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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Systems for daily life
The rule can be a single line inside the front cover: if it has a time, calendar; if it has a deadline but no time, list. Then writing things down gets fast, and you stop shuffling items from one place to the other. People often try to merge the two into one clever system, and the merge tends to collapse inside a fortnight. Two plain tools with a rule between them beat one ingenious one.
Put me in charge of the nation's storehouses: I shall manage them prudently and carefully (Quran 12:55). The offer is made in terms of method, since knowing how you will run something is most of being able to run it.
يوسف
قَالَ ٱجۡعَلۡنِي عَلَىٰ خَزَآئِنِ ٱلۡأَرۡضِۖ إِنِّي حَفِيظٌ عَلِيمࣱ
Joseph said, ‘Put me in charge of the nation’s storehouses: I shall manage them prudently and carefully.’
Qur’an 12:55read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Measurement work in habit research supports automaticity, how little thought a step takes, rather than repetition alone, as the ingredient that makes a routine hold. A sorting rule is what turns capturing a task into something requiring no thought. That work concerns how habits are measured rather than how to run a diary, so the reasoning is sound rather than tested.
Gardner B, Abraham C, Lally P, de Bruijn GJ. (2012). Towards parsimony in habit measurement: testing the convergent and predictive validity of an automaticity subscale of the Self-Report Habit Index.. The international journal of behavioral nutrition and physical activity doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Choosing where something goes costs a little attention every time, and a rule made once pays that cost once.
If most of the difficulty is happening at home, most of the work needs to happen with the household in the room. Otherwise the hour of good conversation gets quietly undone by Tuesday.
The cheapest place to deal with a task is before it ever reaches your list. Some things are better declined in the moment they are offered.
Choose one person and tell them you will send the finished thing by a set time. Not a conversation about how it is going, just the file, the photo, or the word done.