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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Bringing the future closer
You can use the sentence on yourself in the moment: by the time I feel it, it is already too late. Not as a beating, just as information. Two things follow from it. Do what can still be done tonight, badly if that is what is available. Then afterwards, mark the date you would have needed to start, so next time that feeling can be manufactured earlier.
'Would that I had provided for this life to come' (Quran 89:24). It is the sentence hindsight always says, and the whole aim is to hear it early enough to act on.
الفجر
يَقُولُ يَٰلَيۡتَنِي قَدَّمۡتُ لِحَيَاتِي
He will say, ‘Would that I had provided for this life to come!’
Qur’an 89:24read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A meta-analysis of 691 correlations found procrastination goes with how aversive a task feels, how capable of it a person believes they are, and impulsiveness. Not one of those improves by waiting for the deadline to do the work for you. It is correlational evidence about what travels with delay rather than a demonstration of what fixes it.
Steel P. (2007). The nature of procrastination: a meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure.. Psychological bulletin doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Urgency turns up when the deadline is close, which is precisely too late for it to be useful.
Putting tomorrow's envelope beside your keys only works if the keys are the only other thing there. On a counter covered in post, the envelope just becomes part of the pile.
Building a consequence on purpose beats waiting for life to hand you one. There is nothing more virtuous about the natural version. It just tends to arrive too late to teach anybody anything.
The conversation only counts if the decisions end up in the calendar. 'You take Tuesday, I'll take Thursday' has to be written down or it did not really happen.