7 No-Fail Focus Tricks for Adults with ADHD

Kamusta, Happy Minds. Y’know what’s ironic? Well, ironically almost nothing that’s mentioned in the titular track by Alanis Morissette which is turning (shocked emoji) THIRTY YEARS OLD this year! Were it being written now, I’m sure there would be a ton of modern examples which would be shortlisted, but surely no.1 with a bullet would have to be the recent rise in ADHD diagnoses driven in no small part by a social media platform that makes short videos for people with limited attention span.

Second place would probably go to introducing a blog about focus tips for adults with ADHD with an irrelevant segue so, for any of you who are holding onto the point by the skin of your teeth – whatever the hell that means, no, DON’T google it, stay with me – this blog post is about sure-fire concentration hacks for people with ADHD. For those of you who just can’t face a big ‘ole block of text, I’ve summarised each hack under the subheading ‘skip to the tip’. Let’s get into it.

1. Use The Pomodoro Method

One of the biggest challenges for us ADHD’ers is getting started on a task, and one of our second biggest challenges is being able to draw a line under it and stop once we’re rolling. As Jessica McCabe, curator of the Youtube Channel ‘How to ADHD’ explains, a lot of people with ADHD define their world via binary states of being. Things are either ‘now’ or they are ‘not now’, which I think we can agree contains a fair amount of scope for reckless misuse of time management. “Yes, OK, I’m probably throwing future Hannah under the bus by pushing my tax return into ‘not now’, but since the deadline isn’t for another three whole days, that sounds an awful lot like a ‘tomorrow Hannah’ kind of problem”, sound familiar? The good news is that once a task moves into the ‘now’ slot, we are often incredibly good at coming at that task full steam ahead. If only there were a way we could hack our hyperfocusing, deadline driven tendencies, eh?… Enter the ‘pomodoro’ method. 

Named after the adorable tomato-shaped kitchen timer that inventor Francesco Cirrillo used to smash his university revision goals, the Pomodoro Method is a gamechanger for breaking focus time into manageable chunks. Simply set a 25 minute timer and allow no distractions while you work on a single task. After 25 minutes, the alarm goes off and you take a five minute break. Check your social’s, stretch, make tea, make a sandwich… you get the idea. This is awesome for us ADHD’ers simply because it integrates seamlessly with our existing now/not now system. If the urge to check socials creeps in during a focus period, we simply shunt that into ‘not now’ and push on with our single task. But don’t worry, once that break hits you can rest assured I’ll be Snapchatting like it’s going out of fashion, while simultaneously making and eating a cheese sandwich with the exclusive use of my feet, to save precious seconds for harvesting that sweet, sweet dopamine.  

Skip to The Tip

Use a pomodoro timer to organise your work time into 25 minute blocks of focus, 5 minutes of personal time.
My personal favourite pomodoro timer is packaged within the ‘free’ tier of another great piece of time-tracking software that I use every day; ‘Toggl’, and a great piece of advice I recently received was that its waaaaay easier to start with the 5 minute break to ease yourself into the process. When the alarm goes off, you ride that pavlovian imperative all the way into VALHALLA! Or into making an immediate start on your focus time, you decide. Give it a try and let me know how you get on.

2. Task Chunking

No, this isn’t staring at our to-do list until we vomit in the vain hope that someone takes pity on us. Taking the time to make a proper plan before we start work for the day and breaking larger tasks into their component elements will help prevent us feeling overwhelmed. Many of us are stimulated visually too, so it might be nice to incorporate pleasing colour coding using brightly coloured post-it notes, gel pens or highlighters.

Skip to The Tip

Break 1 – 2 hour tasks into 15 minute subsections with the use of a simple and aesthetically pleasing plan. Ticking things off every 15 minutes is going to make you feel like you’re smashing your goals, and keep you feeling motif=vated. Just don’t spend all day colouring in your plan!

3. SHHHH! Quiet, Please…

As a freelancer, I’m either working at home A.K.A distraction city (of which I am currently the mayor going for a record-breaking umpteenth term in office) or working in cafés or other public spaces, and that usually means tolerating a whole lot of noise. Co-working hubs are definitely a great option, but to be honest many of them are as distracting as your average office. 

Just six months ago, I made a game changing discovery. Let me introduce you to a close, personal friend of mine; ‘The public library’. Libraries can be found all over the UK (and beyond) and represent one of the last bastions of free public spaces, within which one can connect to the internet, access a silent or quiet workspace, charge electronic devices and engage in peaceful group focus. If you couple the library with every ADHD’ers not-so-secret weapon – noise cancelling headphones –  ideally playing binaural focus beats, such as these from ‘Brainy’, then you’ve given yourself the best possible chance of getting into the groove. On a personal note, going to work in the library reminded me how much I miss the rhythm of walking to work, grabbing a coffee and settling in at a desk. Best of all, libraries usually keep office hours, so I have an enforced curfew to finish work for the day.

