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
10 practicesGetting going is a separate expense from working slowly. Plenty of people move quickly once they are in and still lose forty minutes in the gap between deciding and starting.
It is worth knowing which of the two you are paying, because the answers differ. If the work itself is slow, you want fewer interruptions and simpler…
If you have ten minutes and the episode is forty, the moment to act is before it starts. Stopping halfway is a much harder ask than never beginning.
This is worth knowing about yourself without shame: once you are inside something absorbing, the pull to stay is enormous and the part of you that…
Almost everyone has an alarm to get up and almost nobody has one to go to bed, which is odd, because bedtime is the one with nothing else pushing on it.
Set it for half an hour before you want to be asleep, so it catches the start of the wind down rather than the end. Expect to ignore it for the first…
Short sight is a fair comparison. If you cannot see far, the ship has to come close before it exists for you, and no amount of trying harder brings it into view sooner.
Which is why glasses are the right idea rather than effort. For time, glasses mean anything that puts the future in front of you before it arrives:…
If you keep choosing whatever is in front of you, the reasoning is probably working properly. It is the information going in that is off, because the future arrives faint and the present arrives loud.
This matters for where you spend your effort. Trying harder to decide well, on inputs that are skewed, mostly produces guilt. Changing what you can…
Knowing that leaving it until Thursday went badly last month does not change what Monday feels like. The memory is there, but it turns up flat, with none of the pressure still attached to it.
So the same week repeats, and from outside it looks as though nothing was learned. What helps is not remembering harder but putting something into…
Some people do not really perceive time passing. It is more like weather, something you are inside of, and then it is suddenly six o'clock.
If that is you, the useful word is perception rather than attitude. Being late is not a statement about what you value, though you have probably been…
Short sleep is often not a sleep problem at all. It is midnight arriving without being noticed, on top of a day whose work got pushed into the evening.
If that is the shape of it, advice about winding down will keep missing. What tends to help is an alarm for going to bed, the same as the one for…
Long stretches of time are where people dissolve. If a whole afternoon is unusable for you, stop trying to use it as an afternoon and cut it into pieces with edges.
Twenty five minutes on, five off, or forty and ten, or whatever suits the work. What you are after is a short enough run that you can tell from…
Write the morning out in small steps with times against them and stick it where you will pass it. Bathroom finished by quarter past, clothes on by half past, at the table by twenty to.
A single hour before you leave is far too long an interval to monitor, so you find out you are late only when you are late. Broken into six pieces,…