Focus, starting, and ADHD

If it has been on the list a year and nothing has moved, consider that you may have already decided. Saying so costs a good deal less than carrying it for another year.

Some items really are waiting for a better month. Others are quietly settled and only the guilt is still going round. You are allowed to say that the…

Decide now what you get if this is done by Friday, and what it costs you if it is not. Tell someone, so it is on the record.

The trouble with most jobs is that nothing happens either way, at least not for weeks. A deal made in advance puts a real consequence next to it: the…

An app can tell you what needs doing. It cannot make you want to do it. That gap is why the next one will disappoint you too.

Reminders, alarms and lists are genuinely good at the first job, so it is easy to assume a better one will finish the second. It will not, because…

Choosing the app, picking the colours, setting up the tags: that is the task avoiding you. It is interesting, it feels like preparation, and by bedtime nothing has been done.

New systems are enjoyable in a way the actual work never is, which is exactly why the evening goes that way. A useful test is whether anything on…

When something does not get written down, go back to that exact moment with curiosity rather than a telling off. What was in your hands, where were you, what did you tell yourself?

The useful information is all in the specifics: the request came in the corridor, the phone was in your other hand, you were already late. That is a…

We all keep a few small stories that let us take the easier option in the moment. Not lies to other people, just the ones we tell ourselves and half believe.

They are not a sign of a bad character. Everybody has a set, and what you have been through shapes which ones you specialise in. The reason to know…

You are allowed to decide not to write things down. What you cannot do is choose that and then be upset with yourself when you forget.

Straddling is the expensive bit: taking the easy option in the moment and the guilt afterwards. Pick one honestly. Either the note gets written, or…

Put the thing you are avoiding early in the day. Anything you place late gets pushed out by whatever the day turns into.

Early has two advantages at once. It is less likely to be shunted, because the day has not yet piled up behind it, and if it does slip it only slips…

Email is the easiest place to hide. It answers back, it never runs out, and by five o'clock it feels like you worked.

What makes it such a good stand-in for real work is that the rewards come in small unpredictable bursts and almost none of it asks much of you. Your…

Turn a vague plan into an if-then: when I sit down after lunch, I will open the one file.

Deciding in advance exactly when and where you will start removes the moment of friction where you usually stall.

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…

If someone close to you has become the person who chases you, that arrangement is wearing you both down, even on the days it works. It is worth naming out loud and changing on purpose.

Once a partner or a manager supplies all the pressure, nothing inside you ever needs to. They end up tired and resentful, you end up handled like a…

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…

If a task gives you nothing, bring something to it. Ring the cousin you never speak to and paint while you talk. Do the filing beside a friend who has their own filing to do.

This is a design fix rather than a failure of discipline. Dull work asks your brain to stay somewhere that offers it no reason to stay. Pair it with…

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…

Before treating something as your failure to get going, check whether you ever agreed it was yours. A job that bothers one person and genuinely does not bother the other has not been agreed by anybody.

That turns a stuck task back into a conversation, which is where it belongs. Say plainly that the unpainted wall does not trouble you, ask what it…

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…

Sometimes the first job is working out what the job is. Go back to whoever asked, or spend twenty minutes finding out, and count that as the work it is.

Ask the plain questions: what is this for, who reads it, what matters most, how long should it be. People hold back because they feel they should…

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…

If reminders, other people's deadlines and a bit of chivvying are what keep you moving, you are allowed to keep them. Inner drive arrives later for some of us, and taking the scaffolding away early does not hurry it along.

Families often pull the supports back on a birthday, as though a certain age should switch on self-direction. What tends to happen is that the only…

When someone says they feel restless inside, ask what the restlessness wants. Restless to move, or restless to do one particular thing until it feels right?

The two feel similar from the inside and point in different directions. With ADHD it is usually undirected: the legs go, the chair is wrong, you need…

When someone says their heart races on their medication, ask whether it ever did before they started. It is the cheapest question you have and it usually sorts the answer out.

