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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Your sense of time
People who are managing well in every visible way still get brought down by a lapsed policy or an unopened letter from the council. Trying to care more about admin does not work, because the difficulty is that it is genuinely boring to you. Move it outside yourself: standing orders, automatic renewals, a fixed half hour on the same day each week with the post and the laptop, ideally with somebody else in the room.
And the day for your livelihood (Quran 78:11). Daylight is named for the plain business of keeping a life running, which includes the parts nobody enjoys.
النبأ
وَجَعَلۡنَا ٱلنَّهَارَ مَعَاشࣰ ا
and the day for your livelihood
Qur’an 78:11read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In 114 undergraduates, the link between procrastination and ADHD symptoms ran through executive functions, including time management, organisation and problem solving. A separate meta analysis finds mind wandering is more frequent and more costly when task demands are high, which is part of why long unstructured stretches go so badly. Both are correlational and neither tests a particular system, so use them as a reason to keep the admin structured and short.
Bolden J, Fillauer JP. (2020). "Tomorrow is the busiest day of the week": Executive functions mediate the relation between procrastination and attention problems.. Journal of American college health : J of ACH doi
Randall JG, Oswald FL, Beier ME. (2014). Mind-wandering, cognition, and performance: a theory-driven meta-analysis of attention regulation.. Psychological bulletin doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Effort follows interest, so the dull and important things need a system rather than good intentions.
For a lot of people with ADHD there are only two times: now, and not now. A deadline on Thursday and one six months out sit in the same box until the day they suddenly become today.
Here is a short way to hold the whole difficulty: the now in front of you is too big and the later is too small. It fits in your head at the moment you need it, which longer explanations do not.
Getting going is a separate expense from working slowly. Plenty of people move quickly once they are in and still lose forty minutes in the gap between deciding and starting.