ADHD, the avalanche, other people's admin, the big one, and when it's more than admin

The rule holds for every ping. Some situations need their own paragraph.

ADHD. If organising time and finishing tasks has always been hard, since childhood, along with losing things and being easily distracted, and it affects your work or relationships, the NHS says to see a GP, because it may be attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and the wait for assessment can be long, so the sooner the better. The method in this book is useful alongside that and not instead of it. The ten-minute test and the same-time sweep are the kind of external structure that many people with ADHD find helps, and none of it depends on remembering, which is the point. But it's a tool and not a treatment, and the difficulty isn't a character fault.

The avalanche. A death, a house move, a divorce, a new baby. There are months when the heap isn't a habit but a weather event, with forty items arriving a week, most of them big and some of them painful. The rule bends. The ten-minute test still runs, because the two-minute things are still two minutes and clearing them is the only relief available. The sweep grows to thirty minutes or an hour, for the duration. And ask for help, specifically. "Can you ring the utilities?" is an item someone can take, and most people want to be given one.

Other people's admin. If you're the one in the house who does it, or the one who doesn't, the heap is a shared thing and the rule has to be too. Agree who takes what, and agree the sweep as a household thing, ten minutes at the table after dinner, together. And if your partner's heap is the problem, this book is a gift and not a lecture, and the difference is whether you hand it over with the sentence "I thought this might help" or the sentence "you need to read this".

The big one. The tax return. The passport. The insurance claim with the photographs and the three phone calls. These fail the ten-minute test honestly and chapter 4 says you'll underestimate them. They don't go in the sweep. They get a booked sitting, two hours, a date, and an earlier book in this series on putting off work that matters has the method for starting one. What the sweep does is the chasing and the gathering round it, so that when the sitting comes, the documents are there.

Email. If the heap is mostly an inbox, the rule is the same. Read it once, ten-minute test, reply now or date it. The unread message is the shut envelope from chapter 16, and the reply is the same size read or unread.

Debt. If the envelopes are about money you can't pay, please stop here and go to the earlier book in this series on opening them, and to StepChange, Citizens Advice or National Debtline, who are free and have seen everything. The ten-minute test doesn't apply to a debt, and pretending it does would be unkind.

When it's more than admin. If the heap has grown because you've felt low most of the day, most days, for two weeks or more, and everything, and not only the forms, has become heavy, the NHS says to see a GP. The heap is a symptom in that case and not the problem, and the method will be there when you're ready for it, and the GP comes first.