Practices

Say the plan out loud to somebody. A manager, a colleague, your wife, a coach. Hearing yourself explain it does something that turning it over privately does not.

The listener does not need to be an expert in any of it. Talking forces you to put things in order, and the gaps tend to announce themselves halfway…

Choose one person and tell them you will send the finished thing by a set time. Not a conversation about how it is going, just the file, the photo, or the word done.

The sending is the whole mechanism, so keep it small and exact: what, and by when. It does not have to be someone qualified to judge the work, and it…

Let the child score themselves on the same sheet the teacher scores. Two columns, filled in separately, then looked at together.

At first the two columns can be miles apart, and that is the useful bit rather than a problem. Nobody is being caught out. Over the weeks the gap…

Good help leaves you more able to do it yourself next time. If the whole thing only works while the other person is in the room, something has gone sideways.

There is a real difference between someone building your schedule for you and someone sitting beside you while you build it. The second is slower and…

If a course has no fixed time, give it one. Write down which day and which hour you will watch it, put that in the calendar as though somebody else set it, and tell one person.

Five minutes every Sunday: when am I watching this, and when am I doing the work that comes after it. Then one short message midweek to whoever is…

When you agree to something, agree who follows up. Do you tell them if it slips, or do they check in with you?

Most of the hurt around late work comes from nobody having said. You assume they will ask, they assume you will speak up, and the silence in between…

Support does not have to stop at eighteen. Plan for it to thin out gradually through the twenties, at a level everyone has agreed rather than one that gets argued over every month.

A workable version names three things: what is still being helped with, how much, and when you will look at it again. Every six months is usually…

Some things only happen when another person is there, even if they are doing something entirely different. Ring a friend and clean your two kitchens together with the phone on the counter.

This works for studying, tidying, paperwork and the weekly shop, because what you are borrowing is presence rather than help. Agree a start time and…

A behaviour agreement needs six things in it: the goal, exactly what the child does, what they earn, what happens if they do not, signatures from everyone, and an adult who sticks to it.

Most of these fall apart over what was meant rather than over what was done, so write the specifics down to the level of what counts as finished. The…

Work the deal out with the child instead of handing it to them. Much the same rules, an entirely different feeling.

Let them argue for a bit longer on the console, or for Friday off, and give ground where you honestly can. The terms tend to land in roughly the same…

Some of what feels like a flaw in your character is really a job that can be handed to something outside your head: a calendar, a list on the wall, a person who helps you lay out the week.

Coaching for attention difficulties is mostly this, and nothing more mysterious. Someone sits with you, builds the week, works out what comes first,…

A bridge year can be a deferred place, a course at the local college, a job, or a stretch of genuinely doing very little. That last one is a real option and not a refusal to choose.

For someone who has just come apart, a fresh demand can restart the same collapse, so a few months with nothing scheduled is sometimes the…

If most of the difficulty is happening at home, most of the work needs to happen with the household in the room. Otherwise the hour of good conversation gets quietly undone by Tuesday.

In a settled stretch, seeing the young person on their own with occasional family time is fine. In a crisis, turn it round: everyone together,…

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…

Worry done on your own goes round in circles. Said out loud to one other person, it usually turns into a problem with edges, and sometimes into a next step.

The rule is short enough to remember at midnight: never worry alone. It does not have to be someone who can fix anything. A friend, a colleague, your…

Partners of people with ADHD tend not to name the lateness or the lost keys as the real injury. It is the size of the reactions. That is where the damage collects.

Annoying is survivable and frightening is not. If you are working through things in a rough order, the temper comes before the calendar, even though…

Being good at apologising is a real skill, and it loses value each time the same apology comes round. After a while what repairs things is something visibly different, not a better sentence.

So keep the apology specific and small. Name the thing, do not explain it away, say what you will do differently, and then let the doing carry the…

Do not walk into a hard event and improvise. Ten minutes beforehand, work out what is likely to happen, what you will do about it, and how you get out if you need to.

If someone is coming with you, make it a shared plan. What the signal is when one of you needs air, who says what to whom, when you leave. The point…

The reason your partner follows you out of the room is usually not control. It is the fear that if you leave now, this will never be finished.

So say the return out loud and mean it. I am not dropping this, I will be back at nine and we will finish it. Then be back at nine. A few kept…

A real apology has no because in it. I would not have shouted if you had not looked at me like that is the argument again, wearing an apology's clothes.

Name the thing you did, own it flatly, and stop there. Then do something that shows it: the phone call you dodged, the mess cleared up, the thing you…