Go looking for the old settings: waiting to be called on in class, standing outside a room before a difficult conversation, three in the morning with…

One man put his lamps on a timer so the room would go dark at eleven and send him to bed. It worked for a few nights. Then he simply carried on in the dark. A cue can tell you the time. It cannot make you stand up.

Worth remembering before you build anything clever. If the pull of whatever a person is already doing is stronger than the nudge you have designed,…

An ADHD diagnosis usually arrives with two extra words attached: which presentation it is, and how severe. Both are descriptions of what gets in your way, not a grade you were awarded.

Inattentive, hyperactive and impulsive, or the two together, and then mild, moderate or severe. Mild means you met the threshold and the effect on…

Hyperactivity and impulsiveness almost never turn up alone. When restlessness appears with no attention difficulty beside it, that is a reason to ask what else might be going on.

In practice the two run together, and over the years the visible restlessness tends to settle while the attention side stays. So a picture that is…

The diagnostic manual is a document people sat in rooms and argued over. That is no reason to dismiss it, and it is a good reason not to treat it as the last word on you.

Committees weigh how reliably clinicians can agree on a criterion, what the field trials show, what a particular wording will do out in the world.…

The checklists were built around the loud version of this, and girls are more often the quiet version. If she is struggling and nobody has ever suggested an assessment, that is worth pressing on.

Defiance in girls can look like refusal, withdrawal or a long-running argument about friendships rather than the disruption a teacher would report.…

Most autistic people also meet the criteria for ADHD. The other direction is much thinner: only a small minority of people with ADHD meet the criteria for autism.

That is mostly arithmetic rather than mystery. ADHD is the more common of the two, so one overlap looks large from one side and small from the other.…

Autism and ADHD share some surface features and are still two different things. The social difficulty in each arrives by a different road.

With ADHD it tends to be impulsiveness and missing what was going on: the interruption, the thing said too fast, the friend never rung back. With…

A reward that comes every time is easy to walk away from. A reward that turns up unpredictably is the one you cannot put down, and that is exactly how your phone is built.

Sometimes there is something good in the notifications and usually there is not, and it is that uncertainty which keeps you checking. Willpower is…

When you read that some proportion of people with ADHD have a particular problem, the number tells you nothing until you know the figure for everybody else.

Twenty percent sounds alarming until you learn what the rate is in the general population. What matters is the multiple, how many times more likely,…

Hypervigilance after trauma and ADHD scanning look much alike from outside. Often the honest answer is that both are present, and the real question is how much of each.

Watching that comes from threat is aimed at something and tends to switch on in particular situations. ADHD distraction is not fussy about where it…

Home DNA tests turn up relatives nobody expected. If someone is thinking of taking one to fill in a blank family history, it is worth saying out loud that it may hand them more than they asked for.

People find half siblings. Sometimes they find that the story they were told about their birth was not the story. That is a great deal to receive by…

When you need a date, hand people events rather than months. Was that before or after the holiday? Same year as the move?

Asking whether something happened between October and January invites a guess. Asking whether it was before or after a wedding, a house move or a…

Find out what they have tried before that did not work. It saves everybody from a plan that failed this person two years ago.

Most people arriving for an assessment have been trying things for years: apps, alarms, lists, an early night, a course somebody recommended.…

The manual now asks for signs by age twelve rather than age seven, and it added wording that fits adult life, including restlessness felt on the inside.

The older cut-off quietly excluded a familiar group: bright children, or well supported ones, who managed until the demands rose and only visibly…

When someone cannot let go of the old rule after the rules have changed, that is the same machinery that loses their keys and drops the thread of a sentence. Stuck, not stubborn.

It shows up in small places. The game changes and they argue for the old version. The usual road is closed and the whole trip falls apart. A plan…

There is no box you type 'always late' into and get the answer out of. When a sensible strategy is not landing, the work is finding out what is blocking it rather than producing another strategy.

If you notice yourself handing over the fourth tool for the same problem, stop and ask a different kind of question. What happened the last time they…