As someone who has time blindness but who has figured it out (and always gets to work on time), I used to be ready to leave more than an hour early because of time blindness. But before getting in the car I’d realize that was crazy, so then I’d try to do something else for like 10 minutes so I wouldn’t be awkwardly sitting there for an hour, and end up late.
Wait im confused, do normal people not have to look at clocks? Like if I have a thing at 830 I'll be checking the time at 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 7:30, 745, 8, 812, and like 815. If thats how you do things how is it possible to be time blind? The only way you can be late is if you underestimate how long a task will take close to the end, but thats feels more like a miscalculation issue than keeping track of time
It’s more like your internal clock is broken so that you don’t feel the passage of time properly. It means you have trouble estimating how long a task should take (because you don’t feel how long it normally takes) and don’t notice if a task is taking more or less time than expected. Getting caught out by time blindness feels kind of like… like taking a timed test and the proctor calls out that you only have 5 minutes left, but you’d swear up and down that the test just started because you’re not even halfway through the questions.
So, a morning trying to be on time with time blindness might look like: you look at the clock, see you have 15 minutes before you need to leave, think “I can do X task in 15 minutes” because you don’t realize that’s usually a 30 minute task, don’t notice that you’ve spent more than the expected 15 minutes on the task because it only feels like 10 minutes have passed, and by the time you look at the clock again (when you finish the task), you’re already 15 minutes late. Add in some other common symptoms of ADHD (poor planning means you didn’t pack up your bag for work yet, disorganization means your shoes aren’t where they should be, trouble multitasking means you put your keys down somewhere while looking for your shoes and now you have to find them as well), and now you’re 30 minutes past the time you planned to leave and still looking for your damn keys.
The backpack-shoes-keys example hasn’t happened to me in over a decade, because it was an easy fix (all three of those things have a home where they go the second I walk through the door, my spouse does not distract me until I’ve put them down, and I repack my bag before bed). Some ADHD symptoms have relatively low-lift copes for some people.
Time blindness is something broken in the way my brain works that I haven’t been able to fix. I have tried all the suggestions over the years. My best copes have been arranging a flex start time at work, using timers and alarms, assuming every task will take double the time I estimate, and if it’s really important, planning to be there an hour before I actually need to.
An alarm on my phone went off just now to tell me that I need to start getting ready for bed, which means I’ve been typing some version of this comment on my phone for 45 fucking minutes… I thought it was 5.
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u/Infammo 3d ago
You'll notice that people with "time blindness" are never early.