Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Bringing the future closer
Hang something small and near on the task. No coffee until the expense form is in. Not a treat later in the month, something you actually want in the next ten minutes.
It works better when the reward is genuinely small, genuinely close, and you hold the line on it. Big distant rewards behave exactly like the deadline does, which is to say they carry no weight until it is too late for them to help. Keep a few different ones to hand, because the same one goes stale after a while.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'We shall be sure to guide to Our ways those who strive hard for Our cause' (Quran 29:69). Something good arrives during the effort rather than only at the far end of it.
وَٱلَّذِينَ جَٰهَدُواْ فِينَا لَنَهۡدِيَنَّهُمۡ سُبُلَنَاۚ وَإِنَّ ٱللَّهَ لَمَعَ ٱلۡمُحۡسِنِينَ
But We shall be sure to guide to Our ways those who strive hard for Our cause: God is with those who do good
Qur’an 29:69read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta-analysis of 52 effect sizes examined delay of gratification and temporal discounting in ADHD and typically developing samples, testing whether males and females differ. The pattern it rests on, that a nearer reward outcompetes a larger later one, is exactly what this technique makes use of. It synthesises laboratory tasks, so it cannot tell you which reward will work for you.
Doidge JL, Flora DB, Toplak ME. (2021). A Meta-Analytic Review of Sex Differences on Delay of Gratification and Temporal Discounting Tasks in ADHD and Typically Developing Samples.. Journal of attention disorders doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Anything close in time pulls harder, so you may as well borrow that pull for something useful.
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
Whatever the record is, do it the same day, every time. The salesman writes his notes in the car outside the client's office. Not that evening, not on Friday.
Putting tomorrow's envelope beside your keys only works if the keys are the only other thing there. On a counter covered in post, the envelope just becomes part of the pile.
Letting the natural consequence do the teaching only works if it arrives soon enough to be connected to what you did. Where the gap is months or years, nobody learns from it. Not you, not anyone.