Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Bringing the future closer
So more information is rarely the fix. What helps is a wedge between the pull and the action: saying you will answer tomorrow, keeping your hand off the mouse for ten seconds, writing the decision down before you make it. Small delays, deliberately built, because the knowledge is already there waiting to be asked.
'Man was created hasty' (Quran 21:37). The haste is named as part of us, which makes a built-in pause an accommodation rather than a moral effort.
الأنبياء
خُلِقَ ٱلۡإِنسَٰنُ مِنۡ عَجَلࣲۚ سَأُوْرِيكُمۡ ءَايَٰتِي فَلَا تَسۡتَعۡجِلُونِ
Man was created hasty: I will show you My signs soon, so do not ask Me to hasten them
Qur’an 21:37read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A meta-analytic review confirmed that children and adolescents with ADHD more often choose a smaller immediate reward over a larger delayed one, and that this reward-delay impulsivity is distinct from responding too fast. The distinction matters here, since it points at how options get weighed rather than only at speed. The review pooled studies of young people, so read across to adults with some caution.
Patros CH, Alderson RM, Kasper LJ, Tarle SJ, Lea SE, Hudec KL. (2016). Choice-impulsivity in children and adolescents with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): A meta-analytic review.. Clinical psychology review doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Knowing something only helps if there is a moment in which to remember it.
Without that gap the choice is made before it is a choice: one marshmallow now instead of two in ten minutes. It shows up in money, in work, in what gets said to people.
There are two ways to make something get noticed: make it louder, or quieten everything around it. The second is usually the one nobody has tried.
You get three goes at thinking about something: before it starts, somewhere in the middle, and once it is over. Most of us only ever use the last one, which is the least useful of them.