If you lose track of time, can’t estimate time, or if you struggle to be on time you may be experiencing something called time blindness.
So in this video you’ll learn what time blindness is, and 10 strategies to manage it. And if you think you’ve heard them all, the last two are pretty creative.
What is Time Blindness?
Real quick, time blindness is a really common symptom of ADHD, or other forms of neurodiversity, it includes:
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- Trouble estimating the time a task will take.
- Chronic lateness or to important meetings or social functions.
- Procrastination.
- Getting overwhelmed by tasks or deadlines
- Difficulty waiting. Because someone with time blindness doesn’t feel the passage of time, waiting can feel like an eternity even if it’s only a few minutes. This can lead to being easily distracted or impulsive behavior. For example, they may blurt out answers before a question is finished. Or they might start another task while cooking and burn their pancakes.
- Difficulty Task-Switching
- Probably one of the most damaging characteristics of having symptoms of time blindness is not being able to sense the future.
So, for example, let’s imagine you’re standing at a dock watching a ship come to port. In the distance, you can see the huge ship on the horizon slowly approaching. You can ‘sense’ that it’s far off and you have time before it arrives at the dock. So you go about preparing for its arrival as well as getting some other tasks done. It gets closer and you ‘sense’ some anticipation as you start to go about your work to receive the ship. It gets even closer and now you ‘sense’ like you need to focus because it’s about to arrive. The shadow of the ship covers you and now you ‘sense’ like it’s time to take action; you’ve already observed, and prepared, and now you need to help the ship come up to the dock. You see how the word ‘sense’ is used to describe the impending event of the ship coming into dock. You sense that future event and it prompts you to take action ahead of time and make plans so this big thing doesn’t just come crashing in on you all at once.
Well, for people with time blindness, that crash is exactly what happens. It’s like they’re on the docks with us too, but they don’t see the ship until its shadow is already cast over them. Or perhaps they do see it but they just can’t ‘sense’ its slow movement towards them like others can.
This inability to ‘sense’ the future makes it difficult, or sometimes even impossible, for people in the time-blind group to plan for the future. They don’t sense that future until it’s happening right now in the present, and by then it’s too late.
Who Does it Affect?
Almost everyone struggles with losing track of time occasionally, but there’s evidence that the brains of people with ADHD, who often experience time blindness, may show altered activity in the brain’s frontal lobes.
For people with more neurotypical brains, if they do lose track of time, they can usually say “I’ll just pay more attention next time, and usually, that little personal pep talk will indeed solve the problem.
But, for a person with time-blindness, just trying harder doesn’t work for them.
The ability to follow a schedule, and estimate the time a task will take to do something feels beyond their control and often leads to feeling overwhelmed and ashamed. And that’s simply because their brains work differently. So you need different strategies, but before we talk about that, let’s look at a fascinating study- The light bulb experiment.
Dr. Russell Barkley, a leading expert on ADHD, conducted an experiment to explore time perception in individuals with and without ADHD. He put participants in a room and showed them a light bulb. He would turn it on for a time and then off again. He asked them to estimate how long they thought the light had been on. And he found something interesting. Both the ADHD and non-ADHD participants were able to estimate the amount of time the light was on in about the same range of accuracy. But, here’s where things fell apart for the participants with ADHD.
When Dr. Barkely gave them the lightswitch and asked them to reproduce the time interval themselves, the ADHDers were not able to reliably reproduce the same time interval with the light as the neurotypicals.
And so, ADHDers could perceive time but they could not judge or effectively estimate the amount of time a task would take to complete.
Shame and perception
I think it’s important to recognize that society confuses time blindness with being lazy or not caring. In most cases the opposite is true. They care very much, and they are very hard on themselves when they constantly show up late or let someone down again. They constantly ask themselves, why can’t I do this? What’s the matter with me, why can’t I seem to get anything done? How come everyone else seems to be able to just do this?
There is a real sense of shame for many people who experience time blindness, and it’s made worse when others don’t understand this issue.
Success as an adult depends on time management
Children are often unaware of time, but as we transition into adulthood, it becomes our responsibility to manage our time well, to be dependable and productive. And when people struggle to manage time, they often fail to meet their goals.
So time blindness is a neurological difference. It’s really impairing, and it’s not just magically going to go away, let’s talk about some strategies to manage it.
Strategies
1. Make time visible, heard and felt, use clocks
The first step for anyone experiencing time blindness is to make time more visible. Start with a clock in every room, yes that includes the bathroom. You need to be able to look and see what time it is wherever you are in your home. One clock in each room is fine. You don’t have to go all Doc Brown from Back To The Future on your house, but you need to make the time easy to see.
2.Timers and Visual Timers
The next thing you’ll need is timers. And even though digital clocks or even the ridiculous mental math of an analog clock work for a bunch of neurotypicals. A visual timer like this can help you ‘feel’ how much time is left for a task. Instead of having to use numbers and math, you can get the sense “I’ve used half my time”, or “I’ve only got a sliver of time left”.
