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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.
Narrowed down
6 practicesTheme · Remembering to do it
How long you have · A minute
When · Any ordinary day
Most of what we call memory looks backwards. The kind that actually runs your week is the other sort: a plan that has to show up in your head at the one moment you could still act on it.
So when something gets missed, the question is not really whether you knew about it. You almost certainly did, at the time you agreed to it. What…
A thought you have in the car about something to say at home is worth nothing until the person is actually there in front of you. Cues have to sit where the action becomes possible, not where you happened to think of it.
Picture where you will be at the moment the thing can be done, and put the reminder there: a note on the front door for something that happens on the…
The moment you think of it is the only moment you are certain to have it. Do the thing, or write it down, or set the alarm, or put something odd in your pocket that will make no sense later until you check.
The two seconds of holding it in mind while you finish what you are doing is usually where it disappears. So make capture the reflex instead of the…
Start the email and then stop: address it, write the subject line, leave it unsent. The half finished thing sits in your drafts looking wrong until you deal with it.
It works because it leaves an odd looking object in a place you already go, and because unfinished jobs nag in a way that quiet decisions do not.…
The bag that has to travel with you tomorrow goes on top of your shoes, not neatly beside the desk. Let the object stand in the way of a route you walk without thinking.
The phrase worth keeping is point of performance: the reminder has to sit where the action happens, at the time it has to happen. A note on the…
Sometimes you cannot write it down. You are driving, your hands are full, you are halfway through a conversation. Then picture the moment in detail instead: the room you will be standing in, the object you will be looking at when you do it.
Make the picture concrete rather than worthy. Not a solemn 'I must ring the surgery' but the desk you will be sitting at, the mug beside the phone,…