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
6 practicesChoose one person and tell them you will send the finished thing by a set time. Not a conversation about how it is going, just the file, the photo, or the word done.
The sending is the whole mechanism, so keep it small and exact: what, and by when. It does not have to be someone qualified to judge the work, and it…
With attention difficulties the organising side often runs a few years behind the birthday. A nineteen year old may be running life more like a sixteen year old, and that is a lag rather than a verdict.
Set expectations against where someone actually is instead of what year they were born in. That way the support that felt normal at school does not…
If you cannot start, the step is too big. Shrink it until it sounds daft: open the document, write the date, put one plate in the sink.
The catch is that the daft step has to be the whole of what you agreed to do, not a trick for getting yourself to do the enormous thing. Most days…
Put something you genuinely want at the end of the chain, and keep it where you can see it. A reward far off in the future is much the same as no reward at all.
Name it before you begin and write it at the top of the page. Keep it close: this evening rather than next term. It does not have to be impressive.…
Putting something in the diary does not guarantee it happens. It gives it a chance it did not have before. That is the honest promise, and it is still worth having.
Expect a fair few blocks to pass unused, particularly in the first month. That is not the system failing, it is the system doing what it does, which…
Every time your eye lands on the job you have never started, it takes a small toll. Ten of those on one list is a tax you pay all day without noticing.
This is the argument for cutting a list back hard, and it has nothing to do with tidiness. An item you are not going to do still costs you something…