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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Remembering to do it
The refusal reading is the expensive one, because it turns a lapse into an insult and starts the argument in the one place where nothing can be sorted out. If you are the one who forgot, saying plainly that it left your head entirely is more useful than assembling a reason. If you are the one who was waiting, that answer is not a dodge, however much it sounds like one.
He will not call you to account for oaths you have uttered unintentionally, but He will call you to account for what you mean in your hearts (Quran 2:225). Even with the weightiest promises, the difference between a slip and an intention is kept.
البقرة
لَّا يُؤَاخِذُكُمُ ٱللَّهُ بِٱللَّغۡوِ فِيٓ أَيۡمَٰنِكُمۡ وَلَٰكِن يُؤَاخِذُكُم بِمَا كَسَبَتۡ قُلُوبُكُمۡۗ وَٱللَّهُ غَفُورٌ حَلِيمࣱ
He will not call you to account for oaths you have uttered unintentionally, but He will call you to account for what you mean in your hearts. God is most forgiving and forbearing
Qur’an 2:225read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A systematic review found that ADHD symptoms are consistently associated with mind wandering, which it describes as internal distractibility. Attention drifting inwards looks like part of the picture rather than an occasional lapse of will. The review reports an association and does not establish which way it runs, so it explains the pattern without settling any particular missed thing.
Lanier J, Noyes E, Biederman J. (2021). Mind Wandering (Internal Distractibility) in ADHD: A Literature Review.. Journal of attention disorders doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Something that never came to mind cannot have been a choice.
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.
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.
The moment you think of it is the only moment you are certain to have it. Do the thing, or write it down, or set the alarm, or put something odd in your pocket that will make no sense later until you check.