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 practicesDo not plan to resist the phone. Put it in another room before you sit down, close the tabs, silence the chat app. Resisting works sometimes, and it costs you something every single time.
The five minutes before you start are worth more than any amount of determination once you are underway. Decide what is coming into the room with you…
Your ability to hold off a distraction is at its worst near the end of a work block, not at the start. Set the room up for the tired version of you, because that is the one who will be sitting in it.
In practice the hard removals happen in advance, while you still feel capable. Phone away before you begin, water and food already to hand, the next…
The towel left on the floor is the model. Tomorrow it is cold and unpleasant to use, and that is the whole of it. Short wait, happens every time, nothing terrible.
When you are building a consequence yourself, aim for those qualities rather than for severity. Something that lands within a day or two. Something…
A long project gives you no feedback until it is too late to use any. Put checkpoints in yourself: with the people involved, or just with you and a Monday morning.
Pick the dates while you are writing the plan, not later when you happen to remember. Each one turns a single verdict at the end into several small…