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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Bringing the future closer
It takes about five minutes and it is the difference between a day you chose and a day chosen for you by whoever emailed first. Some people prefer the night before, when tomorrow is still abstract and easy to be sensible about. Others need the morning. There is no right answer, only the one that survives contact with your actual week.
'The moment you are freed of one task, work on' (Quran 94:7). The turn from one thing to the next is treated as a real moment, and this is what you do inside it.
الشرح
فَإِذَا فَرَغۡتَ فَٱنصَبۡ
The moment you are freed [of one task] work on
Qur’an 94:7read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A randomised experiment found that vividly imagining specific future experiences reduced how steeply people discounted future rewards, and reduced snacking as well. Looking over your day is a mild version of the same move, though the study tested laboratory choices over a short window rather than daily routines. What is worth carrying is that a few minutes of specific imagining changed the choices that came after it.
Dassen FCM, Jansen A, Nederkoorn C, Houben K. (2016). Focus on the future: Episodic future thinking reduces discount rate and snacking.. Appetite doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Without one deliberate look, the day gets decided by whatever shouts loudest.
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.
The towel left on the floor is the model. Tomorrow it is cold and unpleasant to use, and that is the whole of it. Short wait, happens every time, nothing terrible.
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.