Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Your sense of time
Spotting on day one that a procedure is pointless is a real skill. Saying so in the first meeting is the part that costs people the job.
The observation is rarely the problem. It is that it arrives before anyone asked, from someone who has been there a fortnight, often with the exasperation still audible in it. A holding rule helps: write it down when you see it, sit on it for a week, then bring it as a question to one person rather than as a verdict to the room. You lose nothing except the immediate relief of having said it.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Do not rush to recite before the revelation is fully complete (Quran 20:114). Holding back until the thing is finished is given as an instruction, even to a prophet who was right.
فَتَعَٰلَى ٱللَّهُ ٱلۡمَلِكُ ٱلۡحَقُّۗ وَلَا تَعۡجَلۡ بِٱلۡقُرۡءَانِ مِن قَبۡلِ أَن يُقۡضَىٰٓ إِلَيۡكَ وَحۡيُهُۥۖ وَقُل رَّبِّ زِدۡنِي عِلۡمࣰ ا
exalted be God, the one who is truly in control. [Prophet], do not rush to recite before the revelation is fully complete but say, ‘Lord, increase me in knowledge!’
Qur’an 20:114read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A clinical review of adult ADHD lists impulsivity among its core features, alongside inattention, disorganisation, poor time management and procrastination. Impulsivity in that literature is mostly measured on laboratory tasks rather than in meetings, so the jump to what you say at work is clinical observation rather than a finding. What the review does support is treating a fast tongue as part of the condition and not as rudeness.
Ramsay JR. (2017). Assessment and monitoring of treatment response in adult ADHD patients: current perspectives.. Neuropsychiatric disease and treatment doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
The same words land completely differently once people trust that you know the place.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
There are two quite different ways of putting things off. One is anxious and full of dread. The other is perfectly calm until the pressure arrives, and then everything happens at once.
When you are sure something takes ten minutes, do not argue with yourself. Write down the guess, start a timer, and look at both afterwards.
Go looking for the moment the child does the thing you have been asking for, and say so while it is still happening. Most of us watch for the problem and only notice the good behaviour when we have run out of trouble.