Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Your sense of time
Rushing out of the door is the most reliable way to leave something behind. The hurry uses up the very attention that would have checked for the keys.
The answer is not to remember harder, it is to move the check earlier. Pack the bag the night before and leave it by the door, and give yourself a departure time five minutes before the real one. If you are already late, accept whatever you have forgotten and go, since two more minutes of searching rarely pays for itself.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Man was created hasty (Quran 21:37). Haste is described as part of how we are made, which is something to plan around rather than apologise for.
خُلِقَ ٱلۡإِنسَٰنُ مِنۡ عَجَلࣲۚ سَأُوْرِيكُمۡ ءَايَٰتِي فَلَا تَسۡتَعۡجِلُونِ
Man was created hasty: I will show you My signs soon, so do not ask Me to hasten them
Qur’an 21:37read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A theory driven meta-analysis of mind wandering found that it happens more often, and costs more, when the demands of a task are high. Getting out of the door in a panic is a high demand moment by that description. The analysis was not about departures, so this is a general pattern being applied to a familiar situation.
Randall JG, Oswald FL, Beier ME. (2014). Mind-wandering, cognition, and performance: a theory-driven meta-analysis of attention regulation.. Psychological bulletin doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A mind under time pressure has nothing spare for the list of things you meant to pick up.
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 small job due tomorrow feels heavier than a big one due next week. Everyone works this way. It is simply stronger with ADHD, and it quietly wrecks any list ordered by importance.
Nobody works five hours straight. If your estimate assumes you will, then the shortfall gets read as you being slow rather than as the estimate being wrong.
You do not have to agree that it will take longer. Add the extra time anyway and let the week prove you right or wrong. If you finish early, you have a spare twenty minutes, which is not a punishment.