Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Bringing the future closer
Put unassigned time in the calendar on purpose. Not as a gap that might survive, as an actual appointment, because unplanned work always arrives and it has to land somewhere.
A week booked solid is a week where every new thing knocks something else out, and that is where the scramble comes from. Two hours on a Wednesday with nothing named in them is not slack in the lazy sense. It is the space that stops one late email turning into a fortnight of catching up.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'Store all that you reap, left in the ear, apart from the little you eat' (Quran 12:47). Keeping a reserve rather than spending everything available is the same instinct, applied to hours.
قَالَ تَزۡرَعُونَ سَبۡعَ سِنِينَ دَأَبࣰ ا فَمَا حَصَدتُّمۡ فَذَرُوهُ فِي سُنۢبُلِهِۦٓ إِلَّا قَلِيلࣰ ا مِّمَّا تَأۡكُلُونَ
then I can return to the people to inform them.’ Joseph said, ‘You will sow for seven consecutive years as usual. Store all that you reap, left in the ear, apart from the little you eat
Qur’an 12:47read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Imaging meta-analyses found substantial overlap between the regions supporting working memory and those supporting choices about delayed rewards, after earlier work in which working memory training reduced discounting. That is evidence about shared machinery, not about calendars. Read gently, it suggests a mind already at capacity has less left over for weighing what is further off.
Wesley MJ, Bickel WK. (2014). Remember the future II: meta-analyses and functional overlap of working memory and delay discounting.. Biological psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Something has to give when the unexpected arrives, and empty time gives more easily than a promise 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
Feeling bad about being late is a consequence you can talk yourself out of in about four seconds. Telling a friend you are buying dinner if you are late is not.
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.
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.