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
2 practicesThe more one person checks up, the more the other hides, and the more they hide the more the checking looks justified. Both are responding reasonably to the last move and nobody is having a good time.
Getting out of it usually means the monitoring comes down first, which feels like the wrong direction to whoever is doing the monitoring. A workable…
There is a point where a to do list stops being a tool and becomes something you flinch away from. If you have not opened yours in a fortnight, it has passed that point.
The usual advice is to work through it, which is precisely what nobody does with a list that long. It is kinder and quicker to start a fresh page…