Focus, starting, and ADHD

There are two ways to make something get noticed: make it louder, or quieten everything around it. The second is usually the one nobody has tried.

It applies to a desk and to a phone screen alike. Adding one more reminder into a busy field mostly adds to the field. Taking six things off the desk…

Mindfulness practice is good for most people, and may help a little more if you have ADHD. Treat it as something supportive rather than as the treatment itself.

The honest version is worth having, because being told it is the answer and then finding it is not tends to end with people dropping it entirely. If…

When the thing is over, sit down for twenty minutes and go through it: what happened, what worked, what did not, what you will do differently. Put it in the diary, because it never happens on intention alone.

The monthly report, the school year, the audit. Write the answers where you will actually find them next time, and be specific about the point it…

Book time on your own the way you would book anything else. Not as a reward for having finished everything, and not only once you are already frayed.

Overwhelm often comes from the sheer volume of contact rather than from the work: lectures, housemates, group chats, the phone going all evening.…

If it is out of sight it is gone, so build the system around what you can see. Clothes on an open shelf and books in the drawer is a perfectly good arrangement when that is what works.

Tidy usually means hidden, which is why so much storage quietly fails. Try the opposite: hooks instead of hangers, open boxes, a clear jar, one bowl…

Some days fill up entirely with things that were urgent for somebody else. Practise saying not now to other people, and to the version of you that opens one more tab.

For one afternoon, write down every time you get pulled away and who did the pulling: a colleague, a notification, or you. Most people are surprised…

Find out how long you actually last before your mind wanders somewhere nicer, then make that your block. If the honest answer is eleven minutes, work in elevens.

Most people set twenty five minutes because a website said so, fail at it daily, and conclude they are hopeless. Time yourself honestly across a few…

If you take medication, work out when it actually comes on and when it fades, then put the demanding work inside that window. Spending your best hours on email is a waste of something limited.

Track it for a week. What time did it start, when did the edge come off, when were you flagging. Then build the day around the answer: the thinking…

Put small obstacles between the urge and the doing. One browser used only for work, tempting apps buried three folders down, notifications off for anything that is not an actual person you love.

None of this stops a determined person and it is not meant to. It adds four seconds, and four seconds is often enough for the urge to lose its grip.…

Ask what is working and what is not, rather than whether you did well or badly. The first question you can answer honestly. The second one you will lie to yourself about.

At the end of a week, three questions. What went better than I expected. What got in the way. What is the one thing I want to change. Notice where…

A task with no time attached has nothing to bring it back to you. Give it an hour, Friday two until three, and the diary carries it instead of your memory.

Do this on a Sunday with the list in front of you. Not everything needs a slot, only the things that have been sliding from week to week. Be honest…

When someone asks for an hour of your time, your head searches for a clash, finds nothing, and says yes. A calendar with everything already in it turns that guess into something you can look at.

The trick is to put in the whole of your life, not only the appointments other people gave you. Travel, meals, the school run, the hour you actually…

Read down a long to-do list and you will find things belonging to a person you were three years ago. Some of them were never good ideas. They got written down anyway.

Seeing the list that way makes deleting bearable. You are not abandoning your ambitions, you are letting go of ideas that arrived on a hopeful…

A healthy list loses items as well as gaining them. Some leave because they are done and some because they did not survive the week. Both are normal.

If the only way something can leave your list is by being completed, the list can only grow, and every glance at it will feel worse than the last…

A pile is mostly decisions you have not made. You did not know what to do with the thing, so you put it down there to sort out later, and later has not arrived.

Read that way, tidying stops being about tidiness. The job is not moving things around, it is making forty small decisions you have been putting off.…

A task needs smoothing at both ends. If it looks big and horrible you will not begin it, and if the middle is full of snags you will not see it through.

These are two different problems and people usually only work on one. Making the start smaller helps you begin: open the document, write one line.…

A reward that is far off has almost no weight in ADHD. Tying the task to something you actually care about gives you a reason that does not depend on the payoff arriving soon.

So instead of 'I should file these', try 'I want to be someone my family can rely on, and this is part of that'. The other half of this approach is…

Sorting a pile of receipts is not difficult. Sitting with how dull it is, that is the difficult part, and it helps to say so out loud.

Once you know boredom is the real demand, you stop trying to simplify a task that is already simple and start making the dullness bearable instead. A…

Sometimes the last minute really does produce your best work. Often it produces your worst, and those nights are much easier to forget.

That is what keeps the belief alive: it pays out just often enough. Rather than arguing about it, count. Take the last ten things you left to the…

Paint the room is not a task. Fill the holes, tape the edges, buy the rollers, do one wall. That is four tasks, and each one ends.

A big undivided job sits in the head as one enormous demand, which is why looking at it tires you before you have lifted anything. Write the steps in…

Go down the list and find the two items that have been sitting there for months. One of them needs doing this week. The other needs deleting, honestly and out loud.

