Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Bringing the future closer
Every interruption charges you twice. There is the chance you never come back to the work at all, and there is the effort it takes to come back when you do.
This is why a day of successfully resisting everything can still end with nothing left in the tank. You count the times you got pulled away, feel fine about the number, and miss that the pulling back was quietly costing you all day. Useful when you are choosing what to take on at four in the afternoon, and useful before you call the flatness laziness.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'Whoever has done an atom's weight of evil will see that' (Quran 99:8). Small things that seem to cost nothing at the time are still being counted somewhere.
وَمَن يَعۡمَلۡ مِثۡقَالَ ذَرَّةࣲ شَرࣰّ ا يَرَهُۥ
but whoever has done an atom’s-weight of evil will see that
Qur’an 99:8read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta-analytic review confirmed that children and adolescents with ADHD more often choose a smaller immediate reward over a larger delayed one, and that this reward-delay impulsivity is a separate thing from rapid-response impulsivity. Two distinct kinds of cost is a reasonable way to hold it. The review pooled studies of young people, so it cannot tell you the size of the pattern in any particular adult.
Patros CH, Alderson RM, Kasper LJ, Tarle SJ, Lea SE, Hudec KL. (2016). Choice-impulsivity in children and adolescents with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): A meta-analytic review.. Clinical psychology review doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Even the interruptions you win take something out of you.
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 consequence has to cost the person whose behaviour it is, in something they actually care about. If missing the bus mildly annoys your teenager and wrecks your morning, the cost is landing on the wrong person.
Whatever the record is, do it the same day, every time. The salesman writes his notes in the car outside the client's office. Not that evening, not on Friday.
Mindfulness practice is good for most people, and may help a little more if you have ADHD. Treat it as something supportive rather than as the treatment itself.