Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Get started
When you get something hard done, resist waving it off with "anyone could have done that". Let it count.
That reflex is common in people who have spent years falling short of what they meant to do, and it quietly cancels the good of finishing. Try the plain version, said out loud or written in a line at the end of the day: I said I would do this and I did it. Whether other people find the same task easy is a separate question, and not the one that decides whether yours was worth something.
Qur’an and Sunnah
If anyone desires the life to come and strives after it as he should, his striving will be thanked (Quran 17:19). Effort is received there rather than brushed aside, which is permission to receive your own.
وَمَنۡ أَرَادَ ٱلۡأٓخِرَةَ وَسَعَىٰ لَهَا سَعۡيَهَا وَهُوَ مُؤۡمِنࣱ فَأُوْلَٰٓئِكَ كَانَ سَعۡيُهُم مَّشۡكُورࣰ ا
But if anyone desires the life to come and strives after it as he should, as a true believer, his striving will be thanked
Qur’an 17:19read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta-analysis that separated perfectionistic striving from perfectionistic concern found it was the anxious worry about falling short, not high standards in themselves, that tracked with psychological difficulty. Refusing to credit your own finished work belongs on that worried side. The studies pooled were mostly cross-sectional, so they show the two things travelling together rather than proving which one starts it.
Limburg K, Watson HJ, Hagger MS, Egan SJ. (2017). The Relationship Between Perfectionism and Psychopathology: A Meta-Analysis.. Journal of clinical psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
If finishing never feels like anything, there is nothing left over to make the next start worth attempting.
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
Try giving the two of you names. Monday you keeps leaving messes for Thursday you, and Thursday you is getting fed up about it. Say it out loud and let it be a bit ridiculous.
There is a sort of avoidance that looks like getting things done. Sorting the drawer, clearing the inbox, any mildly useful job that is not the one you are dreading.
Working towards something you want will carry you further than working away from something you dread. Before you start, name in your own words what the finished thing gets you.