A list full of things that never move quietly drains everything else on it, because you meet all of them each time you look. Clearing in either…

Keep your clearest hours for the work that needs a clear head. Fold the laundry when you are half awake, not at ten in the morning when you have finally come alive.

Most of us have a window or two in the day when thinking is genuinely cheaper, and we spend it on email and tidying because those are easy to pick…

Pick a system that is good enough, spend one evening on it at most, and then use it for a month without changing anything.

You can spend a very long time sharpening tools and never get round to the woodwork. An ordinary calendar used every day beats a beautiful one used…

The other way through fog is to walk into it. Start badly, on purpose, and let the shape of the thing appear while you are working on it.

With some jobs you genuinely cannot know what you are doing until you are inside them, and waiting for clarity first just keeps you outside. Give…

Note who is a first degree relative and who is a second, instead of writing 'runs in the family'. Parents, children and siblings sit in one ring. Grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins sit in the next.

A simple grid helps: names down the side, then relation, what they were like, what was ever diagnosed, what was ever treated. The picture comes out…

If you take a prescribed stimulant and your workplace tests, sort the paperwork before anyone asks. A labelled bottle and a short letter from your prescriber turn an alarming result into a filing matter.

Prescribed amphetamine shows up on a standard screen as amphetamine, because that is what it is. The test cannot tell the pharmacy from anything…

If you carry a firm dislike of medication from childhood, it is worth asking what you actually remember. Often what is remembered is a row between two adults rather than anything the medicine did.

Where parents disagreed about it, the disagreement was frequently about control and about each other. A child in the middle of that absorbs a…

Some settings simply suit an attention difficulty better. Expectations set out minute by minute, consequences that arrive the same day, a visible ladder to climb: military life often fits for exactly those reasons.

The point carries well beyond the army. When you are helping someone choose work, ask what the day actually looks like rather than what the job is…

One question is worth asking before choosing between products: which part of the day actually goes wrong? Bead type capsules tend to give more early on, while the pump type keeps more back for the afternoon.

Two products can hold the same molecule and cover the same number of hours, and still fit one person and not another, because of where the strongest…

If you learn one thing about how these medicines work, learn the junction between two nerve cells. Nearly every drug in this field acts at one of a handful of points in that small space.

It saves a great deal of memorising. Once you can picture a message being released, landing, and then being cleared away, most explanations turn out…

Mechanism is a moving thing, so it is easier to watch than to read. A university made animation of what happens at the junction will teach you more in ten minutes than a page of description.

Prefer something made by a university or a public body over whatever a search puts at the top, since much of what is written about these drugs is…

Once you can follow the sequence, release, landing, clearing away and breaking down, most new drugs turn out to be recombinations of those four. That is a fair claim to competence and a good place to stop.

Learning drug by drug never ends and never transfers. Learning the sequence means you can place something you have never heard of and ask a sensible…

Learn the family rather than the members. If you know roughly how one drug in a class behaves, you already know most of what the others will do.

The medicines people are most often on collapse into a handful of families. A new arrival is usually a variation inside one of them, and occasionally…

Take one of the gaps you already have, the commute or the walk or the shower, and use it to ask what is coming up this week and what might be slipping. No new tool, no new app, just the question.

That turns something accidental into something you can count on. It works best in the same place each time, so that the place starts asking the…

Sitting with one long unrewarding task has got harder for almost everyone. If you are planning work for yourself, or setting it for someone else, build the variety in rather than hoping for stamina.

In practice that means breaking a long stretch into shorter ones with something marking the end of each, changing what the work looks like part way…

A whole evening can go into recording an evening. It is worth asking, with no scolding in it, whether you were there for the thing you now have a photograph of.

This lands better than a rule about hours, because it is about something you would miss rather than something you are doing wrong. Try leaving the…

Most parents setting rules about an app have never scrolled it for ten minutes. The rules are usually reasonable and the picture underneath them is missing.

This is not really about being permissive. If you do not know that the feed is chosen for you, that one worried search brings a fortnight of similar…

For a week, jot down what was going on just before you picked up the phone, what you were thinking while you scrolled, and how you felt when you put it down. Nothing cleverer than that.

What usually surfaces is not that screens are bad but that two or three specific things are: one account, one time of day, one mood you always reach…

Part of what keeps the late start going is that it has genuinely worked. You have produced something good in one long night before, and you remember it clearly.

So telling you that leaving it late is a bad plan tends to fail, because you have evidence and the other person does not. The honest version is…

The dreaming is not the problem. It is that bills, forms and renewal dates are dull enough to stop registering at all, and those are the things that actually damage a life.

People who are managing well in every visible way still get brought down by a lapsed policy or an unopened letter from the council. Trying to care…