Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Bringing the future closer
There are two ways to make something get noticed: make it louder, or quieten everything around it. The second is usually the one nobody has tried.
It applies to a desk and to a phone screen alike. Adding one more reminder into a busy field mostly adds to the field. Taking six things off the desk so that one note sits alone costs nothing and works better. Before buying another system, spend twenty minutes removing whatever is competing with the cues you already set up.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'Do not gaze longingly at what We have given some of them to enjoy, the finery of this present life' (Quran 20:131). What glitters nearby is what makes everything else hard to see.
وَلَا تَمُدَّنَّ عَيۡنَيۡكَ إِلَىٰ مَا مَتَّعۡنَا بِهِۦٓ أَزۡوَٰجࣰ ا مِّنۡهُمۡ زَهۡرَةَ ٱلۡحَيَوٰةِ ٱلدُّنۡيَا لِنَفۡتِنَهُمۡ فِيهِۚ وَرِزۡقُ رَبِّكَ خَيۡرࣱ وَأَبۡقَىٰ
and do not gaze longingly at what We have given some of them to enjoy, the finery of this present life: We test them through this, but the provision of your Lord is better and more lasting
Qur’an 20:131read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In an individual differences study, people who media multitask more heavily also showed a stronger pull towards immediate gratification and more fast intuitive rather than deliberate thinking. It is a correlation among adults, not an experiment, so it cannot tell you a noisy environment caused the pull. Still, a crowded field of competing signals and a stronger tug towards the nearest one do seem to travel together.
Schutten D, Stokes KA, Arnell KM. (2017). I want to media multitask and I want to do it now: Individual differences in media multitasking predict delay of gratification and system-1 thinking.. Cognitive research: principles and implications doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Whether something stands out depends on what surrounds it, not on the thing itself.
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
Without that gap the choice is made before it is a choice: one marshmallow now instead of two in ten minutes. It shows up in money, in work, in what gets said to people.
You are allowed to build the consequence rather than waiting for life to deliver one. Waiting is not more honest, it is only slower, and often it never arrives at all.
When you ask a manager for regular check-ins, ask for them as a way of staying pointed in the right direction. That is a different conversation from asking to be watched.