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I often compare ADHD’s time blindness to color blindness: a hardwired difference in our perception. However, that implies we can’t do anything about it. The full story has a little more nuance. Despite their impaired color vision, my color-blind friends obey traffic signals and wear matching clothes to work. Likewise, most ADHDers need to live on the real world’s timetable.
I’m always quick to remind people about the emotional implications of time blindness: it’s more than running late or losing track of days. And yet when we struggle to fulfill basic obligations to ourselves and others, that line between the practical and the emotional gets fuzzy. Maybe this explains my obsession with my daily grind. Structuring my life to work with my ADHD helps me feel good about the way I show up for myself and the people I love.
A commenter on a previous post about time blindness responded, “Okay, now what do we do about it?” To answer that, I’m going to share a few strategies I use to make time more concrete and less slippery.
6 ways I keep time from getting away from me
1. Take notes to summarize the day
I sometimes find myself feeling vaguely unsatisfied at the end of the day. I get irritable, restless, and even resentful because I think I haven’t done anything. Most of the time this isn’t true; I’ve just forgotten. To my time-blind afternoon brain, the morning feels like a different day — if it even feels real at all.
I remedy this by taking notes as I go through the day. I’m a Bullet Journaler, but any similar method, including an old-fashioned day planner, would do. The BuJo Daily Log is essentially what our grandparents and great-grandparents would’ve called a dairy.. My own grandfather left behind day planners full of simple, one-sentence reflections — some of them about our time together when he babysat me 30 years ago. Our forebears often took notes on the minutiae of their days, and I think we’re worse off for abandoning the habit.
My Daily Log gives me a more accurate mental picture of what my day was like. It also helps put problems in perspective: did we have that conversation about chores last week, or the week before? Does my husband work late every night, or does it just feel that way? When time blindness tricks us into thinking occasional annoyances happen every day, we might unfairly accuse housemates of “always” behaving badly. Time blindness can also trick us into thinking a problem only popped up recently, or it isn’t that bad, when in reality it’s been driving everyone else crazy for weeks. A written record helps me remember what I did, what I noticed, and how I was feeling on any given day.
2. Bake sourdough bread
This one sounds weird. Hear me out.
I’ve made bread for years, but only recently started experimenting with sourdough. It isn’t time-consuming, but each batch requires attention at regular intervals. Right away, I noticed it felt like a tactile variation on the Pomodoro technique, which breaks productivity into 20-minute work periods.
Sourdough’s natural rhythm of short, low-impact interruptions also reminded me of homework I received from my kid’s therapist. I’m supposed to interrupt his hyperfocus from time to time with something innocuous, like asking him to help me with a very quick chore or answer an easy math problem. This helps him build tolerance to hyperfocus interruptions, practicing briefly coming up for air before settling back in.
When I get up to tend to my sourdough, I notice what I’ve spent the last 30 minutes working on. This noticing makes me feel more empowered to choose what I do next. I also feel more motivated to get straight to what I actually want to do when I return to my desk. Succumbing to distractions like refreshing Twitter or checking my email feels more consequential when I know a timer will disturb me in 30 minutes. Instead of feeling nebulous and abstract, my work time now feels quantifiable and finite.
I don’t always use sourdough this way. Some days it’s laundry. Anything that provides regular, low-impact interruptions helps me stay focused. Ironically, the vanilla Pomodoro method doesn’t work as well. I bail on it too readily. If my brain fights the interruption too hard, I silence the timer. I’m less likely to cheat when my neglect will mess up my bread or mildew my laundry.
3. Review my Bullet Journal Monthly Log at least once weekly
Every Monday, I sit down and review everything I have going on. This includes my Bullet Journal’s Monthly Log. Pre-Bullet Journal, I used apps or day planners to see my month at a glance. This overview reminds me of several things, including what it feels like for a week to go by and how many of this month’s goals I’ve failed to start on yet.
Lately I’ve struggled to prioritize my work. At the beginning of last month, I jotted down a list in my Monthly Log titled “things that will make this month feel successful.” When I look at that list on Monday morning, I remind myself of two things:
- That project I beat myself up for failing to finish this week isn’t even on my list; the month’s work will still feel successful without it.
- If this list will bring me the most fulfillment, I need to find a way to prioritize those items over whatever obsession presents itself today.
Because we’re in a weird time right now — our state is under stay-at-home orders for a pandemic — I’ve also tried to quantify ways I can support my community. I’m currently using my Monthly Log to keep a running list of local restaurants I support each month. It cheers me up when I see it and helps me feel like I’m doing something.
