Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Get started
Choosing the app, picking the colours, setting up the tags: that is the task avoiding you. It is interesting, it feels like preparation, and by bedtime nothing has been done.
New systems are enjoyable in a way the actual work never is, which is exactly why the evening goes that way. A useful test is whether anything on your list moved while you were setting up the thing that was going to help your list move. If you catch yourself comparing two apps, put a timer on it, pick one before it rings, and go and do fifteen minutes of the real job.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Do not say of anything, I will do that tomorrow (Quran 18:23). The sentence still counts when it is dressed up as getting properly organised first.
وَلَا تَقُولَنَّ لِشَاْيۡءٍ إِنِّي فَاعِلࣱ ذَٰلِكَ غَدًا
do not say of anything, ‘I will do that tomorrow,’
Qur’an 18:23read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A scoping review of engagement with digital tools for mental health found that getting people started is rarely the problem, and that keeping them going is. Setting something up is the easy part in the research too. It maps the strategies people use rather than measuring how well any of them work.
Saleem M, Kühne L, De Santis KK, Christianson L, Brand T, Busse H. (2021). Understanding Engagement Strategies in Digital Interventions for Mental Health Promotion: Scoping Review.. JMIR mental health doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Something new gives you a lift the old task cannot, so tinkering wins every time you let it compete.
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
Before deciding you are avoiding something, check that you actually know what it wants. How long, in what form, by when, and what counts as finished.
You will not enjoy it on Thursday either. What Thursday takes away is the choice, not the dislike.
Email is the easiest place to hide. It answers back, it never runs out, and by five o'clock it feels like you worked.