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
6 practicesCharge the phone in another room overnight. Not face down, not on the far side of the bed: another room, so that reaching it means standing up.
Distance is what does the work here, which is why the halfway versions never hold. If you use it as an alarm, a cheap clock settles that for the…
Before a task you have been circling for days, give five minutes to moving your body. A brisk walk or a couple of flights of stairs is often enough to make starting feel less like pushing at a door that will not open.
Treat the movement as part of the task rather than something virtuous you do separately. The lift is short lived, so it helps most sitting right…
Light movement while you work is not stolen from the work. Rocking a foot, standing up, a slow circuit of the room on a call: for many people the concentration goes up rather than down.
Worth testing instead of assuming. Take one task you always do sitting still and do it moving gently: read on your feet, take the meeting walking,…
Do not leave it to eleven at night to decide whether to close the tab. Set the block in the afternoon, while you are still the version of yourself who wants it set.
A browser extension that shuts certain sites between certain hours, a router on a timer, mobile data off after a set time. Pick one, set it once, and…
Set the room up so that movement is already there for the taking: somewhere to stand, something to hold, a chair that lets you shift. Then nobody has to decide in the moment whether it is allowed.
This is a change to furniture and habit, not to willpower. A standing spot for part of the day, a wobble cushion, knitting or whittling while you…
If you are pulled towards risk, you will do better giving that pull somewhere with a floor under it than trying to switch it off. Fast, high, cold, loud: choose the planned version rather than the one that turns up at two in the morning.
Work out what the appeal actually is. Speed, height, cold water, a crowd, the edge of fear. Then find the form of it that has brakes: a climbing wall…