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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Systems for daily life
If the only way something can leave your list is by being completed, the list can only grow, and every glance at it will feel worse than the last one. Try treating a cull as maintenance you do on a set day, the way you would empty a bin. Nothing about it is an admission that you failed.
If the debtor is in difficulty, then delay things until matters become easier for him (Quran 2:280). Even a real obligation is allowed to wait when the person carrying it is stretched.
البقرة
وَإِن كَانَ ذُو عُسۡرَةࣲ فَنَظِرَةٌ إِلَىٰ مَيۡسَرَةࣲۚ وَأَن تَصَدَّقُواْ خَيۡرࣱ لَّكُمۡ إِن كُنتُمۡ تَعۡلَمُونَ
If the debtor is in difficulty, then delay things until matters become easier for him; still, if you were to write it off as an act of charity, that would be better for you, if only you knew
Qur’an 2:280read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A meta-analysis of habit formation work found these interventions do increase how automatic an activity feels, and looked at which components drive that. Attaching your clear out to a fixed moment, rather than to feeling like it, is what gives it a chance of running by itself. The trials pooled there were about physical activity, so the transfer to list keeping is borrowed rather than demonstrated.
Haoming Ma; Aoqi Wang; Runyuan Pei; Meihua Piao (2023). Effects of habit formation interventions on physical activity habit strength: meta-analysis and meta-regression. International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A list that only ever grows becomes something you avoid looking at, and then it cannot help you at all.
Pick one aim big enough to hold the year, and let it be the thing you measure choices against. Not a list of values. One.
Some of what feels like a flaw in your character is really a job that can be handed to something outside your head: a calendar, a list on the wall, a person who helps you lay out the week.
Reading a room is a skill rather than a personality trait, and it can be broken into parts. Before you speak, take a second to look: who is here, what they are doing, how loud the place is.