Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Bringing the future closer
Do not plan to resist the phone. Put it in another room before you sit down, close the tabs, silence the chat app. Resisting works sometimes, and it costs you something every single time.
The five minutes before you start are worth more than any amount of determination once you are underway. Decide what is coming into the room with you and leave the rest outside. If something has to stay reachable, make it slower to reach: logged out, in a drawer, on the other side of the house. You are not making it impossible, only far enough away that reaching for it becomes a decision instead of a reflex.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'Truly you love this fleeting world' (Quran 75:20). It is said as a description of people rather than a telling off, and a pull you have admitted to is far easier to design around.
كَلَّا بَلۡ تُحِبُّونَ ٱلۡعَاجِلَةَ
Truly you [people] love this fleeting world
Qur’an 75:20read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A systematic review and meta-analysis estimated the difference in delay discounting between people with and without internet addiction, and found the two groups differ. It concerns a clinical grouping rather than ordinary phone use, so do not read yourself into it too quickly. It does support treating an always available digital pull as a serious competitor rather than a small one.
Cheng YS, Ko HC, Sun CK, Yeh PY. (2021). The relationship between delay discounting and Internet addiction: A systematic review and meta-analysis.. Addictive behaviors doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A distraction you never meet does not need to be beaten.
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
A report due Friday puts a little pressure on somebody else's Monday. For you Monday feels like nothing at all, and then Thursday evening arrives carrying the whole of it.
Bring the cost forward into today. No screen until the hour of work is done, rather than a poor grade three months from now.
Forethought can be as small as this. The motorway is dreadful at nine and fine at two, so you go at two. Ten seconds of picturing it, not an afternoon of planning.