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 practicesRather than arguing that someone ought to get organised, ask one question. Would your life be better if fewer things slipped, fewer people were annoyed with you, and you spent less of the day worrying about what you had forgotten?
The answer is nearly always yes, and it lands differently when the person says it instead of hearing it. Keep the list concrete and drawn from their…
Anything with more than one step gets written down, and the child does the writing. Ten problems, check them against the answers, correct what is wrong: three lines in their own hand.
A handout would carry the same words, but writing it themselves does two extra things. It puts the sequence somewhere they can look again when step…
Put the rules up on the wall where everyone can see them, and put the child's own version on a card on their desk.
A rule that lives only in memory is not there in the second it is needed, which is the second something more interesting has just walked past. A card…
Where you can, let the learning be something done rather than something sat through. Typing instead of writing, a calculator instead of longhand, a built model instead of an essay.
The knowledge is usually already there. What fails is showing it through a long, still, low feedback task, and that is the part worth redesigning.…