Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Bringing the future closer
Forethought can be as small as this. The motorway is dreadful at nine and fine at two, so you go at two. Ten seconds of picturing it, not an afternoon of planning.
If the word planning makes you tired, drop it. What you are doing is running the thing forward once before you commit: where will I be, what will it be like, what will I wish I had done differently. It works better out loud with someone, because a pictured version persuades in a way a described one does not.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'Would that I had provided for this life to come' (Quran 89:24). That is hindsight talking, and forethought is the same sentence arriving early enough to be useful.
يَقُولُ يَٰلَيۡتَنِي قَدَّمۡتُ لِحَيَاتِي
He will say, ‘Would that I had provided for this life to come!’
Qur’an 89:24read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a randomised experiment, imagining concrete future events during choices between sooner and later rewards reduced impulsive discounting in both lean and obese adults, so it was not confined to one group. These were laboratory choices rather than journeys and deadlines. The part that carries over is that concreteness did the work, not effort or resolve.
Daniel TO, Stanton CM, Epstein LH. (2013). The future is now: comparing the effect of episodic future thinking on impulsivity in lean and obese individuals.. Appetite doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Imagining the actual moment gives you something to weigh, which a general intention never does.
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
A report due Friday puts a little pressure on somebody else's Monday. For you Monday feels like nothing at all, and then Thursday evening arrives carrying the whole of it.
One way to hold the whole thing: you feel now at full volume and later almost not at all. Putting things off, saying yes too often, spending, jumping in. One pattern rather than four separate faults.
You get three goes at thinking about something: before it starts, somewhere in the middle, and once it is over. Most of us only ever use the last one, which is the least useful of them.