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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Your sense of time
Use it as a question rather than a verdict. Standing at the fridge at eleven at night, or with the tab open instead of the form, you can ask whether the now has grown too large in the picture. Naming it often shifts the choice by a small amount, and small amounts are what you are after.
You will progress from stage to stage (Quran 84:19). Life is described as moving through phases, which is a longer view than the moment offers on its own.
الانشقاق
لَتَرۡكَبُنَّ طَبَقًا عَن طَبَقࣲ
you will progress from stage to stage
Qur’an 84:19read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A review of episodic future thinking describes the capacity to picture your own future in concrete detail, and the work that capacity does for planning and choice. It reviews mechanisms rather than testing any technique. The bearing here is modest but real: keeping later in the picture at all is the move, and a phrase you can retrieve is one way of doing it.
Schacter DL, Benoit RG, Szpunar KK. (2017). Episodic Future Thinking: Mechanisms and Functions.. Current opinion in behavioral sciences doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A short phrase you can actually recall in the moment beats an accurate model you only recall afterwards.
Look back over your own history for the times you were knocked down and started something anyway. That pattern is common with ADHD, and it is easy to miss while you are busy counting the failures.
When a deadline or a reward sits a long way off, it can feel almost weightless, while the thing in front of you feels enormous. That is not you being shallow. It is a shortened view of time doing what it does.
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.