Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Get started
It shows up worst on the jobs with nothing built into them: the form, the receipts, the email you have already read four times. Knowing the cost is genuinely higher lets you stop arguing with yourself about whether you should find it easy, and spend that energy on making the task smaller, louder or shorter instead.
And ease my task for me (Quran 20:26). Moses asked for the task to be lighter, not for himself to be made tougher, which is a fair thing to ask for here too.
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A meta-analysis of children and adolescents with ADHD found a measurable preference for the immediate reward over the larger delayed one, and treats that as separate from acting without thinking. It describes a pattern across groups rather than a test you can run on yourself, and it was carried out in young people rather than adults.
Patros CH, Alderson RM, Kasper LJ, Tarle SJ, Lea SE, Hudec KL. (2016). Choice-impulsivity in children and adolescents with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): A meta-analytic review.. Clinical psychology review doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A brain that gets less pull from a distant payoff needs the payoff brought closer.
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.
An avoided task charges you rent even on the days nothing goes wrong. The low hum of hoping nobody asks is part of what it costs.
Do not save the treat for when the whole thing is finished. Put something small right after the awkward step: a coffee on the way back from the shop, a sit down once the taping is done.