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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Your sense of time
For anything long, put the breaks into the number before you start. Say four hours of work plus the standing up, the kettle, the two interruptions, and call the whole thing six. Then finishing at six is on time instead of late. It sounds like a trick, but it changes how the afternoon feels and how willing you are to start the next one.
It is God who has given you the night in which to rest and the day in which to see (Quran 40:61). Rest is written into the design of the day rather than borrowed from it.
غافر
ٱللَّهُ ٱلَّذِي جَعَلَ لَكُمُ ٱلَّيۡلَ لِتَسۡكُنُواْ فِيهِ وَٱلنَّهَارَ مُبۡصِرًاۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ لَذُو فَضۡلٍ عَلَى ٱلنَّاسِ وَلَٰكِنَّ أَكۡثَرَ ٱلنَّاسِ لَا يَشۡكُرُونَ
It is God who has given you the night in which to rest and the day in which to see. God is truly bountiful to people, but most people do not give thanks
Qur’an 40:61read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A meta-analysis of perfectionism in learning found that striving and anxious concern about mistakes relate quite differently to achievement, burnout and stress, so pushing harder is not uniformly helpful. Setting an impossible bar for your own working speed sits on the anxious side of that split. The analysis covers academic settings, so read it as a caution rather than a rule.
Osenk I, Williamson P, Wade TD. (2020). Does perfectionism or pursuit of excellence contribute to successful learning? A meta-analytic review.. Psychological assessment doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
An estimate that leaves out ordinary human pauses turns a normal day into evidence against yourself.
If an hour of real work reliably eats two hours of clock, book two. You do not have to become a better estimator to end up with a schedule that works.
The further off something sits, the less it weighs on today's decision. That is not a flaw in your reasoning. It is how the weighing works for everybody.
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.