Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Systems for daily life
Writing the list is the easy half. If twelve things are down on paper and you still cannot move, the missing skill is choosing, not capturing.
Decide with a question rather than by feel: what actually happens if this is not done by Friday. Anything with a real consequence goes to the top, and there are usually only two or three of those. Then take the first one and put it somewhere on its own, because a list of twelve reads to the eye as one enormous task. If choosing alone leaves you frozen, do it out loud with somebody. Sorting with another person present is far easier than sorting in silence.
Qur’an and Sunnah
You will sow for seven consecutive years as usual. Store all that you reap, left in the ear, apart from the little you eat (Quran 12:47). The guidance comes as a procedure with quantities in it, not as a feeling about what matters most.
قَالَ تَزۡرَعُونَ سَبۡعَ سِنِينَ دَأَبࣰ ا فَمَا حَصَدتُّمۡ فَذَرُوهُ فِي سُنۢبُلِهِۦٓ إِلَّا قَلِيلࣰ ا مِّمَّا تَأۡكُلُونَ
then I can return to the people to inform them.’ Joseph said, ‘You will sow for seven consecutive years as usual. Store all that you reap, left in the ear, apart from the little you eat
Qur’an 12:47read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A randomised trial in 88 adults with ADHD tested twelve sessions of a structured group programme with individual coaching, both alongside medication and without it, to see what the psychological work adds on top of the drugs. Skills like sorting priorities are the kind of thing those sessions cover. The trial was small and it weighed the whole package, so it says nothing about any single technique inside it, including this one.
Cherkasova MV, French LR, Syer CA, Cousins L, Galina H, Ahmadi-Kashani Y, Hechtman L. (2020). Efficacy of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy With and Without Medication for Adults With ADHD: A Randomized Clinical Trial.. Journal of attention disorders doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Weighing one task against another is its own skill, and no amount of extra list making teaches it.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Some things only happen when another person is there, even if they are doing something entirely different. Ring a friend and clean your two kitchens together with the phone on the counter.
If you have been the one holding someone's schedule, meals and reminders together, do not put all of it down on the day they leave. Pass it over a piece at a time, each with a date on it.
The classroom is the strongest place to help and most clinicians cannot get into one. That is a reason to work well in the next best place, not a reason to give up.