Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Your sense of time
Which is why ranking tasks by what matters most tends to fall apart by Tuesday. Your felt sense of weight is set by how near a thing is, so an importance based list spends all day arguing with your own experience. Going with the grain works better: bring the important thing nearer instead. Give it an earlier deadline you have agreed with someone, or a slot in this afternoon's diary, so that proximity is working for you rather than against you.
Man prays for harm, just as he prays for good: man is ever hasty (Quran 17:11). Urgency distorting judgement in the moment is described as a familiar human fault rather than a personal defect.
الإسراء
وَيَدۡعُ ٱلۡإِنسَٰنُ بِٱلشَّرِّ دُعَآءَهُۥ بِٱلۡخَيۡرِۖ وَكَانَ ٱلۡإِنسَٰنُ عَجُولࣰ ا
Yet man prays for harm, just as he prays for good: man is ever hasty
Qur’an 17:11read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A two week daily diary study with wearable sleep tracking in 96 students looked at how stress on a given day led to delaying bedtime and then to worse sleep, taking each person's general self control into account. The useful part is that it follows the same person day by day, and shows their choices shifting with the day rather than with their character. It was about sleep rather than task lists, so the link to prioritising is by analogy.
Schmidt LI, Baetzner AS, Dreisbusch MI, Mertens A, Sieverding M. (2024). Postponing sleep after a stressful day: Patterns of stress, bedtime procrastination, and sleep outcomes in a daily diary approach.. Stress and health : journal of the International Society for the Investigation of Stress doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
How urgent something feels is set mostly by how close it is and hardly at all by how much it matters.
Rushing out of the door is the most reliable way to leave something behind. The hurry uses up the very attention that would have checked for the keys.
People put the meeting in the diary and not the shower, the finding of the keys or the twenty minutes on the bus. The event gets planned as though standing up puts you in the room.
Choosing the dull useful thing over the bright easy one starts with a pause, not with willpower. If the pause never happens, nothing downstream of it gets a chance to happen either.