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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Your sense of time
It asks you to act on the part of the picture you can least feel. So let the important thing serve the present a bit too: do it with someone, do it somewhere you like being, put music on, promise yourself the enjoyable thing straight afterwards rather than at the weekend. Needing that is not weakness. You are paying yourself in the only currency you can actually feel.
By the declining day (Quran 103:1). Time itself is sworn by, which puts some weight behind the thing you cannot yet feel coming.
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A cross sectional study found that how people think about their own future was linked to delaying bedtime, and that the link ran through self control and through problematic smartphone use. It is a snapshot, so the direction is unclear, and it concerns sleep rather than work tasks. What it supports is the general shape here: how the future registers for you is bound up with what you are doing with the present moment.
Mao B, Chen S, Wei M, Luo Y, Liu Y. (2022). Future Time Perspective and Bedtime Procrastination: The Mediating Role of Dual-Mode Self-Control and Problematic Smartphone Use.. International journal of environmental research and public health doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A reward you can feel now can compete with the pull of the fun thing, whereas a distant benefit cannot.
Almost everyone has an alarm to get up and almost nobody has one to go to bed, which is odd, because bedtime is the one with nothing else pushing on it.
When someone has missed the deadline again, the talk about how they always do this changes nothing except how they feel. If you want a different Friday, the conversation belongs on Monday, and it is about the plan rather than the person.
Bad with time covers at least five different things: arriving late, missing deadlines, never planning ahead, always guessing the best case, and losing hours inside something absorbing. Each one has a different fix.