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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Systems for daily life
The anxiety is usually about losing the idea rather than about the task itself, and a separate holding list answers that. Nothing is gone, it is simply not pretending to be live. Your working list gets to mean something again, because everything on it is genuinely for now. Look at the long one once a month if you want to.
No leaf falls without His knowledge (Quran 6:59). Nothing you set down is lost track of, even when you have taken it off your own list.
الأنعام
۞وَعِندَهُۥ مَفَاتِحُ ٱلۡغَيۡبِ لَا يَعۡلَمُهَآ إِلَّا هُوَۚ وَيَعۡلَمُ مَا فِي ٱلۡبَرِّ وَٱلۡبَحۡرِۚ وَمَا تَسۡقُطُ مِن وَرَقَةٍ إِلَّا يَعۡلَمُهَا وَلَا حَبَّةࣲ فِي ظُلُمَٰتِ ٱلۡأَرۡضِ وَلَا رَطۡبࣲ وَلَا يَابِسٍ إِلَّا فِي كِتَٰبࣲ مُّبِينࣲ
He has the keys to the unseen: no one knows them but Him. He knows all that is in the land and sea. No leaf falls without His knowledge, nor is there a single grain in the darkness of the earth, or anything, fresh or withered, that is not written in a clear Record
Qur’an 6:59read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A Cochrane review of mobile phone text messaging for preventive health care covers the same basic move, which is letting something outside your head hold the information and hand it back when it is needed. That is the part worth borrowing for a holding list. The review is about health messaging rather than personal lists, and it does not settle how large the benefit is.
Vodopivec-Jamsek V, de Jongh T, Gurol-Urganci I, Atun R, Car J. (2012). Mobile phone messaging for preventive health care.. The Cochrane database of systematic reviews doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
The comfort of keeping and the usefulness of a short list stop competing once they live in different places.
Before anything else, check the child actually knows what the homework is. Most homework goes missing at that first step, not at the effort step.
If most of the difficulty is happening at home, most of the work needs to happen with the household in the room. Otherwise the hour of good conversation gets quietly undone by Tuesday.
Put something you genuinely want at the end of the chain, and keep it where you can see it. A reward far off in the future is much the same as no reward at all.