Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Systems for daily life
Sorting goes better fast than carefully. If every item stalls you, ask someone to sit in the room while you work, not to help but to keep the pace up.
A person nearby changes what the hour feels like, and they can be reading their own book the whole time. What they supply is momentum, which is exactly what runs out when you are alone with a pile. Quick decisions also stop you turning over what a thing cost or who gave it to you, which is where an afternoon goes.
Qur’an and Sunnah
if you lend me your strength, I will put up a fortification (Quran 18:95). Help is asked for as part of the plan, not after the plan has failed.
قَالَ مَا مَكَّنِّي فِيهِ رَبِّي خَيۡرࣱ فَأَعِينُونِي بِقُوَّةٍ أَجۡعَلۡ بَيۡنَكُمۡ وَبَيۡنَهُمۡ رَدۡمًا
He answered, ‘The power my Lord has given me is better than any tribute, but if you lend me your strength, I will put up a fortification between you and them
Qur’an 18:95read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
The foundational review of psychosocial treatment for ADHD established behavioural parent training and behavioural classroom management as the well supported approaches, and both work by having another person structure the environment around the task. Adults are offered that arrangement far less and often need it just as much. The evidence there is about children, so a body double for adults is the same principle without the same trials behind it.
William E. Pelham; Gregory A. Fabiano (2008). Evidence-Based Psychosocial Treatments for Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Someone else in the room carries the pacing, so you only have to carry the deciding.
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
Guard sleep first, especially through any long stretch away from the usual routine. Once the nights slide, everything else you have set up starts giving way.
Sort the work into hardest, middling and easiest, then choose the order on purpose. Easy first for momentum or hard first while you are sharp, both are fine. What is not fine is letting the most interesting thing win by default.
Whatever system you build has to survive a bad day. When feeling comes in a wave, the calendar and the checklist are the first things to go, so decide now what that hour looks like.