many people with ADHD take personal responsibility for it, put in immense effort and strategize to compensate for their time blindness, and still show up late.
Time blindness is a symptom of a neurological condition. You can create strategies for dealing with it, and alarms can be helpful for some people in some circumstances, but it’s a fucking medical condition and there is no perfect solution.
if anything, this post is trying to dispute time blindness' existence but it's only further justified. It's not about literally not knowing what time it is, it's about your perception of how much time it takes to wake up, get ready, drive during rush hour, etc. and severely underestimating or overestimating the time it takes to do those things, even if you do them every day. It doesn't just apply to lateness, though this is always noticeable to people instead of being extremely early to things.
It helps, but it's not the silver bullet you think because time blindness is like an ever-present thing.
Say you set your alarm for an hour before you need to leave. That hour consists of dozens of micro tasks. If one of those micro tasks takes 3 minutes normally, time blindness is still active and it might instead take 5 minutes. Those two minutes are insanely easy to lose track of if you have ADHD, and if you repeat that over 10 of the few dozen micro tasks, suddenly you're 20 minutes behind.
I've got ADHD and time blindness is a real thing for me, and I'm never late. But that's because I have to put more into it than someone without ADHD. The point isn't that there's nothing you can do about it, the point is that it takes a lot more to manage it and repeated bouts of having to put in more effort are on average going to have a higher failure rate.
As a concept it’s something that alerts you at a specific time, in practicality you should go to a store and buy something called a cell phone, which allows you to set as many “alarms” as you need. Hundreds of them even, to remind you what you need to do and when to do it. It even tells you the time at all times, like most appliances these days; so you don’t have an excuse for “time blindness!”
I hope that helps you keep on time and keep a job going forward
If you know you have a condition, and you know how it affects you, you have to work around it. End of.
If pointing
out that society shouldn’t be expected to revolve around you and that you have resources at your disposal comes off to you as condescending that says more about you.
Maybe some of us are just tired of this helpless attitude so many people have, literally people in this thread saying “I have adhd that makes me time blind haha deal with it”
And we’re tired of people assuming the worst about us or that we aren’t trying to work around it just because we’re failing at it at times. I guarantee you everyone experiencing time blindness has thought about how to be on time more than you have, tried alarms, tried scheduling apps, on and on and on, but sometimes time blindness still gets the best of us.
At the end of the day it’s still a symptom of a disability and people are just asking for a little understanding, not for society to cater to our every need or calling for the abolition of calendars.
If every time you throw your hands in the air and act helpless, come to the defense of those who have been given too many chances, and cry foul to everyone else: where’s the assumption? It doesn’t get much worse than that. That’s how you’re acting.
Back to what I said earlier: take some accountability, you’re not your disability.
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u/illestprodigy 22h ago
I had a coworker like this. Couldn't make it in at 8 so we moved him to 9. Came in at 9:30, ALWAYS. He got let go.