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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Your sense of time
Naming the jump out loud helps, at home and at work: this is a difficulty with timing, here is what I am putting in place, and it is not a comment on how much I care. That is not a free pass. You still turn up to what you agreed, and the person waiting is still allowed to be annoyed. But the conversation goes better when it is about the clock rather than your character.
Man is ever hasty (Quran 17:11). Haste is spoken of as a human condition, not as one person's flaw.
الإسراء
وَيَدۡعُ ٱلۡإِنسَٰنُ بِٱلشَّرِّ دُعَآءَهُۥ بِٱلۡخَيۡرِۖ وَكَانَ ٱلۡإِنسَٰنُ عَجُولࣰ ا
Yet man prays for harm, just as he prays for good: man is ever hasty
Qur’an 17:11read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A case control study of preschoolers who had a close relative with ADHD, but no diagnosis themselves, found they already showed more dislike of waiting and weaker inhibitory control. That points to these traits running ahead of the diagnosis rather than following from it. It is a small study in early childhood, so it supports the general point rather than settling any particular argument.
Pauli-Pott U, Roller A, Heinzel-Gutenbrunner M, Mingebach T, Dalir S, Becker K. (2014). Inhibitory control and delay aversion in unaffected preschoolers with a positive family history of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.. Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Once lateness is heard as a statement about values, both people start defending themselves instead of solving anything.
One more episode tonight is obviously worth it, and by eleven the next morning it obviously was not. Nothing changed except where you were standing in time.
A clever workaround can hide a difficulty for years. A child who memorises what he cannot read looks fine, right up until the amount to be read grows past what memory can carry.
Reading the time off a clock does nothing on its own. The useful bit is the question straight after it: where was I meant to be by now, and how much is left.