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
8 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…
A child who is blind to time is not ignoring the deadline. They are living in whatever is happening right now, with no sense that the bell is close or that Friday's test has anything to do with today.
It shows up as reacting to each moment rather than moving through a day with a shape. Adults read that as not caring, and the child usually cannot…
The pattern usually ends the same way. Nothing feels urgent, then the deadline lands all at once, and the child panics and produces something poor or nothing at all.
Once you can see the sequence, you can step in near the beginning instead of managing the wreckage at the end. Say it out loud with the child,…
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 only real feedback a child gets arrives every ten weeks, it will not shape a single Tuesday. A report at the end of term is a record, not a motivator.
This is worth saying gently to teachers and to parents who feel that grades ought to be motivation enough. For this child they are not, and no amount…
For younger children, make the reward small, concrete and soon. Stickers, points, a smiley face, five minutes of something good, handed over the same hour rather than at the end of the week.
Points that build towards something bigger work well, as long as the point itself arrives immediately. Hourly is not too often for a young child, and…
Keep consequences for the sake of honesty, but let praise and reward do most of the work. Punishment can tell a child what to stop and it cannot tell them what to do instead.
Children with this difficulty collect an extraordinary amount of correction over a childhood, from teachers, from parents, from other children.…
Go looking for the moment the child does the thing you have been asking for, and say so while it is still happening. Most of us watch for the problem and only notice the good behaviour when we have run out of trouble.
It helps to decide in advance what you are hunting for, so that starting the homework without being asked, or waiting a turn, actually registers…