Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Bringing the future closer
The strength of it is that the trigger is fixed and physical. Sitting down in the car is the cue, and the notes happen before the key turns. No deciding, no intention to catch up later at the desk. Find your own version of it: before you take your coat off, before you open the next message, before you stand up from the table.
'The moment you are freed of one task, work on' (Quran 94:7). The gap right after finishing is treated as the place to act, before it closes over.
الشرح
فَإِذَا فَرَغۡتَ فَٱنصَبۡ
The moment you are freed [of one task] work on
Qur’an 94:7read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
An imaging experiment found that imagining fictitious experiences recruits much the same brain network as remembering the past, evidence that the future is constructed out of remembered material. Applied here, it explains why capturing detail while it is fresh matters beyond the record itself: what you can plan with later is built from what you actually kept. The study was about imagination and memory, not about note taking.
Hassabis D, Kumaran D, Maguire EA. (2007). Using imagination to understand the neural basis of episodic memory.. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Tying the action to a moment you always pass through means you never have to remember it.
Nobody decides well mid-panic. So cutting the number of panics is itself a way of making better decisions, even if nothing about your judgement changes at all.
No single strategy fits every situation. When something that worked last year does nothing now, the fault is usually in the match rather than in you.
A report due Friday puts a little pressure on somebody else's Monday. For you Monday feels like nothing at all, and then Thursday evening arrives carrying the whole of it.