3. Audio and vibrating Triggers
I would also recommend adding audio or vibrating timers to your toolkit. Getting lost in a task means your eyes may be busy writing, reading, or focused on some project. In that case, you’ll want something that can give you a tap on the shoulder, so to speak. You already know that most smart watches can do this. But if you need something a little more intense, you could try alarm clocks like this that jump up and run around until you turn them off, or a wristband like this that electrically shocks you when a timer is up.
4. There are also some great apps to help with tasks and routines.
One that I like is Brili; It’s a routine-type app that sequences events or tasks together. Each task has a time limit and a progress circle that goes down over the time of the task. What I like about it is that the timer intervals have multiple chimes that go off during a single task to help keep you focused on the task if you get distracted.
5. Record your time
Finally, one of the best ways to make time visible for tasks or routines is to record them. Especially with tasks where you’re chronically late, rushed, or taking too long to do. Get out your stopwatch and record the actual time it took to complete the task. If you do this a handful of times for the same task, you’ll eventually be able to estimate the actual time it takes to get them done.
For example, if you’re chronically showing up late to drop your kids off at school, time how long it takes for them to get ready, dressed, shoes on, and in the car with their seat belts on and get down the driveway. Maybe you used to think it took 5 minutes to get your kids to put their shoes on, but after timing it, you’ve learned it actually takes 17. Now you know that in order to get them out the door by 8, they have to start putting their shoes on at 7:43, put this number on a post it note on your fridge or set an alexa reminder and that’s going to help you actually get the task done on time.
6. Shorten wait times- make it now
People with time blindness don’t feel the coming future, only the present. And, because waiting is very uncomfortable, they distract themselves or move on to some other project to escape that discomfort. Then, from their perspective, the far-off, ambiguous future deadline suddenly arrives, and they become overwhelmed because they didn’t prepare for it.
So the way we fix this, and this comes from Dr. Barkley again, is to lessen the amount of time a person has to wait between now and future events. That’s done by breaking down the future event into smaller elements that can be chained together so there’s something actionable now.
For a student with time blindness, a project that’s due in 3 months might as well not exist. But breaking up that project into subtasks and milestones will give them something they can continuously work on now and in the near future. It can be helpful for teachers to add a grade to each milestone to add an extra sense of urgency to help motivate the student to action. It isn’t just about breaking the task down, but actually bringings actionable parts of it into the perceivable present of the person with time blindness.
7. Prep early and Leave Early
Prepare early and leave early. I think Jessica McCabe from the channel “How to ADHD” put it best: “I try to finish my morning routine half an hour before I leave for work. That way, I can run late without actually being late.”
And of course you can bring stuff to fill the time when you’re there early, but be sure to set alarms to let you know when it’s time to stop. One time, my husband (time-blind category) went on a trip to China. He arrived at the airport several hours early, so he decided to put on a pair of headphones and watch a movie. He missed his plane because he had nothing to pull him out of his time-blindness void and tell him to get in line to board. He ended up spending the whole night in the airport and then catching the eleven-hour flight to Beijing the next morning. He was totally exhausted when he got there. So, be sure to set your timers and vibrating buzzers. And maybe don’t wear headphones like my husband did.
8. Also, there’s evidence that medication can help with ADHD and Time blindness. So you can talk with your doctor about this.
Alright, so now let’s talk about two lesser known strategies for dealing with time blindness.
9. Measure time with a playlist
Try using playlists to help you manage time.
Let’s say you only have five minutes before you need to leave the house. Instead of a timer, try playing a couple of songs back to back. When the first song ends and the second starts, you’ll know you’re halfway through your time.
If you have a morning routine you need to get through or a study session that needs to be a specific amount of time, use a playlist instead of an alarm. It does take a little preparation but it’s a fun way to keep yourself on track.
10. Reframe time
Check out this clip by ADHD love, Roxanne has ADHD and time blindness-Roxanne literally had no concept of 5 minutes-
You can see her realization light up. Those with time blindness don’t perceive the future; they live in the now. Reframing five minutes into seconds allowed Roxanne to perceive five minutes as if it were the present because she already understood how fleeting seconds are.
And because she could now feel five minutes in terms of the present, she was able to envision all the activities she could realistically accomplish in that timeframe, as opposed to her previous conception of five minutes, which didn’t hold the same meaning for her.
So, how can you reframe time? How can you alter your perception to make these time intervals feel more immediate?
Here’s an example that works for my husband. There’s a little convenience store not far from here, and when I crave a quick snack, I’ll drive there and back. It doesn’t seem to take long, but I’ve timed it, and it’s about 15 minutes round trip. If I couldn’t grasp the concept of fifteen minutes on its own, I could use this familiar scenario to help me understand what 15 minutes truly feels like. Could I take a shower in the time it takes to go to the store and back? ya, probably. Could I paint the walls of one room in that timeframe? Probably not.
You can see how reframing time can help someone who doesn’t naturally sense it gain a grasp of it.
Conclusion
Okay, that’s it for this episode. I hope you found this information useful, be sure to share this video with a friend or family member who’s experiencing time blindness. If you have any questions about this or any other topic, go ahead and leave them in the comments below. And, be sure to check out some of my other neurodiversity related videos- playlist linked in the description. See you later.
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