Practices

Every practice in the library, in one list. Narrow it by how long you have, who it is written for, and where you are right now.

What matches

14 practices

Narrow these down

Choosing 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…

A minuteYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 20:114One line of research

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…

A minuteYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 62:10One line of research

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…

A minuteYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 36:40One line of research

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…

A minuteYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 25:47One line of research

Looking for a whole subject rather than a single practice? Start from the nine areas.

The fear underneath anger

Tolerate distress

Moving your body

The cost of avoiding

Obsessions and compulsions

What worry does

Reading, numbers and learning differences

Breathing

Emotions as signals

Feeling from the inside

When you use something to cope

Breaking the worry loop

Practising under provocation

Treatment and medication

Being seen and judged

Bringing the future closer

Growing empathy

Structure and routine

Posture and how you carry yourself

Exercise, food and other supports

When anger turns to harm

Letting it out safely

Living with uncertainty

What you are actually defending

Self-compassion

Facing it a step at a time

Rest and pacing

Panic and the body

Righteous anger and perfectionism

Anger, alcohol and the body

Use your strengths

Look back over your own history for the times you were knocked down and started something anyway. That pattern is common with ADHD, and it is easy to miss while you are busy counting the failures.

It may be a side effect of not weighting the future heavily. The past does not press down quite as hard either. People who have been sacked, dropped…

Five minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 25:47One line of research

Short sight is a fair comparison. If you cannot see far, the ship has to come close before it exists for you, and no amount of trying harder brings it into view sooner.

Which is why glasses are the right idea rather than effort. For time, glasses mean anything that puts the future in front of you before it arrives:…

Five minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 21:37One line of research

If you keep choosing whatever is in front of you, the reasoning is probably working properly. It is the information going in that is off, because the future arrives faint and the present arrives loud.

This matters for where you spend your effort. Trying harder to decide well, on inputs that are skewed, mostly produces guilt. Changing what you can…

Five minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 10:5One line of research

Knowing that leaving it until Thursday went badly last month does not change what Monday feels like. The memory is there, but it turns up flat, with none of the pressure still attached to it.

So the same week repeats, and from outside it looks as though nothing was learned. What helps is not remembering harder but putting something into…

Five minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 18:23One line of research

Some people do not really perceive time passing. It is more like weather, something you are inside of, and then it is suddenly six o'clock.

If that is you, the useful word is perception rather than attitude. Being late is not a statement about what you value, though you have probably been…

Five minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 17:12One line of research

Short sleep is often not a sleep problem at all. It is midnight arriving without being noticed, on top of a day whose work got pushed into the evening.

If that is the shape of it, advice about winding down will keep missing. What tends to help is an alarm for going to bed, the same as the one for…

Five minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 78:10One line of research

Rushing out of the door is the most reliable way to leave something behind. The hurry uses up the very attention that would have checked for the keys.

The answer is not to remember harder, it is to move the check earlier. Pack the bag the night before and leave it by the door, and give yourself a…

Five minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 21:37One line of research

Long stretches of time are where people dissolve. If a whole afternoon is unusable for you, stop trying to use it as an afternoon and cut it into pieces with edges.

Twenty five minutes on, five off, or forty and ten, or whatever suits the work. What you are after is a short enough run that you can tell from…

Five minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 84:19One line of research

Write the morning out in small steps with times against them and stick it where you will pass it. Bathroom finished by quarter past, clothes on by half past, at the table by twenty to.

A single hour before you leave is far too long an interval to monitor, so you find out you are late only when you are late. Broken into six pieces,…

Twenty minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 20:130One line of research

Walking away from a course or a job that was never going to fit can be the sensible move rather than a failure of nerve. It is also frightening, particularly when other people are paying for it.

Fit does more work here than effort does. The person who cannot survive a rigid nine to five in an open plan office may be excellent somewhere with…

LongerYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 62:10One line of research