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A task you dislike needs a time and a place, not a place on the list. Tuesday at ten, at the kitchen table, is a plan. Soon is not.
Left in open competition, the dull job loses to everything more urgent and everything more interesting, every single day, and that is not a fault in you. Giving it a slot takes it out of the race. Put it in the diary the way you would a dentist appointment, tell someone if that helps, and when the time comes do it badly rather than not at all.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Race to do good deeds (Quran 2:148). The good thing is placed in front of you as something with a time attached, not as an idea for one day.
وَلِكُلࣲّ وِجۡهَةٌ هُوَ مُوَلِّيهَاۖ فَٱسۡتَبِقُواْ ٱلۡخَيۡرَٰتِۚ أَيۡنَ مَا تَكُونُواْ يَأۡتِ بِكُمُ ٱللَّهُ جَمِيعًاۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ عَلَىٰ كُلِّ شَيۡءࣲ قَدِيرࣱ
Each community has its own direction to which it turns: race to do good deeds and wherever you are, God will bring you together. God has power to do everything
Qur’an 2:148read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A Cochrane review of behavioural activation describes a brief approach that works by changing how a person engages with their surroundings, including planning activity deliberately, and notes it may need fewer resources than other therapies. It was reviewed as a treatment for depression in adults, so using scheduling for an ordinary avoided task borrows the idea rather than the evidence.
Uphoff E, Ekers D, Robertson L, Dawson S, Sanger E, South E, Samaan Z, Richards D, Meader N, Churchill R. (2020). Behavioural activation therapy for depression in adults.. The Cochrane database of systematic reviews doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A job with a fixed time no longer has to win your attention to happen.
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
Email is the easiest place to hide. It answers back, it never runs out, and by five o'clock it feels like you worked.
If not knowing makes you itch, the work is learning to sit with the itch rather than making it go away. The plan can stay unfinished while you get on with today.
When you are the one helping, let the tone stay warm and a little funny. A person can hear a hard truth about their own week if it does not arrive solemnly.