Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Getting assessed and diagnosed
Time management is only the fit between tasks and the hours you have: planning them against time, then doing them against time. It is a skill with parts, not a verdict on what kind of person you are.
Most people arrive having already decided they are lazy, and that decision is doing them no good at all. Describing it mechanically gives you both somewhere to look: the planning, the estimating, the starting, the switching from one thing to the next. Any of those can be the weak part, and each has different things you can try.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'In God's eyes, the most honoured of you are the ones most mindful of Him' (Quran 49:13). Worth is placed somewhere other than capacity here, which takes a good deal of heat out of the subject.
يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلنَّاسُ إِنَّا خَلَقۡنَٰكُم مِّن ذَكَرࣲ وَأُنثَىٰ وَجَعَلۡنَٰكُمۡ شُعُوبࣰ ا وَقَبَآئِلَ لِتَعَارَفُوٓاْۚ إِنَّ أَكۡرَمَكُمۡ عِندَ ٱللَّهِ أَتۡقَىٰكُمۡۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ عَلِيمٌ خَبِيرࣱ
People, We created you all from a single man and a single woman, and made you into races and tribes so that you should recognize one another. In God’s eyes, the most honoured of you are the ones most mindful of Him: God is all knowing, all aware
Qur’an 49:13read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
The updated European consensus statement on adult ADHD describes a condition that often persists into adult life and old age while remaining underdiagnosed and undertreated in many countries, so this difficulty is chronic and largely unattended rather than a matter of will. It is expert consensus rather than experimental evidence, and it is enough to keep moralising out of the conversation.
Kooij JJS, Bijlenga D, Salerno L, Jaeschke R, Bitter I, Balázs J, Thome J, Dom G, Kasper S, Nunes Filipe C, Stes S, Mohr P, Leppämäki S, Casas M, Bobes J, Mccarthy JM, Richarte V, Kjems Philipsen A, Pehlivanidis A, Niemela A, Styr B, Semerci B, Bolea-Alamanac B, Edvinsson D, Baeyens D, Wynchank D, Sobanski E, Philipsen A, McNicholas F, Caci H, Mihailescu I, Manor I, Dobrescu I, Saito T, Krause J, Fayyad J, Ramos-Quiroga JA, Foeken K, Rad F, Adamou M, Ohlmeier M, Fitzgerald M, Gill M, Lensing M, Motavalli Mukaddes N, Brudkiewicz P, Gustafsson P, Tani P, Oswald P, Carpentier PJ, De Rossi P, Delorme R, Markovska Simoska S, Pallanti S, Young S, Bejerot S, Lehtonen T, Kustow J, Müller-Sedgwick U, Hirvikoski T, Pironti V, Ginsberg Y, Félegyházy Z, Garcia-Portilla MP, Asherson P. (2019). Updated European Consensus Statement on diagnosis and treatment of adult ADHD.. European psychiatry : the journal of the Association of European Psychiatrists doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
You can work on a skill that has parts, and you cannot work on a verdict about your character.
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
'I set a reminder and still did not do it' is not a story about a bad reminder. It tells you the missing piece was never information, and a bigger, louder version of the same thing will fail in the same way.
Some people simply cannot get a family history. Refugee journeys, destroyed records, closed adoptions, families that did not survive. That is a gap in the paperwork and not evidence against the diagnosis.
When someone says their heart races on their medication, ask whether it ever did before they started. It is the cheapest question you have and it usually sorts the answer out.