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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Systems for daily life
There is a real difference between someone building your schedule for you and someone sitting beside you while you build it. The second is slower and feels less efficient, and it is the one that travels. A simple test after a few months: could you run a week of this without them? If not, ask them to hand more across rather than take more on. Say it as a request, since most helpers are only trying to be useful.
If you lend me your strength, I will put up a fortification between you and them (Quran 18:95). He still builds it. The help is folded into his own work rather than replacing it.
الكهف
قَالَ مَا مَكَّنِّي فِيهِ رَبِّي خَيۡرࣱ فَأَعِينُونِي بِقُوَّةٍ أَجۡعَلۡ بَيۡنَكُمۡ وَبَيۡنَهُمۡ رَدۡمًا
He answered, ‘The power my Lord has given me is better than any tribute, but if you lend me your strength, I will put up a fortification between you and them
Qur’an 18:95read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A randomised trial with 257 employees set planning on its own against partner support on its own, and against the two combined, following whether physical activity held up over six months. It is a different behaviour and a different population, so it does not settle anything about coaching. What makes it worth citing is that it asks the question underneath this tip directly: what does another person actually add to a plan you have already made yourself?
Prestwich A, Conner MT, Lawton RJ, Ward JK, Ayres K, McEachan RR. (2012). Randomized controlled trial of collaborative implementation intentions targeting working adults' physical activity.. Health psychology : official journal of the Division of Health Psychology, American Psychological Association doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Doing it with support is how the doing gets learned, and watching it be done for you is not.
Read down a long to-do list and you will find things belonging to a person you were three years ago. Some of them were never good ideas. They got written down anyway.
If attention is the diagnosis and reading, writing or maths is still unusually hard, ask whether there is a second thing sitting underneath. The two travel together often enough that one label is rarely the whole story.
When something has become impossible, start far below it. Sitting in the parked car with the engine off is a real first step, and it is the one that gets somewhere.