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 practicesIf the screen limit in your house is only your preference, every evening turns into a negotiation about your preference. Borrowing a published figure, roughly two hours a day of leisure screen time for a child over two, moves the argument off you.
The carve-outs matter as much as the number. A video call with a grandparent is a conversation, and a laptop open for homework is schoolwork, so…
Fast cuts, saturated colour, constant motion, a level that ticks over just as you were about to stop. Screens are not accidentally gripping for a distractible brain, and preferring them says something about how you are wired rather than about what has gone wrong with you.
There is a second use for knowing this. If those features are what holds attention, they are also the features worth stealing for the things that…
For a child who finds face to face conversation frightening, a game where they talk to friends while doing something else may be the only place they socialise at all. Worth noticing before you count the hours.
Talking through a headset takes out most of what makes conversation hard: no eye contact to hold, no faces to read in real time, no silence to fill.…
Ask a child how long they were on the tablet and the answer comes back low. Ask their parent and that answer comes back low too. Neither of them is exactly lying to you.
A child does not volunteer that they went over the limit, and a parent doing their best on every other front rounds their own household down. This…