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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Bringing the future closer
This is why so much sensible advice slides straight off. Before asking what the wisest option is, something usually has to come off the pile: fewer commitments, a deadline moved, one thing dropped for a month. Unglamorous work, and generally the thing that makes everything after it possible.
'Man is ever hasty' (Quran 17:11). Constant urgency bends what looks worth doing, so the work is to lower the urgency rather than to think harder inside it.
الإسراء
وَيَدۡعُ ٱلۡإِنسَٰنُ بِٱلشَّرِّ دُعَآءَهُۥ بِٱلۡخَيۡرِۖ وَكَانَ ٱلۡإِنسَٰنُ عَجُولࣰ ا
Yet man prays for harm, just as he prays for good: man is ever hasty
Qur’an 17:11read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A careful analysis of intertemporal choice tasks argues that preferring the sooner reward can reflect motivation and circumstance rather than impatience, and that these results need reading with care. Applied here, a person in permanent crisis may be taking the near option because it is the only one available to take. That analysis is about task design rather than about overloaded lives, so it is a caution rather than a finding about you.
Paglieri F, Addessi E, Sbaffi A, Tasselli MI, Delfino A. (2015). Is it patience or motivation? On motivational confounds in intertemporal choice tasks.. Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
There is no thinking time in a week that has no spare time in it.
If you lose track of how long you have been at something, a clock you can see is the fix. If you get pulled under and surface far too late, what you need is an interruption, not a clock.
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.
If the same crunch arrives every month, another talk about it will not shift next month. It was never a shortage of information.