Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Your sense of time
Fasten a time you keep missing to another person. Go up when your partner goes up. Ask a colleague to knock for you on the way to the meeting.
A person moving is much easier to notice than a number changing. Ask for it as a favour and keep it small and specific, because a vague request to be kept on track turns the other person into a supervisor, which neither of you wants. If they forget once, that is fine. It is a prop, not a promise.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Urge one another to the truth, and urge one another to steadfastness (Quran 103:3). Keeping each other going is described as something people do together rather than alone.
إِلَّا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُواْ وَعَمِلُواْ ٱلصَّٰلِحَٰتِ وَتَوَاصَوۡاْ بِٱلۡحَقِّ وَتَوَاصَوۡاْ بِٱلصَّبۡرِ
except for those who believe, do good deeds, urge one another to the truth, and urge one another to steadfastness
Qur’an 103:3read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A cross sectional study found the link between how people think about their future and delaying bedtime ran through two things: their self control and their problematic phone use. It does not test whether pairing up with someone helps. What it does suggest is that going to bed on time is held up by more than one strand, so an external cue is a fair place to intervene.
Mao B, Chen S, Wei M, Luo Y, Liu Y. (2022). Future Time Perspective and Bedtime Procrastination: The Mediating Role of Dual-Mode Self-Control and Problematic Smartphone Use.. International journal of environmental research and public health doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Somebody getting up and moving is a cue you can see, where the clock was one you had to remember to check.
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
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.
Take the Friday deadline and walk it backwards onto the days. What happens Monday, what happens Tuesday, written down where both of you can see it.
People put the meeting in the diary and not the shower, the finding of the keys or the twenty minutes on the bus. The event gets planned as though standing up puts you in the room.