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 practicesPeople rarely stop at you are late. They move on to what sort of person is late, and then it is about respect and reliability rather than about time. You have probably taken that account on board yourself.
Naming the jump out loud helps, at home and at work: this is a difficulty with timing, here is what I am putting in place, and it is not a comment on…
If the test is on Friday and it is Monday, Friday is doing almost no work. Put something today on the end of today's revision, however small.
This is not spoiling a child. It is matching the reward to the timescale they can actually feel, which is roughly the one they are living in. Half an…
If the internal clock is not there, put clocks in the room. Somewhere the child can see without turning round, a timer on the desk, one on the wall by where they work.
Think of it as a prop rather than a cure. The aim is not to train an ability into existence before the child is allowed to cope, it is to let them…