give up because a strategy failed. They give up because it turned out to be harder than anyone had told them.
Be specific about the first fortnight, since that is when it is worst and the payoff has not arrived yet. Someone who expected a small effort and met…
If someone is about to send off a saliva kit to fill in the family history they never had, have a conversation first. These tests hand back more than health information, and they hand it back with nobody in the room.
A father who is not the father, a sibling nobody mentioned, a donor conception no one planned to explain: these arrive by email on an ordinary…