Skip to The Tip

Minimise distractions by working in a quiet space such as a library, wearing noise cancelling headphones playing binaural or instrumental music and carving out a clean, uncluttered physical space for deep work. Music or pink or brown noise will create a comforting thrum that your subconscious can latch onto to tune out distractions.

4. Move More

In the immortal words of Pharell Williams; ‘Hey Mr, look at your girl… She wants to MOVE!’ Well that goes double for ADHD’ers. If you’re already adopting the pomodoro method in step 1, then those 5 minute breaks are an opportunity to stand up and move around. Movement energises the body, increasing blood flow and keeping energy levels high. We weren’t built to sit still all day! If you’re a home worker, consider a standing desk, but if that’s not an option then regular light stretching, walking around your space and the occasional dance break to your favourite track will keep you from getting lethargic. Since many ADHD’ers enjoy constant movement, fidget toys and chewing gum can all be effective ways to indulge that urge while staying productive.

Skip to The Tip

Make time to stand up, walk around, jump up and get down.

5. Harry Potter and the Lack of Personal Boundaries

Another classic hallmark of ADHD is unrealistic time-management and difficulty in enforcing boundaries. This mentality is sometimes referred to as ‘magical thinking’, because we are over optimistic about how much can be crammed into a day. This problem easily compounds over time because if we plan to achieve five things on Monday, for example, but only finish three then we start Tuesday with a backlog of two tasks that we need to finish before we can start the five tasks we planned for Tuesday. This is a recipe for stress and anxiety. Cue late nights, burnout, working weekends and the dissolution of anything even vaguely representing personal boundaries. The real kicker here, and this is something I’m particularly partial to, is that we often don’t take time to celebrate victories. We don’t have time, we finish a task and move straight onto the next thing because we’re already so behind!

It’s time to end magical thinking, make realistic sustainable plans that work and celebrate our successes. Incorporate overflow time for tasks that take longer than planned and remember to reflect on how and why they took longer. If the same one hour task has taken three hours for three consecutive weeks, well maybe you’ve got yourself a three hour task in disguise there, partner. I suggest you treat it as such. 

Skip to the tip

Less is more when it comes to scheduling tasks. Celebrate your victories by rewarding yourself when you finish work for the day.

6. Mindfulness Over Matter

If you’re struggling to focus on a task, rather than just continuing to hurl yourself against it in defiance of the evidence, consider a short mindfulness break. There are tonnes of resources online, such as headspace where you can access guided meditation to help clear your mind. If you’re working and you keep getting distracted, try consciously bringing your attention back to the task. If it keeps happening, ask yourself  ‘when did I last take a break?’ Perhaps your mind is wondering because you keep making it adult and it needs to stop for a minute and let the inner child out to play?

Skip to the tip

A refreshing dip into a 5 minute guided meditation could be enough to clear your mind of invasive thoughts. Using a guided app, such as headspace could give these sessions structure and consciously pulling your attention back to the task in hand will reduce tangential imagination ramblings (ohh! Good band name!)

7. You Are Not a Machine. Remember to Unplug 

Let’s start with recognising a statement of fact which I think we could all do to remember.

We are not machines, and our sole purpose in life is not to simply be as productive as possible.

Say it with me, friends and neighbours; there is more to life than work and productivity. So how can we best acknowledge and respect this? Well, there’s a whole heap of ways, but one that I really like is to make a joy board.

A joy board is simply a fun way to collate physical icons to represent units of your time invested in things you want to do. Let’s say you resolve to get outside and be in nature more often, so you might print out and laminate a little picture of a tree. Maybe you want to play your musical instrument, so you laminate a picture of your guitar. Maybe you want to read more books, meditate, dance, paint, you get the idea…

Let’s face it, with ADHD, we don’t have to look far for our next five-minute-fascination. We know we want to do these things, we feel there isn’t sufficient time but in our heart of hearts we know that the time has simply slipped through our fingers. So, once we have a few little icons printed and laminated, we make our joy board board. It’s very simple, it consists of the seven days of the week written out with our name at the top. Each week, no matter how busy things get, we place at least seven icons anywhere on the board – one for every day of the week. It’s not essential that we make time for joy every single day – although that would be nice – but getting to the end of the week and knowing that we averaged a little joy each day is a wonderful way of demonstrating that our life belongs to us and we are making time for the little things.

Skip to the Tip

Find a way to incorporate seven opportunities each week solely for the pursuit of joy. Even if this is just 10 minutes each time. Consider making a joy board. If you find yourself doom-scrolling, unable to focus or struggling to finish work for the day, head over to the board and pick out something you really want to do. Then do it. Bliss. 

If these tips helped you, or if you have your own sure-fire focus tips for wrangling your ADHD, then we’d love to hear from you.

Our Managing Time workshop is packed with more practical tips to help you get in the zone!

Catch you next time, Happy Minds!