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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Systems for daily life
Which is why sorting the house out is not a side project to the attention problem. Ten minutes of searching is precisely the dull, shapeless stretch where you end up on your phone, and by then the thing you were originally doing has gone too. Fewer searches means fewer of those openings, and that does more for your focus than trying harder to focus.
Make coats of chain mail and measure the links well (Quran 34:11). The care goes into the making, so the thing does not have to be worked out afresh every time you need it.
سبأ
أَنِ ٱعۡمَلۡ سَٰبِغَٰتࣲ وَقَدِّرۡ فِي ٱلسَّرۡدِۖ وَٱعۡمَلُواْ صَٰلِحًاۖ إِنِّي بِمَا تَعۡمَلُونَ بَصِيرࣱ
saying, ‘Make coats of chain mail and measure the links well.’ ‘Do good, all of you, for I see everything you do.’
Qur’an 34:11read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A meta-analysis of mind wandering found that it rises as a task grows more demanding, and that people differ reliably in how much of it they do. Hunting for a lost object is demanding in a thoroughly unrewarding way, which is close to the worst combination. The pooled studies used laboratory tasks rather than kitchens, so this explains the pattern rather than measuring it in your house.
Randall JG, Oswald FL, Beier ME. (2014). Mind-wandering, cognition, and performance: a theory-driven meta-analysis of attention regulation.. Psychological bulletin doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Every search you have to make creates a stretch of dull time for your mind to slip away in.
Light movement while you work is not stolen from the work. Rocking a foot, standing up, a slow circuit of the room on a call: for many people the concentration goes up rather than down.
Often the most useful thing a clinician does is not delivered by the clinician. It is delivered by the teacher, or the parent, after a conversation you had with them.
University is one route, not the route. Saying so only helps if you can name the others, so find out what actually exists before you have the conversation.