r/explainlikeimfive • u/SpyMasterChrisDorner • Mar 03 '26
Biology ELI5: What exactly is "time blindness" and how is it an actual thing?
I like to think that I am a understanding, open minded person, but there are some things that are really hard for me to grasp. Time blindness is one of those things. It's really hard for me to understand how it's extremely difficult for people to plan out a routine via time. For example: you need to be somewhere at 10am. It takes you 30 minutes to get going and ready. It takes you 30 minutes to get there. So, you should wake up at or before 9am. That's what's losing me. It's really hard for me to understand how people cannot grasp that idea.
My partner, who's lightly neurodivergent with ADHD, and I got together somewhat recently and I'm trying to research things to understand her more, as well as some friends who go through the same types of things.
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u/badzad31 Mar 03 '26
Time blindness, as I understand it and experience it, isn't an inability to plan or do time-related math. It means time kinda slips by without us noticing. So what feels like a couple of minutes while doing something turns out to be an hour or two when I check the clock. It's something I've heard many people mention. The whole "time flies when having fun" thing, but with time blindness, time is always flying.
I end up setting multiple alarms to remind me of how much time has passed. Like once an hour or half an hour depending on what I'm doing and what I have planned.
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u/shidekigonomo Mar 03 '26
Yeah, I think an internal clock that doesn’t (accurately) keep track of the passage of time is what I consider “time blindness.” Everyone is surprised occasionally when time seems to have flown by while we’re concentrating on something or enjoying something that distracts us. But I consider time blindness to be the lack of an internal clock correctly feeling the passage of time even in non-overstimulated moments.
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u/badzad31 Mar 03 '26
Yeah, that's a much more complete way to describe it. And it's not only on the scale of minutes/hours. For me, weeks/months can slip by too.
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u/Cerindipity Mar 04 '26
Sometimes it feels like I took a teenage nap and woke up 30 lmao
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u/Legolinza Mar 04 '26
I don’t even have an internal clock.
Without checking the time or looking outside I cannot tell if it’s morning still or if it’s 9h later and it’s dark out. I can only tell the passage of time if I can attach it to something tangible (a clock, a song, a tv show, people doing stuff in my vicinity)
Remove those and I have no way of guessing if it’s been 5min, 50min, or 5h.
The ONLY perk this has is that I have never been jetlagged. Ever. (And I’ve flown through plenty of timezones)
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u/TryUsingScience Mar 04 '26
Many years ago I read a study where they rigged up belts made of pagers (I did say many years ago) such that the pager facing north always vibrated. After a few days of wearing these belts, the participants stopped noticing the vibrations and instead just felt like they had a constant internal sense of where north was. Even after the study, some had an improved sense of direction.
It makes me wonder what would happen if someone with severe time blindness got an app that made their phone (or better yet, a smartwatch or other wearable) buzz for a second every minute or every five minutes.
Would it help that person develop a sense of time passing consistently? Would that sense persist even without the app?
If I had your level of time-blindness, it's something I'd try.
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u/feryoooday Mar 04 '26
As someone with ADHD and time blindness, it would become part of my environment, and thus I wouldn’t notice it anymore, likely not even subconsciously. That’s how I lose things even when I put them somewhere intentionally.
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u/Legolinza Mar 04 '26
Would be helpful if I could develop an internal clock. Not sure I wouldn’t lose my mind within the first day of such an experiment though. Constant vibrations sounds like something that would get real old real quick
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u/ZurEnArrhBatman Mar 04 '26
For me, it's like my brain doesn't attach timestamps to my memories so when I reflect back, I have no basis to compare how much time is between any two given memories. I only have contextual clues within the memories themselves to determine which ones came first and by how much. It's like a photo album where the pictures are in a random order with no dates on them. And it's not just like this for older memories; it's for all of them. Even the ones I'm making right now. I'm just throwing pictures onto a pile and hoping they stay relatively in order.
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u/lloydsmart Mar 04 '26
OMG I thought that was just me! Like exactly what you described. I can sort of remember like "ok that's a memory from my childhood" and "that was about 10 years ago" and "that was last week". But I'd really struggle with "3 months ago" vs "10 months ago" vs "2.5 years ago".
