For as long as I can remember, I’ve struggled with time. I’ll briefly check my email, and somehow, 45 minutes goes by. I’ll schedule an appointment thinking I have ample time between meetings, only to find myself sprinting with not a second to spare. My inability to feel time passing or to properly assess how much time I need to do something has been a hard thing to understand. And in a world dominated by hustle culture and ableist conceptions of efficiency, it’s easy to feel stigmatized or ashamed for being someone that often runs late.
However, as I continue to learn about my brain, I’ve learned that struggling with time isn’t me being lazy, sloppy or careless. In fact, “time blindness,” or the inability to feel the passing of time or to properly gauge how much time a given task takes, is a studied phenomenon that’s common among folks with ADHD and/or other neurodivergence.
“Put simply, time blindness is a way of describing how some of us struggle to feel time,” Liz Lewis, an ADHD coach and founder of Healthy ADHD told HuffPost. “We don’t always feel it passing, we don’t estimate how long things will take very well, and we also have trouble picturing the future.”
In the ADHD research community, “time blindness” can be cited as both a neurological issue and a social/emotional reaction, Lewis said. Some experts say neurodivergent brains don’t experience time as a linear process. Others think the constant pressure to conform to neurotypical school and workspaces creates extra anxiety and exhaustion, making neurodivergent folks more likely to struggle with time.
Anna Granta, a coach for neurodivergent adults, said that neurodivergent people are often connected thinkers, rather than linear thinkers. While a neurotypical person may look at numbers on a clock and immediately know how much time they have until their next task, a neurodivergent person may get totally consumed in a given task, then struggle to wind down that task in time to start the next one.
“I think people with ADHD or other neurodivergent conditions struggle to understand the passage of time because it’s relentlessly linear,” Granta told HuffPost. “Time passes at a consistent rate, whether we want it to or not, independently of how we understand it. And I think that mismatch is really difficult for [neurodivergent people] to conceptualize.”
Because the passage of time can be so elusive, Granta and Lewis recommend using visual aids, instead of simply relying on digital clocks. Whether you or someone in your family has ADHD or just struggles to stay on top of time, Granta, Lewis and other experts shared the most effective tools for time management.
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