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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Bringing the future closer
For partners this is a hard one, because the frustration is completely fair. But a lecture adds shame to something that already feels unpleasant, and unpleasant things get avoided harder. If you want next month to go differently, change the arrangement instead: an earlier checkpoint, a shared calendar entry, a smaller first step agreed between you.
'Truly you love this fleeting world' (Quran 75:20). The pull is described plainly and without a telling off, which is roughly the tone to aim for.
القيامة
كَلَّا بَلۡ تُحِبُّونَ ٱلۡعَاجِلَةَ
Truly you [people] love this fleeting world
Qur’an 75:20read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A meta-analysis of 691 correlations found procrastination is bound up with how unpleasant a task feels, how capable a person believes they are of it, and impulsiveness. A lecture tends to worsen the first two. The evidence is correlational, so it cannot prove that scolding causes delay, but it does point straight at the levers scolding pushes the wrong way.
Steel P. (2007). The nature of procrastination: a meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure.. Psychological bulletin doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Being told off makes a task feel worse, and tasks that feel worse get left even later.
This is not asking you to swallow the frustration, only to take it somewhere other than the moment itself.
A reminder system is not a crutch you should be aiming to throw away. It is closer to a pair of glasses. You wear them because they work, and nobody expects your eyes to improve because you wore them for a year.
Most time strategies are doing one of three jobs: showing you time passing, interrupting you when a moment arrives, or laying the days out ahead of you. When something is not working, ask which of the three is missing rather than hunting for a new app.
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.