Practices

Keep both tools, and settle in advance where each thing goes. The deciding is what wears you out, so make that decision once instead of forty times a week.

The rule can be a single line inside the front cover: if it has a time, calendar; if it has a deadline but no time, list. Then writing things down…

Some things can only be done between nine and five, and those are the ones that quietly fail. Ring the bank, chase the appointment, sort the form: give those a time before anything else.

The failure is silent. You mean to do it all day, the office closes, and it rolls to tomorrow where the same thing happens again. Go through your…

Before you try to prioritise better, check whether there is any order in there at all. Plenty of people who feel stuck cannot say which of their jobs is genuinely required and which is merely wanted.

You can test it in a couple of minutes. Write the things down and mark the ones that carry a real consequence if they do not happen this week. If you…

Some jobs never move because they were never yours. Somebody else wanted them and you wrote them down to be kind.

You can usually spot one: the item that has been copied onto three different lists and never once started. The trouble is not that the work is hard.…

For the item that never gets done, make an actual decision: cross it off, or find a way to genuinely want it. Leaving it sitting there is the only option that costs you every single day.

Taking it on often works through a person rather than through the task. You may not care about the paperwork, but you care about whoever is waiting…

Saying no accurately depends on a calendar you actually keep. You cannot check whether Thursday is free if Thursday looks blank when it is not.

This is what makes the fiddly work of maintaining a diary worth doing. Nobody keeps a calendar for the pleasure of keeping one. You keep it so that…

But what if I need it one day? The honest answer is that keeping it has a daily price. A list you cannot find anything in has stopped being a list.

The thing you might want once in two years is sitting on top of the thing you need on Thursday. That holds for a to-do list, a desk and a spare room…

ADHD clutter and hoarding look alike from the doorway and are not the same thing. Many people living among piles would be delighted if the lot vanished overnight.

Hoarding is about not being able to part with things. This is more often about sorting being unbearable, or about keeping something in case it turns…

Distraction and disorder feed each other. Every hunt for the missing keys is a perfect opening for your attention to wander off somewhere more interesting.

Which is why sorting the house out is not a side project to the attention problem. Ten minutes of searching is precisely the dull, shapeless stretch…

Every small snag in a task is an exit. The forgotten password, the missing form, the bit where you are not sure what happens next: each one is a chance to say forget it, I will do this later.

So do the snag hunting before you sit down rather than during. Have the login to hand, the papers in one place, the next step written in words a…

Make one list in the morning, glance at it a few times during the day, and move whatever is left onto tomorrow's list rather than letting it disappear.

The glancing matters as much as the writing, since a list written at eight and never looked at again is just a piece of paper. Carrying items forward…

Where ADHD and disordered eating meet, the pattern is more often bingeing, or bingeing and purging, than strict restriction. Restriction tends to travel with over-control, while bingeing travels with impulse and reward seeking.

This matters because the questions asked at assessment are usually the restriction ones, so a binge pattern can sit unnoticed for years. If you…

Most claims about food and behaviour rest on weak studies. The ones worth taking seriously give each person both the real thing and a dummy at different times, with nobody knowing which is which, so that hope and expectation cannot do the work.

The food colouring trials are the standard example. Around 150 children each received drinks containing a preservative plus one of two dye mixes, or…

The same brand of sweets is often made with plant based colours in one country and artificial ones in another. If a company can make it without the dyes elsewhere, the dyes are not essential to the food.

Nine artificial colours are approved in the US, and the volume approved for use rose roughly fivefold between 1950 and 2012. One of them, Red No. 3,…

Skin prick and IgE blood tests find real allergies. The IgG food sensitivity panels sold direct to families have not been shown to measure sensitivity at all, and they tend to come back with a long list of foods to avoid.

IgG antibodies mostly show that you have eaten something, not that it harms you, which is why the results look alarming and change so little when…

The studies linking pesticide levels to ADHD are tangled up with income, since families least able to buy organic differ in plenty of other ways too. If organic food is affordable for you, fine. If it is not, you are not failing your child.

In one study of 1,140 children, 94% had detectable pesticide in their urine, and ADHD was about twice as common among those with higher…

Put an actual number on it: how many coffees, teas, energy drinks and colas in a normal day. Without that number, your sleep problems, your anxiety and how well a medication is working are all being read against an unknown.

People underestimate this, partly because it feels embarrassing and partly because a large takeaway cup is often two or three servings. Count across…

Stimulants sharpen focus in almost anyone, so responding well to one does not confirm you have ADHD. The diagnosis comes from your history and how you function, not from a trial of tablets.

This cuts both ways. Someone can be handed a diagnosis on the strength of a good response, and someone else can be doubted because their response was…

Food and movement are powerful, and hardly anyone keeps them up as prescribed. So the question is not what works best on paper. It is what you will still be doing in six weeks.

Roughly a third of people follow a prescription exactly as it is written, and keeping to a diet or an activity plan goes worse than that. Which means…

Pick one small change and leave the rest alone. A full overhaul asks the most of you at the point when you have the least to give, and it usually collapses in the second week.

One change, small enough to be almost boring, kept for a month. Then another. It feels slow while you are in it, and it is the version that tends to…