Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Bringing the future closer
Two things depend on the same small gap: looking back at how the last one went, and looking ahead at how this one is likely to go. Neither can happen once you are already moving.
Which is oddly good news, because it is not two skills to build. It is the half second before you answer, agree, buy or set off. Most people already have the material. They know how last time went and they can guess how this will go. The gap is simply where any of that gets consulted.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'Let every soul consider carefully what it sends ahead for tomorrow' (Quran 59:18). Considering carefully is that pause, given a name.
يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُواْ ٱتَّقُواْ ٱللَّهَ وَلۡتَنظُرۡ نَفۡسࣱ مَّا قَدَّمَتۡ لِغَدࣲۖ وَٱتَّقُواْ ٱللَّهَۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ خَبِيرُۢ بِمَا تَعۡمَلُونَ
You who believe! Be mindful of God, and let every soul consider carefully what it sends ahead for tomorrow; be mindful of God, for God is well aware of everything you do
Qur’an 59:18read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A review of episodic future thinking sets out the mechanisms behind imagining your own future and the functions that imagining serves, pulling together cognitive and neural evidence. It summarises a field rather than testing a technique, so it will not tell you how long a pause needs to be. What it does establish is that picturing a future event is active work, and work needs a moment to happen in.
Schacter DL, Benoit RG, Szpunar KK. (2017). Episodic Future Thinking: Mechanisms and Functions.. Current opinion in behavioral sciences doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
You cannot use what you know while you are already halfway into doing something else.
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 the panic finally shows up, take it as news about the past rather than a call to action. It means the good options went a while ago.
Putting tomorrow's envelope beside your keys only works if the keys are the only other thing there. On a counter covered in post, the envelope just becomes part of the pile.
The conversation only counts if the decisions end up in the calendar. 'You take Tuesday, I'll take Thursday' has to be written down or it did not really happen.