Time Blindness in ADHD: Simple Strategies to Implement Straight Away.

Time blindness is a very familiar phenomenon for my clients with ADHD, and it may be for you, too. Broadly speaking, time blindness is a difference in the perception and awareness of time passing.

It can affect people in various ways, for example:

A) being unable to estimate the time it may take to do a task,

B) having no sense of time passing while engaged in something,

C) struggling to sense future events coming up and act accordingly.

Let’s look at the above three aspects of time perception and consider some possible strategies for each of them in turn.

A. Difficulty in estimating time accurately.

This difficulty can take the form of both under and over-estimating the time it takes to complete something.

Time underestimation.

The result of underestimating time can often have dire consequences in the workplace.

For example, when we believe that each job will take less time than it actually does, projects and assignments start to build up as we find they take longer, thereby pushing other tasks further into the future. At some point, the accumulated backlog of tasks becomes overwhelming, and we feel we cannot cope at work.

Another example would be a person who needs to leave the house by a particular time and reckons it won’t take them long to get ready. However, in reality, they are inevitably late leaving the house every day.

I have worked through this challenge with various clients over the years, and usually, the primary reason comes down to underestimating time in some way or another. Once we have established this, it’s relatively straightforward to work through each part of getting ready and develop a more realistic estimate to enable them to leave the house in time. For more on that topic, go here

Time overestimation.

Overestimating time is often associated with some of the less pleasant activities or those tasks which don’t hold so much interest for us. This can stop us dead in our tracks, as really, who’d want to start washing up believing it’s going to take 45 minutes or start writing an email, suspecting it will take at least half an hour – maybe more?

Strategies for time estimation

So, what’s the solution for these internal time warps?

Well, one of the most effective ways is actually to time yourself to begin with. YES, with a stopwatch if necessary. This enables you to accurately identify how long something takes to complete.

I have created a simple tool you can use to help you do this. It’s called the Time Estimation Tool, or TET for short, and you can download your copy here.

        The TET enables you to keep testing out your “guesstimates” and then adjusting your techniques based on the real-life results you get. Mostly, when people have done this exercise, they are surprised to discover the actual amount of time things take. With practice, and applying it to various different life situations, this can revolutionise people’s time management skills in all kinds of positive ways.

TIP: Using clocks and watches, various timepieces and reminders and alarms on our phones or smart watches can help familiarise us with common time periods in our individual circumstances.

Find out what works for you, either audio or visual ways of seeing the passage of time or a combination, until you know for sure how long these things take you.

The effect of having small chunks of certainty in an often windswept existence is strangely comforting and provides a firm foundation to build on.

B) Having little sense of time passing when we are engaged in something.

It is hard enough to get going on something and feel we can sustain focus on something without interrupting ourselves to look at the clock. That is what many of my coaching clients have told me over the years. We are usually talking about hyperfocus. 

For those not in the know – you could liken hyperfocus to very heavy sleep where nothing gets through; even a loud bang next door or a car alarm going off is not enough to wake you. On the other hand, the kind of sustained focus with awareness is more like a light sleeper, one who is sleeping, but noises like thunder or a ring on the doorbell would waken them sufficiently to notice what’s happening around them.

One is so intensely focused on the matter at hand that there is no awareness of anything else. The other is still focused, yet with the possibility of dipping in and out of focus on the task to notice, for instance, hunger, noises, other people, and, of course, what time it is, as well as the significance of that information.

Strategies for noticing time passing while engrossed in something.

1. Again, you can use anything that gets your attention, like a noise, a timer, or a message; some people even ask someone to come and tell them it’s time to eat, stop, or whatever else needs to be done.
2. Another effective strategy is to set yourself up with an intention beforehand. For example, I will work for 20 minutes on X, then stand up and walk to fetch water and stretch for 5 minutes.

In this way, you are priming yourself to bear time in mind when you first set out to do something.

3. You can also make a pact to check in with yourself at intervals throughout the day, say mid-morning, lunchtime, mid-afternoon, and (at a time which can be particularly tricky for many with ADHD) at the close of the working day. Yes, you may well need a check-in at 5 pm to tell you to wrap up and literally get ready to go home. Many people overwork and extend their working hours more by accident than design, simply due to not noticing time going by.

      You can build this up in small increments until you have more awareness of time passing throughout the day.

C) Not sensing future events coming up and acting accordingly.

Time blindness results in perceiving events as literally less “real” the further away they are in the future. This lack of awareness of the distance of future dates and events causes ADHD-ers to be chronically underprepared when the time inevitably does come. Life will be full of unpleasant surprises as a result, leaving you feeling demoralised and often at a disadvantage.

Examples:

• Lack of awareness of how close or far away events are in time leads to leaving things to the last minute – e.g.  Not realising the due date for a bill until you get a final notice or a court summons.

         Not seeing your holiday dates coming up might lead to you not packing the suitcase until the last minute or realising your passport is out of date when it’s too late to do anything about it.

• Another common circumstance of time blindness comes when preparing for well-known future events – knowing there is a deadline for handing in a piece of work, for example, but being very hazy about when that is. In coaching sessions, many people have told me,” Oh, it’s in a couple of months, I think.” When I asked them the exact date to put in their calendar or planner, they had to go and look it up and were, in many cases, surprised to find it was rather sooner than they thought.

Once these clients firm up their knowledge around due dates and record them where they can easily refer to them, they find it much easier to make a realistic plan to get the work done in time.

• Not doing things for our future selves is another result of time blindness. Often, because of impulsivity added to time blindness, we enjoy ourselves so much in the moment that we forget the needs of our future self. This can lead to burnout, energy crashes, or just plain overwhelm, as our self-care needs continually get put on the back burner.

Strategies for dealing effectively with future events.

1. Make time visual and external to your brain whenever you can, using calendars, wall charts, and diaries. If you are OK with checking digital devices, then use those too.
2. Identify precise dates and times when events are happening to be sure to set reminders and timers for them. You may want to remind yourself a few times they are coming up soon, as well.
3. Practise asking yourself, “What would future me thank me for doing right now?” That extra glass of water, healthy option, or money in the bank can very likely help “future you” maintain your equilibrium.

Fortunately, there are many strategies that you can employ to combat time blindness.

• Using methods which make time more “real” for you,
• Experimenting to find out which of them works for you, and
• Implementing one or more of the above strategies, you will be able to bring more awareness and skilfulness into your dealings with this elusive construct we call time, and live your life more smoothly and enjoyably as a result.

Anna Schlapp B.A., ACC, ACCG, is a certified ADHD coach, coaching people to understand and manage their unique time perception more productively. If you would like to explore this or any other of your ADHD traits with a highly experienced coach of more than ten years, you can contact Coach Anna here.