Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Get started
Keep your clearest hours for the work that needs a clear head. Fold the laundry when you are half awake, not at ten in the morning when you have finally come alive.
Most of us have a window or two in the day when thinking is genuinely cheaper, and we spend it on email and tidying because those are easy to pick up. Notice where yours falls, after moving about, after medication takes hold, first thing, late at night, and then guard it. Put the dull physical jobs in the flat parts of the day, where they cost you almost nothing.
Qur’an and Sunnah
And ease my task for me (Quran 20:26). Choosing the hour when a task costs you least is one honest way of asking for exactly that.
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta-meta-analysis found that physical activity reduces depression and anxiety in adults who are not clinically unwell, which is one reason the window after moving about tends to be a good one. That is evidence about mood rather than about concentration, and nothing in it tells you how to arrange a working day.
Rebar AL, Stanton R, Geard D, Short C, Duncan MJ, Vandelanotte C. (2015). A meta-meta-analysis of the effect of physical activity on depression and anxiety in non-clinical adult populations.. Health psychology review doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
The same effort carries you much further when it is spent in the hour your head is working.
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 other way through fog is to walk into it. Start badly, on purpose, and let the shape of the thing appear while you are working on it.
If you are helping someone get moving, start with the thing they mind about, even when you can see something else that needs it more. A goal a person picked for themselves is the only kind they will chase when you are not in the room.
Shrink the first step until it takes two minutes, and do only that.