Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Your sense of time
The inner clock does more than one job. It tells you what time it is now, how long that took, how long things usually take, and it taps you on the shoulder when a particular time arrives.
Worth finding out which of those is weak for you, because they need different props. Someone who estimates badly needs a record of past attempts to argue with. Someone who estimates fine but sails straight past the moment needs an alarm, not a lecture about planning. Most people can name their own within a week of paying attention.
Qur’an and Sunnah
We stayed a day or a part of a day, but ask those who keep count (Quran 23:113). Even there the honest answer is to check with something that keeps count.
قَالُواْ لَبِثۡنَا يَوۡمًا أَوۡ بَعۡضَ يَوۡمࣲ فَسۡـَٔلِ ٱلۡعَآدِّينَ
and they will reply, ‘We stayed a day or a part of a day, but ask those who keep count.’
Qur’an 23:113read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A clinical review of adult ADHD treats poor time management, disorganisation and delay as core associated features to be assessed and monitored, not as side notes. Being a review, it summarises clinical opinion and evidence rather than testing anything. It supports treating time as a specific area to look at closely rather than as a vague complaint.
Ramsay JR. (2017). Assessment and monitoring of treatment response in adult ADHD patients: current perspectives.. Neuropsychiatric disease and treatment doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Different parts of timekeeping fail in different ways, and knowing which one saves you from fixing the wrong thing.
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
Fun things serve the present. Important things serve the future. Put like that, you can see why the advice to just do the important thing is asking rather a lot.
One more episode tonight is obviously worth it, and by eleven the next morning it obviously was not. Nothing changed except where you were standing in time.
Here is a short way to hold the whole difficulty: the now in front of you is too big and the later is too small. It fits in your head at the moment you need it, which longer explanations do not.