Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Bringing the future closer
Building a consequence on purpose beats waiting for life to hand you one. There is nothing more virtuous about the natural version. It just tends to arrive too late to teach anybody anything.
Take the five moves together: sooner, more often, held by someone else, big enough to notice, applied every time. Any one of them helps a bit. Two or three at once is what changes how a month goes. Start with whichever is easiest to set up this week, because the arrangement you actually build beats the better one you were going to.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'Hurry towards your Lord's forgiveness and a Garden as wide as the heavens and earth' (Quran 3:133). Urgency is deliberately attached to something distant, which is this same move at an incomparably greater scale.
۞وَسَارِعُوٓاْ إِلَىٰ مَغۡفِرَةࣲ مِّن رَّبِّكُمۡ وَجَنَّةٍ عَرۡضُهَا ٱلسَّمَٰوَٰتُ وَٱلۡأَرۡضُ أُعِدَّتۡ لِلۡمُتَّقِينَ
Hurry towards your Lord’s forgiveness and a Garden as wide as the heavens and earth prepared for the righteous
Qur’an 3:133read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A randomised trial with 1,006 smokers found that deliberately supporting autonomy and competence increased both, tested against ordinary community care. What that shows for our purposes is that a designed arrangement can be set against doing nothing in particular and measured. It was about tobacco rather than deadlines, so read it as encouragement to build something rather than as evidence for these specific five moves.
Geoffrey C. Williams; Holly A. McGregor; Daryl Sharp; Chantal Lévesque; Ruth Kouides; Richard M. Ryan (2006). Testing a self-determination theory intervention for motivating tobacco cessation: Supporting autonomy and competence in a clinical trial.. Health Psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A consequence you built arrives while you can still do something about it.
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
Once a week, both calendars open on the table. Who is doing scouts, who has football, what is happening on Thursday. Twice a week if the house is busy.
That Thursday night feeling, fully motivated at last with no good option remaining, is a trap in the timing rather than a fault in you.
Smoking sends its bill decades later. Homework skipped at fourteen lands at university applications. January's receipt matters in April of the following year. The few seconds of relief are always right here.