Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Remembering to do it
Remembering to do something later is really two jobs stacked on each other. You have to keep hold of the thing itself, and you have to keep some feel for how the hours are passing, and both have to be working at the same moment.
That is why this fails more often than either piece alone, and why it is the failure other people see. Seeing it as two jobs splits the fix in two as well. Get the content out of your head and into something that holds it, then hand the timing to something that fires whether or not you happen to be tracking the hour.
Qur’an and Sunnah
We also commanded Adam before you, but he forgot (Quran 20:115). If the first man is described as forgetting what he was told, you are in old company.
وَلَقَدۡ عَهِدۡنَآ إِلَىٰٓ ءَادَمَ مِن قَبۡلُ فَنَسِيَ وَلَمۡ نَجِدۡ لَهُۥ عَزۡمࣰ ا
We also commanded Adam before you, but he forgot and We found him lacking in constancy
Qur’an 20:115read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In one experiment, people who had just been made to exert self control were then worse at carrying out an intention when the cue for it arrived. On that evidence, remembering to act draws on the same limited resource as the acting does. It is a single laboratory study, so it is a hint rather than a settled account, though it fits the way things fall over at the end of a hard day.
Li JB, Nie YG, Zeng MX, Huntoon M, Smith JL. (2013). Too exhausted to remember: ego depletion undermines subsequent event-based prospective memory.. International journal of psychology : Journal international de psychologie doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Anything that needs two unreliable systems to hold at once will drop more often than either one on its own.
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
When someone hands you a date, the useful move is not writing the date down. Open your calendar there and then and decide the hour the work will actually happen.
Sometimes you cannot write it down. You are driving, your hands are full, you are halfway through a conversation. Then picture the moment in detail instead: the room you will be standing in, the object you will be looking at when you do it.
When a task is missed it is usually not sitting somewhere being refused. It has gone off the radar altogether, the way a name goes when somebody asks you for it.