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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Remembering to do it
To a partner, the missed errand looks like a verdict on where they come in your order of things. It helps to say out loud, at a calm moment rather than in the middle of it, that the intention was real and something happened between the intention and the shop. That is not an excuse and it does not get the shopping done. It just stops the wrong argument, which is the one about whether you care.
Mention me to your master, Joseph said, and it was forgotten, so Joseph remained in prison for a number of years (Quran 12:42). The Qur'an reports that as a thing that happened, not as evidence about anybody's heart.
يوسف
وَقَالَ لِلَّذِي ظَنَّ أَنَّهُۥ نَاجࣲ مِّنۡهُمَا ٱذۡكُرۡنِي عِندَ رَبِّكَ فَأَنسَىٰهُ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنُ ذِكۡرَ رَبِّهِۦ فَلَبِثَ فِي ٱلسِّجۡنِ بِضۡعَ سِنِينَ
Joseph said to the one he knew would be saved, ‘Mention me to your master,’ but Satan made him forget to do this, and so Joseph remained in prison for a number of years
Qur’an 12:42read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
ADHD in adults is a recognised condition with agreed standards for diagnosis and treatment, and the updated European consensus statement notes that it remains underdiagnosed and undertreated in many countries. That matters here because a difficulty nobody has named tends to get read as carelessness, by others and by the person themselves. The statement is about clinical care rather than relationships, so it is context for the conversation and not a settlement of any particular row.
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Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Other people can only see the outcome, and the outcome cannot tell them whether the plan was ever there.
If the same thing keeps being dropped and it keeps landing on one person, the answer has to be a shared system rather than a better explanation.
Not every reminder is the same kind of reminder. Call at three is a clock job, when I next see my manager is a person job, and that thing at the conference next year is a diary job.
Somebody should ask the boring question: is there a list at all, anywhere? It gets skipped for being too obvious to ask, which is how a person can go years with nothing.
A sticky note is fine for something happening within the hour. Anything further out needs something that goes off by itself, because holding a plan in mind for three days is not a thing memory does.