Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Systems for daily life
Once something is written down it starts costing you. It gets read, moved to next week, copied out again, felt guilty about. Filtering at the door means asking whether this belongs in your life at all, which is a different question from whether you could somehow fit it in. It is also far easier than removing it three months later.
eat and drink but do not be extravagant (Quran 7:31). The permission and the limit arrive in the same sentence, which is how a workable rule tends to be written.
الأعراف
۞يَٰبَنِيٓ ءَادَمَ خُذُواْ زِينَتَكُمۡ عِندَ كُلِّ مَسۡجِدࣲ وَكُلُواْ وَٱشۡرَبُواْ وَلَا تُسۡرِفُوٓاْۚ إِنَّهُۥ لَا يُحِبُّ ٱلۡمُسۡرِفِينَ
Children of Adam, dress well whenever you are at worship, and eat and drink [as We have permitted] but do not be extravagant: God does not like extravagant people
Qur’an 7:31read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A randomised trial tested a whole strategy for keeping high-risk families engaged in group behavioural parent training, because a programme known to help is no use to people who cannot sustain attending it. Taking something on and then not sustaining it is common enough to be its own field of research. That work was about attendance rather than about declining tasks, so it supports the general point and no more.
Chacko A, Wymbs BT, Chimiklis A, Wymbs FA, Pelham WE. (2012). Evaluating a comprehensive strategy to improve engagement to group-based behavioral parent training for high-risk families of children with ADHD.. Journal of abnormal child psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Keeping a task out costs you one sentence, and removing it later costs you months of carrying it.
Difficult things come out more easily when your hands are occupied and you are not looking straight at the other person. Walk side by side, drive somewhere, wash up together, keep the sewing going.
Keeping your own prescription going is a skill like any other: when to reorder, who to ring, what to do when the pharmacy has none. Better learned before the week you need it.
Find out how long you actually last before your mind wanders somewhere nicer, then make that your block. If the honest answer is eleven minutes, work in elevens.