Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Systems for daily life
If you keep it all in your head, it is worth asking who else is keeping it. Very often somebody nearby is doing the remembering, and neither of you has ever said so out loud.
This matters because from outside it looks like coping, right up until that person is away, unwell or worn out by it. Ask the plain question at home: what do you hold for me that I do not hold for myself. Appointments, birthdays, bin day, when the car is due. Then move two or three of those into something written that you can both see. The aim is not that you should manage alone. It is that the arrangement gets chosen rather than assumed.
Qur’an and Sunnah
They conduct their affairs by mutual consultation (Quran 42:38). An arrangement between two people is meant to be talked about, not carried silently by one of them.
وَٱلَّذِينَ ٱسۡتَجَابُواْ لِرَبِّهِمۡ وَأَقَامُواْ ٱلصَّلَوٰةَ وَأَمۡرُهُمۡ شُورَىٰ بَيۡنَهُمۡ وَمِمَّا رَزَقۡنَٰهُمۡ يُنفِقُونَ
respond to their Lord; keep up the prayer; conduct their affairs by mutual consultation; give to others out of what We have provided for them
Qur’an 42:38read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A Cochrane review examined automated telephone systems that deliver messages and collect information, used to supplement or replace some contact between clinicians and patients. Services build the remembering into a system rather than trusting anyone to carry it in their head. It is about health services rather than households, but it raises the same question: where does this information actually live, and what happens on the day that place is unavailable.
Posadzki P, Mastellos N, Ryan R, Gunn LH, Felix LM, Pappas Y, Gagnon MP, Julious SA, Xiang L, Oldenburg B, Car J. (2016). Automated telephone communication systems for preventive healthcare and management of long-term conditions.. The Cochrane database of systematic reviews doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A system running on somebody else's memory works beautifully until that person is not there.
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
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.
Sort the room out before you sort the willpower out. One agreed place to work, television off, phone in another room for the duration.
With attention difficulties the organising side often runs a few years behind the birthday. A nineteen year old may be running life more like a sixteen year old, and that is a lag rather than a verdict.