Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Get started
Next time you tell yourself you will remember it, ask what you would bet on that. A month's rent, for or against. The answer usually arrives before you have finished asking.
Turning a comfortable belief into a wager makes its odds obvious, and it does it without a row. Keep it light and a bit silly, because the point is not to catch yourself out, it is to see the claim clearly for a second. If you would not put money on remembering, take the ten seconds and write it down.
Qur’an and Sunnah
That man will only have what he has worked towards (Quran 53:39). What you meant to remember does not count for much; the note you wrote does.
وَأَن لَّيۡسَ لِلۡإِنسَٰنِ إِلَّا مَا سَعَىٰ
that man will only have what he has worked towards
Qur’an 53:39read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A systematic review of gamification looked at whether making effortful, repetitive tasks more game-like improves how people engage with them, which is the family this little wager belongs to. The findings there are mixed and the settings were computer based cognitive tasks. Take the bet as a device that some people find useful rather than an evidenced technique.
Lumsden J, Edwards EA, Lawrence NS, Coyle D, Munafò MR. (2016). Gamification of Cognitive Assessment and Cognitive Training: A Systematic Review of Applications and Efficacy.. JMIR serious games doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A vague feeling of confidence looks very different once you have to put a number on 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
Promise yourself twenty minutes, or one podcast episode, rather than a finished result. Then the end is guaranteed however badly it goes.
When somebody looks like they have stopped caring, it is often that they have stopped expecting it to go well. Giving up on yourself tends to come after a long run of trying and being told it was not enough.
Put the thing you are avoiding early in the day. Anything you place late gets pushed out by whatever the day turns into.