4. Use a smart watch
I love the Apple Watch. Readers have also told me about FitBits and other wearables they use to keep track of time.
To make my watch a tool and not a distraction, I’ve disabled almost all notifications except for calendar reminders (which I curate carefully), timers, and alarms. Timers and alarms, especially, help me more on my watch than anywhere else. I like to keep my distance from my phone during productive times, and I hesitate to use it for reminders because I find notification sounds disruptive. Watch notifications nudge me with a discreet vibration on my wrist. I can use it to set reminders for anything that feels helpful, without worrying about bothering others or needing my phone nearby.
While I don’t rely on alarms as much as some, I have benefited from a recurring “Get ready for bed!” alarm every night at 10:15. This is the kind of thing that would feel silly on my phone where everyone else can see and hear, but makes perfect sense on my watch.
5. Keep my schedule in front of me
Many ADHDers I know won’t remember to look at a clock or a to-do list throughout the day. We forget time exists at all — why would we remember the clock? Forcing timekeeping devices and reminders under my nose helps combat this.
I’ve embraced the Apple Watch’s face complications to remind me of upcoming obligations. I chose a watch face that shows my next calendar event prominently in the middle. Every time I check the time, I see the next thing I have coming up.
On the analog end of things, my Bullet Journal keeps my schedule in front of me from the time I wake up to the time I go to bed. At night, after I review my Daily Log one last time, I leave it open at my place at the breakfast table. This is usually when I realize I haven’t yet taken out the trash. Then it greets me first thing in the morning with a reminder of what my day will look like. I carry it to my desk and leave this spread open while I work.
This sounds like a lot, but I lose my grip on the day pretty easily without a visual reminder.
6. Budget and track time with manipulatives
Last summer my work schedule and routine changed dramatically. I had trouble learning to budget my time in a new reality (sound familiar?). As with many things, the solution was to externalize it instead of trying to wrangle an abstract concept in my head.
To get a handle on the problem, I used buttons — the first collection of small objects I could lay hands on — to represent half-hour increments of time. Then I laid out a grid on a piece of paper and labeled each section with a different work category: writing code, checking email, blogging, etc. I placed buttons on the grid to either plan how much time to spend on each project or track how I spent my time throughout the day.
This system helped immensely. Suddenly the answer to the question, “where did my time go?” was no longer opaque. My buttons also helped me manage disruptions to my routine. After a morning meeting that would normally have thrown my productivity off for the rest of the day, I counted out my remaining buttons and realized I had more available work time than I thought.
We don’t need fancy solutions, we just need something that works
While I have high praise for the Apple Watch, you’ll notice most of these tools aren’t fancy. They’re cheap, simple, and effective.
It’s easy to get hung up on the process. We want to find or build the perfect tool, so we hyperfocus on that instead of the task the tool is supposed to help us complete. Or we refuse to do the task because we lack the perfect tool. We think if only we could afford to buy this thing, or if only we had time to create a better system, then we could succeed. For now we’re stuck.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Don’t wait for perfection when you’re lost in the weeds with time blindness. Jump in with the best solution you can hack together today. That’s what I did with my buttons: one morning I’d had enough. Blinded by my frustration, I grabbed the nearest set of 16 small objects and a piece of blank paper. The key is to find ways to make time feel external, concrete, and tangible. Anything that accomplishes that, no matter how cheap or silly, will leave you better off than where you started.
How about you? Have you developed any techniques for working with your time blindness?
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A long time ago (30 years) I saw the use of buttons to track reps in a fitness regime I didn’t stick to and the reason I didn’t stick wasn’t the buttons per-se, rather that it was inconvenient. I set my casio watch to beep every hour and I created a windows AT command to ask me every hour “Have you been productive?” but the buttons in boxes – yep – with an external reminder might actually work… I’ll give it a shot.
Would love to hear how it goes!
I don’t thiiink I have ADHD but I already do like two of these things and maybe the buttons one would help. Hmm. I’d have to get buttons. Or cut up bits of paper…
Haha I think the most important aspect of the button is I happened to see them sitting around 🤣 If I hadn’t had a jar of buttons, I would’ve used coins, bread tabs, or yes maybe even cut up pieces of paper but that may have felt like too much effort 😆 I’m all about quick solutions to test out new strategies!
