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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Bringing the future closer
The value sits in the rare entries. Shirts and trousers you would remember anyway. The thing that only matters once a year is exactly what memory drops, and it is also the thing you cannot replace at half past eleven the night before. Write it once while you are calm, then simply run down it each time.
'Whatever good you store up for yourselves, you will find it with God' (Quran 2:110). Effort stored is effort you meet again, and a written list is a very small version of that.
البقرة
وَأَقِيمُواْ ٱلصَّلَوٰةَ وَءَاتُواْ ٱلزَّكَوٰةَۚ وَمَا تُقَدِّمُواْ لِأَنفُسِكُم مِّنۡ خَيۡرࣲ تَجِدُوهُ عِندَ ٱللَّهِۗ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ بِمَا تَعۡمَلُونَ بَصِيرࣱ
Keep up the prayer and pay the prescribed alms. Whatever good you store up for yourselves, you will find it with God: He sees everything you do
Qur’an 2:110read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
An imaging experiment found that imagining experiences you have never had recruits much the same brain network as remembering the past, evidence that what we picture is constructed out of remembered material. That is a reason not to use recall as the storage system for anything that matters. The study concerned imagination and memory rather than packing lists, so the link here is by inference.
Hassabis D, Kumaran D, Maguire EA. (2007). Using imagination to understand the neural basis of episodic memory.. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A list holds the thinking you did once, so you never have to redo it in a hurry.
The job will not feel more pleasant on Thursday. It will be the same job, done tired, in less time, with somebody waiting. Later is not the easier option. It only looks that way from here.
Letting the natural consequence do the teaching only works if it arrives soon enough to be connected to what you did. Where the gap is months or years, nobody learns from it. Not you, not anyone.
Thursday night goes badly, you swear at yourself, and you mean every word. Next quarter the same thing happens. That is not you failing to learn. It is a lesson that cannot survive the distance.