Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Bringing the future closer
The job will not feel more pleasant on Thursday. It will be the same job, done tired, in less time, with somebody waiting. Later is not the easier option. It only looks that way from here.
There is a quiet assumption that willingness will turn up in the meantime. It does not. What changes is the conditions, and they get worse. Saying this plainly to yourself is not a telling off, it is removing the one story that makes putting it off look sensible. Once that story goes, twenty minutes now is a much easier sell.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'What you have runs out but what God has endures' (Quran 16:96). The relief of putting something off is exactly the kind of thing that runs out.
مَا عِندَكُمۡ يَنفَدُ وَمَا عِندَ ٱللَّهِ بَاقࣲۗ وَلَنَجۡزِيَنَّ ٱلَّذِينَ صَبَرُوٓاْ أَجۡرَهُم بِأَحۡسَنِ مَا كَانُواْ يَعۡمَلُونَ
What you have runs out but what God has endures, and We shall certainly reward those who remain steadfast according to the best of their actions
Qur’an 16:96read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A review of episodic future thinking gathers what is known about how imagining your own future works and what it does for us. What is relevant here is that this sort of picturing can be accurate as well as encouraging, including about how a rushed Thursday will actually go. It reviews mechanisms rather than testing a technique, so it explains more than it proves.
Schacter DL, Benoit RG, Szpunar KK. (2017). Episodic Future Thinking: Mechanisms and Functions.. Current opinion in behavioral sciences doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Delay does not make the task nicer, it only makes the circumstances harder.
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
The towel left on the floor is the model. Tomorrow it is cold and unpleasant to use, and that is the whole of it. Short wait, happens every time, nothing terrible.
Nobody decides well mid-panic. So cutting the number of panics is itself a way of making better decisions, even if nothing about your judgement changes at all.
At a check-in, only look. Where am I, what has slipped, what have I still not heard back on. Skim the inbox without opening anything.