Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Your sense of time
Every trait worth having here arrives with its twin. A love of the offbeat and a real problem with deadlines are the same wiring seen from two sides.
Strength lists that leave the cost out are not believable and they do not help anybody. Pair them instead. If you are the one who finds the interesting angle, you are probably also the one who is late with the dull part of it, and the job is to build enough structure around the second that the first can survive in a workplace. Practical work, not moral work.
Qur’an and Sunnah
The sun, too, runs its determined course laid down for it (Quran 36:38). A set course rather than bursts is held up as the model, which is what the scaffolding is for.
وَٱلشَّمۡسُ تَجۡرِي لِمُسۡتَقَرࣲّ لَّهَاۚ ذَٰلِكَ تَقۡدِيرُ ٱلۡعَزِيزِ ٱلۡعَلِيمِ
The sun, too, runs its determined course laid down for it by the Almighty, the All Knowing
Qur’an 36:38read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta analysis found that striving for high standards and worrying about falling short relate differently to achievement, burnout and stress, so pushing harder is not uniformly helpful. It is about perfectionism rather than ADHD, and it is correlational. Even so, it supports the shape of this advice: piling effort onto the weak side has costs, whereas building supports around it does not.
Osenk I, Williamson P, Wade TD. (2020). Does perfectionism or pursuit of excellence contribute to successful learning? A meta-analytic review.. Psychological assessment doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
The same tendency produces the good and the difficult, so you cannot keep one and cut out the other.
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
Reading the time off a clock does nothing on its own. The useful bit is the question straight after it: where was I meant to be by now, and how much is left.
Set the limit while you are calm and let the device hold it. A computer that shuts itself down at half past ten is arguing with nobody, which is why it wins.
The dreaming is not the problem. It is that bills, forms and renewal dates are dull enough to stop registering at all, and those are the things that actually damage a life.