Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Systems for daily life
Every time your eye lands on the job you have never started, it takes a small toll. Ten of those on one list is a tax you pay all day without noticing.
This is the argument for cutting a list back hard, and it has nothing to do with tidiness. An item you are not going to do still costs you something each time you scan past it. Clearing it out is not giving up on it. It is refusing to keep paying for something you were never going to get.
Qur’an and Sunnah
God wishes to lighten your burden (Quran 4:28). Taking weight off is in keeping with how you are meant to be treated.
يُرِيدُ ٱللَّهُ أَن يُخَفِّفَ عَنكُمۡۚ وَخُلِقَ ٱلۡإِنسَٰنُ ضَعِيفࣰ ا
God wishes to lighten your burden; man was created weak
Qur’an 4:28read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In 114 undergraduates, executive functions including time management and organisation sat between attention problems and procrastination, which fits the idea that the difficulty is in handling the load rather than in wanting to work. It is a cross-sectional study in students, so it shows these things travelling together at one moment and cannot show what causes what.
Bolden J, Fillauer JP. (2020). "Tomorrow is the busiest day of the week": Executive functions mediate the relation between procrastination and attention problems.. Journal of American college health : J of ACH doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
An unfinished intention keeps a small claim on your attention until it is either done or dropped.
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
Good help leaves you more able to do it yourself next time. If the whole thing only works while the other person is in the room, something has gone sideways.
Send the report between the adults, by email or through the school system. Do not make the child carry a piece of paper to four teachers and then home.
Put the uncertainty at the front. Not Thursday, possibly Friday, most likely Monday is worth far more to the other person than a confident yes you cannot keep.