A favourable sense of identity, comfort, safety, security, satisfaction, pleasure, or achievement can be formed while people with a cognitive disability are doing activities. Measures of attendance and sustained attention time can quantify being busy. We all know that being busy is not always affirmative, i.e. a necessary evil. Confirming the value and dignity of a person requires a decent lifestyle that includes favourable activity experiences. Nothing to do between meals is the antonym, and the message received by the person is disrespectful.
The goal for affirmative activities is for the person to be happily occupied for a long time. Diplomacy can be used to talk people into doing a short-term evaluative activity, but keeping them busy doing activities that they volunteer to do takes more than diplomacy. Diplomacy helps, but the activity must appeal to the individual too.
Planning activities for people who have long-term cognitive disabilities starts with figuring out what the person can still do, and then trying to select what this individual will do. Quick and easy would be a list of can dos for each mode. You could hand the list to the person, who would place their order, which would be inserted into a machine that would arrange delivery of the supplies to the person. At the present time, that story is science fiction.
The evaluation of the ACL score never really stops because we all fluctuate, but the fluctuations become predictable when you know the person. Planning takes into account fluctuations.
Affirmative activity development is explored in each profile. The accuracy required for evaluations is unnecessary when your goal is to obtain an estimate of each person's tolerance for errors. When the person says "That's OK" or "I like it like that," you can accept the statement without prompting them to fix an error. The intensity of the information that they pay attention to changes within the ACL scale. These have been broadly separated into sensory, movement, linear, classification, tangible and abstract information. Depending on the person's pattern of performance, some of this information is attended to and higher levels of information is ignored in this ordinal scale.
The can do lists are for us and the reason we need them is to find activities they can do efficiently. Without can do lists, finding the right activity for a person can take hours and weeks, or may never be found. Generating can do lists is similar to starting the development of evaluative activities, as follows:
- Activity development concentrates on the quality of information that captures attention.
- The definitions of attention are the major guidelines for selecting the cues, i.e. supplies and directions.
- The descriptions of causing effects are the major guidelines for the expected behaviour.
- The descriptions of the thought processes (see the modes) are the major guidelines for detecting the person's tolerance for errors during the process.