Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Your sense of time
Keep a cheap kitchen timer where you work and another where you get ready. If speaking to a smart speaker is quicker for you, use that instead. Notice that this is not really about the tool, it is about what happens in the second when you think I should set something: any friction there and the thought passes.
Enter your houses by their main doors (Quran 2:189). Taking the straightforward way in is offered there as the better practice.
البقرة
۞يَسۡـَٔلُونَكَ عَنِ ٱلۡأَهِلَّةِۖ قُلۡ هِيَ مَوَٰقِيتُ لِلنَّاسِ وَٱلۡحَجِّۗ وَلَيۡسَ ٱلۡبِرُّ بِأَن تَأۡتُواْ ٱلۡبُيُوتَ مِن ظُهُورِهَا وَلَٰكِنَّ ٱلۡبِرَّ مَنِ ٱتَّقَىٰۗ وَأۡتُواْ ٱلۡبُيُوتَ مِنۡ أَبۡوَٰبِهَاۚ وَٱتَّقُواْ ٱللَّهَ لَعَلَّكُمۡ تُفۡلِحُونَ
They ask you [Prophet] about crescent moons. Say, ‘They show the times appointed for people, and for the pilgrimage.’ Goodness does not consist of entering houses by the back [door]; the truly good person is the one who is mindful of God. So enter your houses by their [main] doors and be mindful of God so that you may prosper
Qur’an 2:189read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A meta-analysis of 691 correlations found that how unpleasant or effortful a task feels is one of the strongest and steadiest predictors of putting it off, alongside low confidence and impulsiveness. Fiddling with an app is a tiny version of that same friction. The analysis is correlational and general rather than a study of timers, so read this as applying its logic on a small scale.
Steel P. (2007). The nature of procrastination: a meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure.. Psychological bulletin doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
The harder a small step is, the less often it gets taken, and setting a timer is a very small step.
For younger children, make the reward small, concrete and soon. Stickers, points, a smiley face, five minutes of something good, handed over the same hour rather than at the end of the week.
Getting going is a separate expense from working slowly. Plenty of people move quickly once they are in and still lose forty minutes in the gap between deciding and starting.
Long stretches of time are where people dissolve. If a whole afternoon is unusable for you, stop trying to use it as an afternoon and cut it into pieces with edges.