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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Bringing the future closer
For the memory of a bad night to change anything in August, it would have to still be vivid in August, and it will not be. So stop waiting for the lesson to take hold. Put the correction somewhere outside your head: a calendar entry for the date you should start, a checkpoint somebody else is expecting, a note written to yourself while it still stings.
'Man is ever hasty' (Quran 17:11). Haste is described as a standing feature of people, which is part of why one bad night rarely rewrites anything.
الإسراء
وَيَدۡعُ ٱلۡإِنسَٰنُ بِٱلشَّرِّ دُعَآءَهُۥ بِٱلۡخَيۡرِۖ وَكَانَ ٱلۡإِنسَٰنُ عَجُولࣰ ا
Yet man prays for harm, just as he prays for good: man is ever hasty
Qur’an 17:11read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A review of the procrastination research names the delay before an incentive arrives as one of the three task features that most reliably produce putting things off, alongside how aversive the task is and how big the incentive is. The delay itself does the damage, which is not a claim about character. It is a review of what has been found rather than a trial of any remedy.
Zhang S, Liu P, Feng T. (2019). To do it now or later: The cognitive mechanisms and neural substrates underlying procrastination.. Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A consequence only teaches while you can still feel it, and this one fades long before it is needed again.
There are two ways to make something get noticed: make it louder, or quieten everything around it. The second is usually the one nobody has tried.
When you ask a manager for regular check-ins, ask for them as a way of staying pointed in the right direction. That is a different conversation from asking to be watched.
By the time the motivation turns up, the moment to act has usually gone. Thursday night panic about a report due on Friday is real motivation, just delivered too late to be any use.