Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Your sense of time
If you keep choosing whatever is in front of you, the reasoning is probably working properly. It is the information going in that is off, because the future arrives faint and the present arrives loud.
This matters for where you spend your effort. Trying harder to decide well, on inputs that are skewed, mostly produces guilt. Changing what you can actually see and feel at the moment of choosing gives that same reasoning better material: a visible clock, the bill left out on the table, the first line of the email already typed.
Qur’an and Sunnah
The sun and moon were given their phases so that you might know the number of years and how to calculate time (Quran 10:5). Calculation is handed external instruments rather than left to what the day feels like.
هُوَ ٱلَّذِي جَعَلَ ٱلشَّمۡسَ ضِيَآءࣰ وَٱلۡقَمَرَ نُورࣰ ا وَقَدَّرَهُۥ مَنَازِلَ لِتَعۡلَمُواْ عَدَدَ ٱلسِّنِينَ وَٱلۡحِسَابَۚ مَا خَلَقَ ٱللَّهُ ذَٰلِكَ إِلَّا بِٱلۡحَقِّۚ يُفَصِّلُ ٱلۡأٓيَٰتِ لِقَوۡمࣲ يَعۡلَمُونَ
It is He who made the sun a shining radiance and the moon a light, determining phases for it so that you might know the number of years and how to calculate time. God did not create all these without a true purpose; He explains His signs to those who understand
Qur’an 10:5read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A methodological analysis of the tasks used to measure impatience warns that choosing the smaller sooner reward can reflect motivation rather than impatience, so the two get confused. It is an argument about measurement, not a study of people with ADHD. Still, it supports the caution here: what looks like poor judgement from outside may be a different quantity altogether.
Paglieri F, Addessi E, Sbaffi A, Tasselli MI, Delfino A. (2015). Is it patience or motivation? On motivational confounds in intertemporal choice tasks.. Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A sound decision made on distorted information still gives a poor result, so the repair belongs with the information.
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
Nobody works five hours straight. If your estimate assumes you will, then the shortfall gets read as you being slow rather than as the estimate being wrong.
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.
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.