'ADHD is not your fault. Its effects should not produce moral or spiritual blame. ADHD lapses are not a character deficiency.'
For me the hardest thing was trying to describe what it is like to have ADHD, I came across this a few years ago on the net Normal people have a sort of mental secretary that takes the 99% of irrelevant crap that crosses their mind, and simply deletes it before they become consciously aware of it. As such, their mental workspace is like a huge clean whiteboard, ready to hold and organize useful information.
On the other hand, we’re extremely good at working out the context of random remarks, as we’re effectively doing that all the time anyway. The exception to this is a thing we get called hyper focus. Occasionally, when something just clicks with us, we can get ridiculously deeply drawn into it, and NOTHING can distract us. We’ve locked our metaphorical office door, and we’re not coming out for anything short of a tornado.
There are techniques for managing concentration. It’s a limited resource, and he needs to ration it out; expecting him to concentrate on a non-interactive task for an hour is about as realistic as expecting you to hold a brick out at arm’s length for the same period. The pomodoro technique is absolutely brilliant – you use a kitchen timer to mark out moderate periods of mandatory focus , interspersed with short distraction breaks . Three sets, then a longer break, rinse and repeat.
As such, don’t give us long lists of tasks at once. Our short-term memory cannot handle it, we’ll forget most of them, and get terribly stressed about the whole thing. If he’s got a corner desk, give him a whiteboard that he can reach from his chair. It doesn’t work if he has to get up or reach to use it – but an in-your-face, instantly-updatable todo list can make a world of difference.
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