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 practicesIf the screen limit in your house is only your preference, every evening turns into a negotiation about your preference. Borrowing a published figure, roughly two hours a day of leisure screen time for a child over two, moves the argument off you.
The carve-outs matter as much as the number. A video call with a grandparent is a conversation, and a laptop open for homework is schoolwork, so…
For a child who finds face to face conversation frightening, a game where they talk to friends while doing something else may be the only place they socialise at all. Worth noticing before you count the hours.
Talking through a headset takes out most of what makes conversation hard: no eye contact to hold, no faces to read in real time, no silence to fill.…
There is a rough benchmark for homework: about ten minutes a night per school year, so a child in their first year does ten minutes and a final year student tops out near two hours.
It helps to have the number before a school meeting, because "this is too much" sounds like an opinion while a benchmark sounds like a standard. Some…
A rule that holds in your house and nowhere else is not really a rule. Children locate the unrestricted house within about a week.
So the awkward job is the useful one: a short message to the parents of the two or three friends your child spends most weekends with, agreeing…