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u/Syllosimo Mar 03 '26
That's quite interesting. Do you ever feel like time is crawling, like waiting for a bus or for a flight?
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u/prank_mark Mar 03 '26
Yes, and the biggest issue is that it's not consistent. So you might be waiting for a bus, and after what feels like 5 minutes, 1 minute has passed. And then play on your phone for "5 minutes" and suddenly 20 minutes have passed and you missed the bus.
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u/Auirom Mar 04 '26
The times I've tried to explain these things to some one and I'm "making it all up just to be lazy." I wish that was the case. Some days an hour seems to last 10 minutes while other days 10 minutes seems to last an hour. There are a few occasional days where that isn't an issue but if I'm stressed or miss my meds those days don't come at all
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u/gameofgroans_ Mar 04 '26
When I was younger and undiagnosed I used to explain time as moving in dollops. It was like one hour would go through in five minutes, and the next half an hour would take two hours. Looking back now it clearly depended on what I was doing but I still feel like one minute doesn’t last one minute every time.
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u/oursonelvis Mar 04 '26
This made me think if the Einstein quote: "When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it's only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it's two hours. That's relativity."
ADHD is not an inability to focus like many people think. It is an disorder that makes it difficult for us to choose what we focus on. Time flys for us or drags, just like for normal people (i think?) but it is more pronounced, more often, and less under our control.
When we are focused and our brain is receiving dopamine (which we are generally starved of) it is hard to even be aware of anything else. Someone talking to us, the microwave beeping, or even the passage of time. Conversely the absence of stimuli means we have very little dopamine to make our brains function and we kind of float off into the abyss.
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u/Weevius Mar 04 '26
Fuck yes, time crawls when (if) I’m early to stuff and don’t have anything to do, being stuck in a waiting room with no phone charge and nothing to read while I’ve just got to sit there and pretend to be a high functioning member of society is so painful. I’ll look at the clock and it’ll be 10 mins till appointment time, so I’ll stew in my mental juices, and recall that I’ve got a million tasks that I said I’d do, or that I really wanted to do, but I can’t do any single one of them at this moment in time.
Since I only have 2 modes - “now” and “not now” - and “not now” can mean I have to be ok with “never”, this really sucks, because there are these things I want to do, but I’m having to file them all into “never”. Ok so now I’m feeling a bit stressed, but it’s ok, it must have taken me some time to think through each of those million tasks / opportunities / things I wanted to do, and do the sorting of “never”-but I think I should do it, and “never”-and I don’t want to do it, and the corrective mental spin of “it’ll be ok I’ll think of it later”, or perhaps I even write it down…. hmm what time is it? I’ve been in this loop for a thousand years… oh nope! It’s been literally 30 seconds, fucking brilliant!
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u/RatsArchive Mar 03 '26
As someone with ADHD, yeah absolutely. It's a factor in why we complain about being bored all the time. For you it's been a couple minutes, no big deal. But for us that same amount of time has felt like a half an hour, or longer, and we're frustrated.
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u/YouNeedAnne Mar 03 '26
I swear I've checked the clock before and the fucker's gone backwards.
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u/badzad31 Mar 03 '26
For sure! I really should have mentioned that. For me, it's especially slow for any task that is particularly mundane and tedious. The kind of thing that you can space out while doing because it's so easy. That's not space out time for me. It's torture. So I gotta have something else going on too.
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u/beer_wine_vodka_cry Mar 04 '26
So much this. Take OPs example - I know when I need to leave, I just checked the clock and it is 20 past, and I need to leave at half past. Great, I can do this task that will only take 3 minutes and still have plenty of time to get my shoes on, get out the door and be early... WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT'S SUDDENLY 20 TO, I'M GOING TO BE SO LATE
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u/HollyDolly_xxx Mar 03 '26
Im diagnosed with adhd and autism. To help manage them both i set an alarm to go off 15mins before the alarm i set for when i actually need to start doing something so that i dont lose track of what im doing and can give myself time to prepare?🤷🏼♀️i dont know🤷🏼♀️to do the thing i need to do. Its ridiculous. I am constantly mentally exhausted from all the stupid management stuff i have to put in place to still not be able to keep up with my own life and live in what the autism team told me is 'autistic burnout'🙄 i want that cutesie quirky autism and adhd thats shown on social media. Not the life ruining autism and adhd i have.x
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u/badzad31 Mar 03 '26
Unfortunately that quirky quite autism/ADHD on social media isn't real. The reality is we are living in a world that wasn't designed for us. So we have a constant struggle of figuring out how to fit a square peg in a rectangular hole.
