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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Remembering to do it
Before you commit to a routine, count its steps, then take some out. Bin bags stored next to the bin, stamps kept with the envelopes, paying on the site rather than moving money across by hand. A stamped, addressed envelope is not a paid bill until it reaches the postbox, and that last step is how it ends up living on the hall table for a fortnight. Cheaper is not better if the cheaper route gives you four places to fall over.
Fulfil any pledge you make in God's name (Quran 16:91). Since a yes carries that kind of weight, it is worth making the road from yes to done as short as you can.
النحل
وَأَوۡفُواْ بِعَهۡدِ ٱللَّهِ إِذَا عَٰهَدتُّمۡ وَلَا تَنقُضُواْ ٱلۡأَيۡمَٰنَ بَعۡدَ تَوۡكِيدِهَا وَقَدۡ جَعَلۡتُمُ ٱللَّهَ عَلَيۡكُمۡ كَفِيلًاۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ يَعۡلَمُ مَا تَفۡعَلُونَ
Fulfil any pledge you make in God’s name and do not break oaths after you have sworn them, for you have made God your surety: God knows everything you do
Qur’an 16:91read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In one experiment, if then plans reduced the influence of an established habit on what people did, but the benefit shrank as the competing habit got stronger. Plans are not equally sturdy everywhere, and they hold up least where something is already pulling the other way. It is a single laboratory study about habits rather than about paperwork, so the useful part is the general shape: fewer moments for a plan to survive is better than a stronger plan.
Webb TL, Sheeran P, Luszczynska A. (2009). Planning to break unwanted habits: habit strength moderates implementation intention effects on behaviour change.. The British journal of social psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Each step is another moment when something else can pull you away, and those chances add up across the whole process.
When someone hands you a date, the useful move is not writing the date down. Open your calendar there and then and decide the hour the work will actually happen.
Take one of the gaps you already have, the commute or the walk or the shower, and use it to ask what is coming up this week and what might be slipping. No new tool, no new app, just the question.
For most of childhood somebody else held the diary. Parents remember the dentist, the kit, the letter that needs signing, and then one day nobody is doing that for you and the whole job is yours.