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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Remembering to do it
Being told to get organised in the abstract lands on nothing. A number lands. Put last year's late charges and rush postage at the top of the page and let that be the reason you set the reminders up, remembering that the total is not a report on your character. It is the running cost of an unsupported memory, and it comes down when the supports change.
Honour your pledges: you will be questioned about your pledges (Quran 17:34). A standing order and a date in the diary are how a pledge gets honoured when memory is not the reliable part.
الإسراء
وَلَا تَقۡرَبُواْ مَالَ ٱلۡيَتِيمِ إِلَّا بِٱلَّتِي هِيَ أَحۡسَنُ حَتَّىٰ يَبۡلُغَ أَشُدَّهُۥۚ وَأَوۡفُواْ بِٱلۡعَهۡدِۖ إِنَّ ٱلۡعَهۡدَ كَانَ مَسۡـُٔولࣰ ا
Do not go near the orphan’s property, except with the best [intentions], until he reaches the age of maturity. Honour your pledges: you will be questioned about your pledges
Qur’an 17:34read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A meta analysis of 89 intervention studies picked out which features of an intervention went with better intention, movement between stages of change, and more self driven motivation. So how a goal is framed and delivered does shift whether people act on it. That work is about physical activity and says nothing about bills, so the transfer is the general principle rather than the specific numbers.
Knittle K, Nurmi J, Crutzen R, Hankonen N, Beattie M, Dombrowski SU. (2018). How can interventions increase motivation for physical activity? A systematic review and meta-analysis.. Health psychology review doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A cost you can see in pounds is easier to act on than one that lives vaguely in the future.
If arrears have already built up, reminders will not be enough on their own, and free money advice is worth getting alongside them.
Most of what we call memory looks backwards. The kind that actually runs your week is the other sort: a plan that has to show up in your head at the one moment you could still act on it.
Remembering to do something later is really two jobs stacked on each other. You have to keep hold of the thing itself, and you have to keep some feel for how the hours are passing, and both have to be working at the same moment.
Start the email and then stop: address it, write the subject line, leave it unsent. The half finished thing sits in your drafts looking wrong until you deal with it.