Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Systems for daily life
Sort the work into hardest, middling and easiest, then choose the order on purpose. Easy first for momentum or hard first while you are sharp, both are fine. What is not fine is letting the most interesting thing win by default.
Write the three piles on paper and then pick. If you tend to run out of steam by three in the afternoon, the hard thing belongs in the morning. If you cannot get going at all, one easy thing first is a strategy rather than cheating. Say the order out loud or write it at the top of the page, since a decision that stays in your head gets quietly overruled by whatever feels best at the time.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Make coats of chain mail and measure the links well (Quran 34:11). The standard is fixed beforehand rather than judged by feel while the work is under way.
أَنِ ٱعۡمَلۡ سَٰبِغَٰتࣲ وَقَدِّرۡ فِي ٱلسَّرۡدِۖ وَٱعۡمَلُواْ صَٰلِحًاۖ إِنِّي بِمَا تَعۡمَلُونَ بَصِيرࣱ
saying, ‘Make coats of chain mail and measure the links well.’ ‘Do good, all of you, for I see everything you do.’
Qur’an 34:11read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a cross-sectional study of 114 undergraduates, the link between attention problems and putting things off ran through executive skills such as time management and organisation. Everything was measured at one moment, so it cannot show that changing the order of your tasks changes anything. It does place the deciding and sequencing part of the work right where the difficulty sits, which is a reason to make that part explicit.
Bolden J, Fillauer JP. (2020). "Tomorrow is the busiest day of the week": Executive functions mediate the relation between procrastination and attention problems.. Journal of American college health : J of ACH doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Any order chosen deliberately beats the order your attention would pick, which is always whatever is most fun right now.
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
Start with less work than they can manage, not more, and add back slowly. Break the long jobs into pieces small enough that each one can be finished and noticed.
Set the room up so that movement is already there for the taking: somewhere to stand, something to hold, a chair that lets you shift. Then nobody has to decide in the moment whether it is allowed.
Start at the moment you have to be there and work backwards, writing each step and how long it takes, until you reach the hour you have to get up.