Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Bringing the future closer
By the time the motivation turns up, the moment to act has usually gone. Thursday night panic about a report due on Friday is real motivation, just delivered too late to be any use.
Worth saying to yourself without contempt, because the pattern is not a preference for pressure. The job is to move the feeling earlier rather than to feel it harder. Anything that makes Friday present on Monday is doing that work: a check-in, a first paragraph due, a friend who asks you how it is going.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'Would that I had provided for this life to come' (Quran 89:24). That is the voice of hindsight, and the trick is to borrow it early.
يَقُولُ يَٰلَيۡتَنِي قَدَّمۡتُ لِحَيَاتِي
He will say, ‘Would that I had provided for this life to come!’
Qur’an 89:24read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A randomised experiment found that vividly imagining specific future experiences reduced how steeply people discounted future rewards, and reduced snacking too. That is a laboratory task over a short window, not evidence that picturing Friday will get the report written. It does support the general move of bringing a later moment into the present one, which is what all of this is trying to do.
Dassen FCM, Jansen A, Nederkoorn C, Houben K. (2016). Focus on the future: Episodic future thinking reduces discount rate and snacking.. Appetite doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Motivation that arrives on time is worth more than motivation that arrives strongly.
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
Before you hand it over, read the original request again. Not your memory of it. The actual words.
Smoking sends its bill decades later. Homework skipped at fourteen lands at university applications. January's receipt matters in April of the following year. The few seconds of relief are always right here.
Put unassigned time in the calendar on purpose. Not as a gap that might survive, as an actual appointment, because unplanned work always arrives and it has to land somewhere.