Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Bringing the future closer
Before you hand it over, read the original request again. Not your memory of it. The actual words.
Almost nobody enjoys this, which is why almost nobody does it. But work that is good except for the two things nobody remembered is the commonest kind of nearly finished work. Five minutes with the brief sitting next to what you made will catch exactly that. It is the same move as sending a student back over their answers, and about as welcome.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'And that in the end he will be repaid in full for it' (Quran 53:41). In full means the whole of it, including the parts that are easiest to leave out.
ثُمَّ يُجۡزَىٰهُ ٱلۡجَزَآءَ ٱلۡأَوۡفَىٰ
and that in the end he will be repaid in full for it
Qur’an 53:41read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In one case control study, several things contributed to the ADHD picture independently of each other: executive difficulties, delay aversion, variability in responding and emotional ones. That variability is part of why a good piece of work can still be missing a particular piece. The study was about what distinguishes groups rather than about checking your work, so take it as background for why omissions happen at all.
Sjöwall D, Roth L, Lindqvist S, Thorell LB. (2013). Multiple deficits in ADHD: executive dysfunction, delay aversion, reaction time variability, and emotional deficits.. Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
What you were asked for drifts while you work, and only the original shows you how far.
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
Do not plan to resist the phone. Put it in another room before you sit down, close the tabs, silence the chat app. Resisting works sometimes, and it costs you something every single time.
Keep a count of it. Everyone talks themselves out of things, and 'I always pull it off at the last minute' is a belief living off the handful of times it was true.
Someone running just ahead of the avalanche has nowhere to stand and think. Reflection needs a bit of room, and a life with no room in it cannot make any.