Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Your sense of time
Reading the time off a clock does nothing on its own. The useful bit is the question straight after it: where was I meant to be by now, and how much is left.
Try adding one sentence to every glance. It is twenty past two, so I have forty minutes and I am about halfway. Said out loud it sounds laborious, but it takes two seconds and it is the step where the number turns into a decision. Without it people can check the clock a dozen times in an afternoon and still be surprised by the evening.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Anyone who wishes may be mindful or show gratitude (Quran 25:62) as the night and day follow each other. The turning of the day is offered as an occasion for noticing, not just as something that happens.
وَهُوَ ٱلَّذِي جَعَلَ ٱلَّيۡلَ وَٱلنَّهَارَ خِلۡفَةࣰ لِّمَنۡ أَرَادَ أَن يَذَّكَّرَ أَوۡ أَرَادَ شُكُورࣰ ا
it is He who made the night and day follow each other- so anyone who wishes may be mindful or show gratitude
Qur’an 25:62read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In 132 children aged seven to eleven, how they thought about the future, and how vividly they could picture future events, related to how long they were able to wait for a better reward. Picturing where you need to be is close to what that study measured, though it was children and it was correlational. It supports making the future concrete rather than leaving it as a number on a screen.
Burns P, O'Connor PA, Atance C, McCormack T. (2021). More Later: Delay of Gratification and Thought About the Future in Children.. Child development doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A number only changes what you do once you have worked out what it means for the thing in front 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
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.
When you are sure something takes ten minutes, do not argue with yourself. Write down the guess, start a timer, and look at both afterwards.
Instead of one warning, give several: half an hour, fifteen minutes, five, one. The child then has time to arrive at the ending rather than having it dropped on them.