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
5 practicesA ping about a parcel and a ping about your mother's health feel identical in the second before you look. Give that feeling a name, false urgency, and you get a little room.
The buzz carries no information about importance. It borrows the feeling of importance and lends it to whatever happened to arrive. Naming it in the…
One gentle way to name it: those are being used as words to play with, and they were never really words for playing with. Said kindly, it lands without anyone being told off.
The young person in front of you almost certainly says it too, so any version that sounds like a reprimand will close the conversation down. Naming…
When you wave off what your child is into, they rarely hear a comment about gaming. They hear something about themselves.
At that age a good part of who someone is gets built out of what they love, so a shrug at the thing usually lands as a shrug at the person. You do…
Gaming for an hour before you start the work almost never costs an hour. Do the thing that has to be done first, then the thing you want.
Once something enjoyable is running, whatever you were meant to do afterwards looks duller than it already did, and the hour quietly becomes three.…
Charge the phone in another room overnight and use a proper alarm clock. Small change, and it takes the decision away from you completely.
In bed the phone is right there, and stopping is left to you at the hour you have the least left. Out of the room, there is nothing to resist. Buy…