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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Bringing the future closer
Worth seeing as one pattern rather than as a list of separate failings, which is both kinder and more useful. The same fix applies everywhere it appears: bring the later thing nearer, or put a delay in front of the nearer one. Naming it once saves you fighting the same battle in four areas as though they were unrelated problems.
'And neglect the life to come' (Quran 75:21). What sits further away carries less weight, and that is said as something true of people rather than as an accusation.
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
One meta-analysis pooled 52 effect sizes to test whether males and females with ADHD differ on delay of gratification and temporal discounting tasks, compared with typically developing samples. The sheer volume of that work tells you the underlying pattern is well studied and well established. What any one person will do in a particular moment is not something a pooled effect can say.
Doidge JL, Flora DB, Toplak ME. (2021). A Meta-Analytic Review of Sex Differences on Delay of Gratification and Temporal Discounting Tasks in ADHD and Typically Developing Samples.. Journal of attention disorders doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A reward you can have now feels bigger than a better one later, whatever the arithmetic says.
A report due Friday puts a little pressure on somebody else's Monday. For you Monday feels like nothing at all, and then Thursday evening arrives carrying the whole of it.
Usually it is not that you did not know better. The obvious option had already taken hold before anything you know got a chance to speak.
A long project gives you no feedback until it is too late to use any. Put checkpoints in yourself: with the people involved, or just with you and a Monday morning.