These are really great and creative. I appreciate how they’re all very flexible and adjustable. I’d seen advice elsewhere that suggested setting detailed, 30-min interval schedules but felt like, if a disruption were to happen and the scheduled got messed up, I would feel badly and stop using it altogether. The solutions you have here are fantastic and I can’t wait to try them out. thank you 🙂
Flexible and adjustable is the name of my game! ADHDers are all individuals and what works for some of us doesn’t work at all for others — the key is just figuring out what your brain and situation need.
The schedule thing always gets me too! As soon as it gets thrown off — and it always does — I feel like I can’t do any of it because now it’s “wrong.” The rigidity of a set schedule really only works for me when it *has* to, at times when I have external commitments dictating the course of my day.
Hope some of the suggestions in this post help you out!
love the posts, seriously. your words have given me valuable epiphanies several times. but I’d like to see the end of the use of the term “real world”. “real” makes it sound like we have to adapt to a truth and “correct” way of being on earth, but that dimishes us simply for being wired differently. “neurotypicals” (another word I don’t like) aren’t automatically better and right and more correct, despite much of the world living on that timetable. maybe there’s just more of them, who knows, I’m not a sociologist. but if everyone approaches the world through their own lens and own experiences, then that’s the only universal as far as I’m concerned. there is no “real” world, only the aspect of it that I’m forced to conform to because much of the rest of the “world” refuses to bend to meet me.
Thanks for bringing this up! It’s really interesting to hear others’ reactions to different terms because words mean such different things to so many of us.
For example, I never would’ve made that association with the term “real world.” Now I’m curious how many others think of it that way!
This is probably the writer in me, but to me “real world” means the external, concrete, tangible world outside myself. There’s my inner world, which I often extend to the physical world if I’m just sitting alone in my own space, and it’s entirely defined by my way of thinking and processing. If I lived alone, off the grid, on a self-sufficient homestead, I would exist entirely in my own world. My inner and outer worlds would always be in sync.
(Or maybe not. I’d still have to pay attention to things like seasons and daylight and weather, I suppose.)
But in my current life, I am very much enmeshed with the world around me — the external world, the one I do not control. Which I think may also be what you were talking about: the world that “refuses to bend.” Whenever I use the words “real world” here, I really just mean the world in general, neurotypical and otherwise. The world outside myself.
Also the writer in me, I will probably think on this and test drive other terms to see if there’s anything that still evokes what I want, with maybe fewer opportunities for emotional baggage.
FWIW, I have never loved “neurotypical” and “neurodiverse” either. The community seems to have adopted it as a shorthand intended to be more inclusive, but there are a lot of implied assumptions there about how people present to the world. I’ve been working out how to write about that as a larger issue (not about terminology, but more general attitudes) and probably will eventually, after I’ve taken some more time to organize my thoughts.
Anyway, sorry if that was more wordy than you bargained for 🤣 Glad you’ve been enjoying the blog!
speaking as someone who can be excessively florid, there’s no such thing as too wordy for me. I even prefer 1000-page novels lol. yeah, we agree on the meaning of the term “real world” as you were using it (which I assumed), but there we get into existentialism as well LOL. I guess the real world for me is “the rest of the world”. cause things in my personal inner world have their own set of causes, effects and consequences regardless of other humans around me. I do see it the same way you do as the world being anything outside of myself, not in the collective sense of billions of humans roaming the earth inflicting things on each other, good and bad. come to think of it, that might be another reason why I don’t interact with people as often as others may, ADD or no. for me most things, whether tasks or thoughts to be had, boil down to “now” or “not now”. and since people are ALWAYS a project and not a task, they are usually “not now” LOL.
and while we’re at it, I’ll be the 89,467th person to repeat themselves that it’s well past time we stopped calling it “attention deficit disorder” LOL. if nothing else, it makes things harder on us cause “the rest of the world” is confused by the term. I’ve spent more time than on anything else explaining to people that it doesn’t necessarily mean what they assumed all of this time. wow, their understandings of the disorder were nearly always spectacularly wrong. and I’m certainly not the first nor will be the last person to experience that.
Ugh, yes! I was just telling someone the other day, I hope there’s a big re-evaluation of our terminology soon. The term ADHD doesn’t describe at all what’s actually happening! Not only that, there are so many overlaps between certain manifestations of autism and certain manifestations of ADHD. It feels like there is a constellation of factors here that deserve a more nuanced look and a set of labels that actually describe our experience.