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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Your sense of time
Everyone recognises this, which makes it a good thing to notice rather than a private failing. The exchange rate flips overnight: tomorrow's tiredness is cheap at ten in the evening and expensive at seven the next morning. Since you cannot argue with yourself at the moment of choosing, choose earlier. Decide where the evening ends before it starts, and take the small frictions seriously, the remote across the room, the plug switched off, the next episode not queued up ready.
The night as a cover (Quran 78:10). Night is described as something drawn over the day rather than as extra room at the end of it.
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A systematic review and meta analysis of bedtime procrastination, meaning delaying sleep with no outside reason to, established what it goes along with and its association with not getting enough sleep. Another meta analysis measured its link with depression, anxiety and stress in university students, something that had been assumed rather than tested. Both report associations rather than causes, and together they suggest this particular habit is worth taking seriously instead of laughing off.
Hill VM, Rebar AL, Ferguson SA, Shriane AE, Vincent GE. (2022). Go to bed! A systematic review and meta-analysis of bedtime procrastination correlates and sleep outcomes.. Sleep medicine reviews doi
Azeem O, Sulaiman F, Haidong Z. (2026). Bedtime procrastination and psychological distress in university students: a systematic review and meta-analysis of their association.. Frontiers in psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
The cost lands on tomorrow, so tonight it barely counts.
If you will not look at clocks, let something tell you instead. A watch or phone that buzzes every fifteen minutes, or on the hour, rebuilds a rough sense of how long you have been at this.
There are two quite different ways of putting things off. One is anxious and full of dread. The other is perfectly calm until the pressure arrives, and then everything happens at once.
Nobody works five hours straight. If your estimate assumes you will, then the shortfall gets read as you being slow rather than as the estimate being wrong.