Are you familiar with “The Now” and “The Not Now”? It sounds straight out of The Phantom Tollbooth, I know. But this is some newish-to-me vocabulary that has:
Made it easier for me to collaborate with my partner, coworkers and clients
Made me feel less guilty/ashamed/like a failure for often running late
Made me understand more about myself and how to function in a neurotypical world
Now, with the understanding that every brain is different, I thought I’d share a little bit about my own experience with time.
I have a very poor sense of time. Things that I think will take 5 minutes often take 15. I’ll sit down to do “just one more quick thing” before bed, and look up to find that hours have passed.
This is called Temporal Discounting, and it is very common in people with ADHD. It can show up as procrastination or tardiness, and look like forgetfulness or carelessness. And I can tell you from experience, it’s definitely not a lack of care, well, not exactly. For me, it’s often a result of caring about something else more intensely and getting lost in it, even if it’s not the most urgent thing. Like, say, remembering that the reason I set an alarm was so I would know when it’s time to go, and if I ignore the alarm, I’m just going to be late, but it doesn’t matter because I was “productive procrastinating” and look how much I got done! Oh, I’m sorry I was late. That’s rude of me. But not on purpose omg I swear it’s not a power move.
When I think very hard about time, tasks, and prioritization, reminding myself of my naturally fluid relationship to time…it’s easier to force myself to think of time as literal minutes and not a vague concept.
Things that help me:
Deadlines
Writing things down (so I can check my calendar eleventy times a minute)
Backwards planning (with assistance
The “snooze” feature in Gmail
Accountability buddies
Flexibility and forgiveness (ask me with genuine curiosity why I was late, and let me ramble enthusiastically for a few minutes and we’ll be friends for life)
Things that don’t help me:
Alarms (too easy to ignore)
Project Management systems/to-do lists (too easy to forget about)
People getting pissed that I’m late (just makes me feel bad)
Making lists (once I’ve made the list, my “accomplishment” dopamine receptor is satisfied and actually doing the things on the list become less exciting)
More daily planners
Guilt and shame
In my hyperfixation on this concept that radically altered my self-perception, I really liked this description of “time blindness” from the Edge Foundation:
The key elements of time blindness include:
Inability to sequence events – A neurotypical brain tends to order upcoming events in sequence and see each event as a separate entity with a specific time and date, and chunks of time between events. The ADHD brain tends to lump events into “now” and “not now.” All the “not now” events get grouped together as one lump with no blocks of time in between.
Impaired time estimation – Having ADHD can make even familiar and repetitive tasks seem new each time they are performed. This can lead someone with ADHD to believe they know how long tasks will take, but estimating time turns out to be more a matter of chance.
Procrastination and performance anxiety – Because ADHD individuals lump upcoming tasks “now” and “not now,” they tend to procrastinate and then quickly become overwhelmed when the time comes to do the “not now” tasks. They realize what they have ahead of them, experience anxiety and retreat into the safety of some favorite distraction.
Whew - sounds annoying! Sorry!
But if you know this about yourself, you can cut the crap with the shame spirals and just acknowledge that hey, my brain works differently. And it’s not a mystery! It works like this! So now I can know better / do better, as they say.
And perhaps, if you’re able to share this about yourself as a fact and not a judgment, you too will find it easier to navigate a world that wasn’t designed for your brain.
I’m gonna link to this article again, because it has some fantastic examples of strategies that might work for your ADHD brain. Or not. But it might get you thinking.
It got me thinking, and I’ve been trying some of them out for a few months now. Major shout out to the friends who have “body doubled” while I did work I didn’t want to do, or given me short fun burst of energy tasks to light me up and distract me for an hour so I’d be ready to buckle in for the tough stuff. And shout out to the reward of “if I get to the cafe early, I can get a piece of cake before my meeting starts” because that’s a fairly decent way to get me to arrive on time.