Advice on meditation for anxious, restless, distracted mind?

I went to a 2 day intensive course at my local Namgyal monastery that I think was good.

Have you spoken to a doctor about conditions such as ADHD? Your first sentence is pretty much spot on what someone with ADD or ADHD might say about their daily experience.

"Meditation" is a wonderful word and in a lot of ways a misnomer. Acclimation or Recognition might be better terms to describe the process. Essentially, due to ignorance all beings end up in discomfiture. This ignorance can be wiped away clean by insight into absolute reality. Insight into absolute reality requires a positive bounce and universal compassion. The vast infinite universe is packed with uncountably many sentient beings, all who have within themselves the potential for awakening. As I want to be happy and free of dissatisfaction, so do they all. Compassion is noble and allows us to entertain and understand selflessness.

(Infinity of) Continuum Hello and, with you again, rolling some hopefully helpful thoughts on the most inscrutable but also most important discipline i've come across in all my days, now I'd like to pivot and speak about the Continuum and Focus.

The continuum is easy enough to comprehend. People say the material world yields material causes and effects. The mental world is made of mental causes and results in mental effects. Prior moments of world are made of world, prior moments of mind are made of mind. We can explore this idea more deeply, but fundamentally we are seeking the well body of breathing and good resonance that pervades our body-psychic system and is largely influenced by the quality of our thoughts, attitudes, health, and degrees of flow of the body fluids and winds. Reeling back a bit consider infinite time. Infinite time with infinite world still does not explain where mind comes from. On the other end, if mind creates mind, then mind is foremost, and might in some way magnetically find and forge environs in its process of grasping and becoming. Clinging, grasping, and later on becoming are just a couple of the links in the causal chain known as the twelve nidanas. It is this causal sequence that we are trying to somehow halt or arrest, if only for an instantaneous moment of focus, because once the link is clearly allowed to melt the chain is a lot less strong.

That's a lot.

Focus is very fundamental, and until you can focus on the dance of breath and body (your breath is a companion for life), just focus on a dot on the ground or the wall for a while. Try and actually keep it in focus. This should expose the vibratory nature of the universe immediately. Duratable focus is how we are going to illuminate the dark corners or clouds of in-conciseness. Single-pointed-precision or Single-pointed-concentration is therefore key for a diligent and thorough investigation into reality's qualities and properties (assuming it has some we can name or identify) and it must be undertaken/done with a positive attitude, a chipper or cheerful countenance.

Short of that, "meditation" can be done to help focus by a classical meditation where one separates black and white stones. Black stones for an unsavory thought that does not benefit oneself or all sentience / sentient beings / community, and light colored stones to indicate a wholesome thought or helpful thought to all sentience / sentient beings / community. This lets one learn how to observe ones mind without being too rigid about what is being thought. In general, the mind wants to be your friend, help you focus, and it can take hints. Focus training could also be something like staring at particular points for ~15 second periods and trying to hold them perfectly in focus. You may find it to be impossible - vibratory nature.

Related way to keep your ocular muscles healthy: take about 2-3 minutes in a day to adjust your eyeballs' focal points by looking at near trees, near homes, near phenomena, then gradually increase the distance, trying to clearly focus on new objects at deeper and farther distances. Finally, work your way back on the same chain of objects. Small, frequent, and useful techniques will go far. Still, making time to sit and let the emotional wattage of daily life dissipate through the slightly enlarged vessel of quietude-and-sensory-withdrawn-mind will help immensely. Again, frequency preferable to intensity.