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
9 practicesReading a room is a skill rather than a personality trait, and it can be broken into parts. Before you speak, take a second to look: who is here, what they are doing, how loud the place is.
Give yourself a short list to run through. How are people dressed and speaking, is this somewhere jokes land, is anybody clearly in a hurry. Then…
Writing things down is not evidence that your memory has failed. It is what happens once there is more in your life than one head can hold.
Most people who refuse a system are protecting something: the sense of being capable, of not being the sort of person who needs help with this. Argue…
Putting a task in the diary is not the same as doing it. The slot holds the time. The starting is still yours.
Worth knowing before you build anything, because when the first week goes by with the boxes filled and half of them untouched, the honest conclusion…
Decide now what you will do when the technology fails, because it will. The plan can be one line: if the connection drops, I take the laptop to the library and carry on there.
Write the fallback next to the thing it protects. Where else could I work, who do I message to say I will be late, what is the offline version of…
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 attention is the diagnosis and reading, writing or maths is still unusually hard, ask whether there is a second thing sitting underneath. The two travel together often enough that one label is rarely the whole story.
A specific difficulty with reading, written expression or number sits alongside attention problems in a large share of cases, and it needs its own…
Before asking for something new, find out what has already been agreed. A great many adjustments sit unused on paper because the student was never told, or the teacher was never told.
Get hold of the actual document and read it properly. Extra time, a quiet room, not being made to read aloud, notes given in advance: these are often…
Start at the moment you have to be there and work backwards, writing each step and how long it takes, until you reach the hour you have to get up.
Interview at ten. Twenty five minutes on the train, ten minutes walking, fifteen minutes early to be safe, twenty five to dress and eat, and the…
A calendar holds things that happen at a time. A list holds things that must get done but not at any particular hour. Put both in one place and you break both.
When everything goes in the calendar, the real appointments get lost among forty invented blocks. When everything goes on the list, the dentist at…