Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Systems for daily life
Work, friends, games and news all happen on the same rectangle, so nothing in your surroundings tells you which one you are in. Software has to do the job the room used to do.
A blocker that shuts the usual sites during your working hours, a tracker that shows you afterwards where the time actually went, or a small app that pops up now and then and asks whether you are still on the thing you meant to be on. Choose one and give it a fortnight. Do not install four at once, because setting them all up is itself a very satisfying way to avoid the work.
Qur’an and Sunnah
With two receptors set to record, one on his right side and one on his left (Quran 50:17). The recording happens by itself rather than depending on anyone remembering to do it, which is what a good tracker imitates.
إِذۡ يَتَلَقَّى ٱلۡمُتَلَقِّيَانِ عَنِ ٱلۡيَمِينِ وَعَنِ ٱلشِّمَالِ قَعِيدࣱ
with two receptors set to record, one on his right side and one on his left
Qur’an 50:17read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A systematic review of mobile apps and text message based health interventions noted that a very large number of apps exist relative to the evidence supporting them. That is the caution to carry into any app store: popularity and polish are not evidence. Pick one, use it for a few weeks, and judge it on whether your own days changed rather than on what the description promised.
Rathbone AL, Prescott J. (2017). The Use of Mobile Apps and SMS Messaging as Physical and Mental Health Interventions: Systematic Review.. Journal of medical Internet research doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
When everything happens in one place, nothing signals that you have wandered off, so the signal has to be added on purpose.
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
But what if I need it one day? The honest answer is that keeping it has a daily price. A list you cannot find anything in has stopped being a list.
The cheapest place to deal with a task is before it ever reaches your list. Some things are better declined in the moment they are offered.
Choose one person and tell them you will send the finished thing by a set time. Not a conversation about how it is going, just the file, the photo, or the word done.