Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Systems for daily life
Read down a long to-do list and you will find things belonging to a person you were three years ago. Some of them were never good ideas. They got written down anyway.
Seeing the list that way makes deleting bearable. You are not abandoning your ambitions, you are letting go of ideas that arrived on a hopeful Tuesday and never earned their place since. The wanting was real at the time. That does not put you under an obligation now.
Qur’an and Sunnah
you will progress from stage to stage (Quran 84:19). Moving through stages is the expectation, so a list left over from an earlier stage is not a debt.
لَتَرۡكَبُنَّ طَبَقًا عَن طَبَقࣲ
you will progress from stage to stage
Qur’an 84:19read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta-analytic review of nine randomised and three uncontrolled trials asked whether the gains from psychosocial treatment for adult ADHD, chiefly CBT, were still there at longer follow-up. The question itself is the encouraging part: it is worth knowing that changes can hold, whatever your own history of abandoned attempts suggests. Twelve trials is a small evidence base and a quarter of them had no control group.
López-Pinar C, Martínez-Sanchís S, Carbonell-Vayá E, Fenollar-Cortés J, Sánchez-Meca J. (2018). Long-Term Efficacy of Psychosocial Treatments for Adults With Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: A Meta-Analytic Review.. Frontiers in psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
It is easier to take something off when you stop reading its removal as failure.
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
Put behaviours on the report, not grades. Finished the class work, followed the rules, got on with the others, handed the homework in.
An hour exists somewhere in the week for almost anything. That is what makes yes so easy, and it is not the same as having an hour.
Pick one aim big enough to hold the year, and let it be the thing you measure choices against. Not a list of values. One.