Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Systems for daily life
Two to four targets is the usual advice and three is plenty. A longer list looks thorough and quietly stops working.
Every extra line is another thing a busy teacher has to notice and rate honestly at the end of a lesson, and another thing the child is meant to hold in mind all day. Keep it short and you also learn something: when three things are being tracked you can actually tell whether the plan is helping.
Qur’an and Sunnah
neither wasteful nor niggardly when they spend, but keep to a just balance (Quran 25:67). Too many targets and too few both fail, and the balance point is nearer three than ten.
وَٱلَّذِينَ إِذَآ أَنفَقُواْ لَمۡ يُسۡرِفُواْ وَلَمۡ يَقۡتُرُواْ وَكَانَ بَيۡنَ ذَٰلِكَ قَوَامࣰ ا
They are those who are neither wasteful nor niggardly when they spend, but keep to a just balance
Qur’an 25:67read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A Cochrane review of personalised care planning describes the person and the professional jointly identifying the problems and agreeing concrete goals and actions, rather than general intentions. Concrete and agreed is easier to hold to when there are few of them, though that last step is a practical inference and not something the review measured. The trials pooled there were in long-term physical conditions, not classrooms.
Coulter A, Entwistle VA, Eccles A, Ryan S, Shepperd S, Perera R. (2015). Personalised care planning for adults with chronic or long-term health 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 short list gets rated properly and a long one gets rated carelessly, which leaves you with numbers that mean nothing.
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
Start with less work than they can manage, not more, and add back slowly. Break the long jobs into pieces small enough that each one can be finished and noticed.
The good place to be is where things matter but nothing is on fire yet. Booking the check-up, planning next term, getting the haircut before it becomes a situation.
Every time your eye lands on the job you have never started, it takes a small toll. Ten of those on one list is a tax you pay all day without noticing.