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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Bringing the future closer
The moment you answer one message the review is over, and you will not notice it ending. Keep a sheet beside you and write down what you spot instead of dealing with it. Ten minutes of pure looking gives you a picture of the whole thing, which is what you came for. The doing can start afterwards.
'That his labour will be seen' (Quran 53:40). Seeing the work is treated as its own thing, and that is all a checkpoint is for.
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
An individual differences study found that people who media multitask more heavily also showed a stronger pull towards immediate gratification and more fast intuitive rather than deliberate thinking. It is a correlation among adults, not proof of cause. It does describe the pull that turns a five minute review into an hour of email, and it is a fair reason to keep reviewing and doing as separate activities.
Schutten D, Stokes KA, Arnell KM. (2017). I want to media multitask and I want to do it now: Individual differences in media multitasking predict delay of gratification and system-1 thinking.. Cognitive research: principles and implications doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
You cannot see the whole of something while you are inside one part of it.
Nobody decides well mid-panic. So cutting the number of panics is itself a way of making better decisions, even if nothing about your judgement changes at all.
Your ability to hold off a distraction is at its worst near the end of a work block, not at the start. Set the room up for the tired version of you, because that is the one who will be sitting in it.
On Monday, take a minute to picture Thursday twice. Thursday with an hour of this already behind you, and Thursday with none of it done. Make both of them specific.