Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Your sense of time
The more you have to look up before you can begin, the further the real time drifts from your guess. Every search is also a door left open, and some of them lead somewhere else entirely.
Booking a trip is the clearest case: one question about dates becomes four tabs and an hour gone. A decent defence is to do the looking up as its own block, with the answers written in one place, and only then start the task itself. You are separating the part that invites wandering from the part that needs you present.
Qur’an and Sunnah
A day or part of a day (Quran 18:19) was how the sleepers judged a stay that had run far longer. Felt duration drifts, and a job full of small searches drifts furthest.
وَكَذَٰلِكَ بَعَثۡنَٰهُمۡ لِيَتَسَآءَلُواْ بَيۡنَهُمۡۚ قَالَ قَآئِلࣱ مِّنۡهُمۡ كَمۡ لَبِثۡتُمۡۖ قَالُواْ لَبِثۡنَا يَوۡمًا أَوۡ بَعۡضَ يَوۡمࣲۚ قَالُواْ رَبُّكُمۡ أَعۡلَمُ بِمَا لَبِثۡتُمۡ فَٱبۡعَثُوٓاْ أَحَدَكُم بِوَرِقِكُمۡ هَٰذِهِۦٓ إِلَى ٱلۡمَدِينَةِ فَلۡيَنظُرۡ أَيُّهَآ أَزۡكَىٰ طَعَامࣰ ا فَلۡيَأۡتِكُم بِرِزۡقࣲ مِّنۡهُ وَلۡيَتَلَطَّفۡ وَلَا يُشۡعِرَنَّ بِكُمۡ أَحَدًا
In time We woke them, and they began to question one another. One of them asked, ‘How long have you been here?’ and [some] answered, ‘A day or part of a day,’ but then [others] said, ‘Your Lord knows best how long you have been here. One of you go to the city with your silver coins, find out where the best food is there, and bring some back. But be careful not to let anyone know about you
Qur’an 18:19read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A review of the cognitive and neural work on delay picks out three features of a task that most drive putting it off: how unpleasant it feels, how large the eventual payoff is, and how far away that payoff sits. A task riddled with small searches does badly on the first of those. The review describes mechanisms rather than testing this particular tactic.
Zhang S, Liu P, Feng T. (2019). To do it now or later: The cognitive mechanisms and neural substrates underlying procrastination.. Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Hunting for details both adds time and keeps putting you back at the top of a fresh distraction.
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
For a lot of people with ADHD there are only two times: now, and not now. A deadline on Thursday and one six months out sit in the same box until the day they suddenly become today.
Time speeds up inside something absorbing and crawls inside something dull, and for many people with ADHD that swing is much wider. Which means your sense of time is least reliable exactly where you need it most.
When someone has missed the deadline again, the talk about how they always do this changes nothing except how they feel. If you want a different Friday, the conversation belongs on Monday, and it is about the plan rather than the person.