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 practicesPutting something off is often fear wearing a lazy costume. If planners have never fixed it for you, that is a clue the trouble is what the task makes you feel, not what your diary looks like.
Ask what you expect to happen when you open it. There is usually something specific in there: that it will be wrong, that it will swallow the whole…
Sometimes both roads carry a cost and neither will feel good. Accept that first, then choose, rather than searching for the option that comes without a sting.
A lot of long deliberation is really a search for the version that leaves nobody upset and nothing lost. When that version does not exist, the search…
Look at what you are actually working for this week. If every item is there to stop someone being cross or something going wrong, you are running on avoidance, and it is exhausting.
Avoidance does get things done, but only at the last moment and only with dread attached, and it leaves behind nothing you wanted. Take one thing off…
If not knowing makes you itch, the work is learning to sit with the itch rather than making it go away. The plan can stay unfinished while you get on with today.
For some of us an unresolved question hums in the background until it is settled, and settling it becomes urgent even when nothing depends on it.…