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 practicesChoosing the dull useful thing over the bright easy one starts with a pause, not with willpower. If the pause never happens, nothing downstream of it gets a chance to happen either.
The chain runs roughly like this: something stops you for a second, you notice what you are doing, the later consequence comes into view, and only…
Getting going is a separate expense from working slowly. Plenty of people move quickly once they are in and still lose forty minutes in the gap between deciding and starting.
It is worth knowing which of the two you are paying, because the answers differ. If the work itself is slow, you want fewer interruptions and simpler…
If you have ten minutes and the episode is forty, the moment to act is before it starts. Stopping halfway is a much harder ask than never beginning.
This is worth knowing about yourself without shame: once you are inside something absorbing, the pull to stay is enormous and the part of you that…
Almost everyone has an alarm to get up and almost nobody has one to go to bed, which is odd, because bedtime is the one with nothing else pushing on it.
Set it for half an hour before you want to be asleep, so it catches the start of the wind down rather than the end. Expect to ignore it for the first…