Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Bringing the future closer
If you want a future to carry any weight, it has to be pictured rather than stated. What does the day look like. Who is in the room. What is different by Thursday. A teenager who has never visited two different universities cannot feel the comparison you are asking them to weigh, and saying the sentence more firmly will not build it for them.
'Even though the Hereafter is better and more lasting' (Quran 87:17). The verse states plainly that the further good deserves more weight than we give it.
الأعلى
وَٱلۡأٓخِرَةُ خَيۡرࣱ وَأَبۡقَىٰٓ
even though the Hereafter is better and more lasting
Qur’an 87:17read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A review of episodic future thinking sets out how imagining your own future works and what it is for, drawing on cognitive and neural evidence. Being a review, it gathers rather than tests. The useful point here is that imagining the future draws on the same construction as remembering, so a future you have no material for is genuinely hard to bring to mind.
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.
You cannot be pulled by a future you are unable to picture.
Hang something small and near on the task. No coffee until the expense form is in. Not a treat later in the month, something you actually want in the next ten minutes.
Someone running just ahead of the avalanche has nowhere to stand and think. Reflection needs a bit of room, and a life with no room in it cannot make any.
Whatever the record is, do it the same day, every time. The salesman writes his notes in the car outside the client's office. Not that evening, not on Friday.