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
3 practicesInstead of one warning, give several: half an hour, fifteen minutes, five, one. The child then has time to arrive at the ending rather than having it dropped on them.
A single warning asks a child to track the gap on their own, which is the thing they cannot do. A ladder of prompts turns a stretch of time into a…
Look back over your own history for the times you were knocked down and started something anyway. That pattern is common with ADHD, and it is easy to miss while you are busy counting the failures.
It may be a side effect of not weighting the future heavily. The past does not press down quite as hard either. People who have been sacked, dropped…
Walking away from a course or a job that was never going to fit can be the sensible move rather than a failure of nerve. It is also frightening, particularly when other people are paying for it.
Fit does more work here than effort does. The person who cannot survive a rigid nine to five in an open plan office may be excellent somewhere with…