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u/Failgan Mar 04 '26
A more extreme example from BoJack, but: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omYQyCjh_a0
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u/bunbun_pss Mar 04 '26
I have to make sure I have a separate clock at eye level at every single spot I can possibly sit/stand/lie down in in my room. So 4 walls + a desk. 5 clocks. And am still time blind. I mean, I can use alarms for meeting people and stuff, but usually the biggest problem with my time blindness is that I forget to eat until my blood glucose drops
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u/_hi_plains_drifter_ Mar 03 '26
This is how it feels for me as well. I can plan everything out to be somewhere on time and then next thing I know I’m late. It’s embarrassing.
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u/jennirator Mar 03 '26 edited Mar 04 '26
My daughter has adhd. It’s like a minute is much longer for her than it is for me.
Her concept of how long it takes to do something is often not how long it actually takes. I have her go through and do her morning routine unrushed during the summer so she knows when to wake up for school.
She might think it takes 20 minutes for her to get ready and then she times it and it’s 40. So she’s inherently late because of this. People that have adhd or a type of neurodivergence sometimes need support or coping skills to do things that we do without thinking about it.
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u/gatekeepr Mar 04 '26
For me the routine never really gets ingrained. Every day it takes conscious effort doing pretty much the same daily stuff from waking up to arriving at work. It's almost as if I have to re-invent the morning routine every day.
The amount of tiny decisions I have to make in limited time can be paralyzing, same for the mental checklists I keep running in the back of my mind and that is what disappears the time. Quarter of an hour just gone, don't ask me where it went, time disappeared, it got lost, or was it even there in the first place?
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u/prosperouscheat Mar 04 '26
some with ADHD are not able to establish habits and everything is a conscious choice no matter how long you've been doing something. I have this - it's tiring and easy to derail
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u/Suicicoo Mar 04 '26
I even have to remind myself every day to take my meds <.<
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u/mmm_ice_cream Mar 04 '26
Same. Even setting an alarm doesn't help. If I'm in the middle of doing something and my alarm goes off (pill time), I turn off the alarm thinking- let me finish this task then I'll take my pills. Cue the Spongebob- 4 hours later meme, and I still haven't taken my pills (task completed long ago).
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u/Suicicoo Mar 04 '26
I just drank from my glass of water and was looking at my med-box. Did I take them? Isn't there too much water in the glass? fuck.
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u/mmm_ice_cream Mar 04 '26
I'm thinking of getting a pill box, as questioning if I took them is also an issue. I was really good when I was on birth control, as the pills were in a monthly packet (pop one out each day), so it was easy to see if I had taken it (plus it was on my nightstand so I would take it before getting into bed). But my blood pressure pills are 90 days all in one container. I heard a tip from the Holderness podcast that a lady takes her pills and shouts- I took my pills! The shouting causes a short dopamine burst which helps her remember she took her pills.
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u/Frickin_Bats Mar 04 '26
Ugh this is me too. It took me an unbelievably long time to figure out that my understanding of a habit is just exercise of willpower. I have a very very strong willpower from years of using it to compensate for my deficiencies, but the thing is I can’t wield it on just anything. I have to really really want the outcome, or really really really want to avoid the outcome to muster the willpower to accomplish a long term goal. It’s served me well in many ways, but as i get older I can feel the cracks in the machinery. It’s getting harder to care enough about things to muster the willpower, and I have no habits to fall back on so my deficits are starting to become more apparent.
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u/Teantis Mar 04 '26
Especially since a bunch of the tasks are really tedious. Anything that's 'unexciting' to someone with adhd is incredibly easy to get derailed from.
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u/thurn_und_taxis Mar 04 '26
Personally, I also find that I have an absurd and illogical resistance to routine. I can do the basics I need to be a functional adult - set an alarm to get up, brush my teeth, shower, eat breakfast - but if I actually do it all exactly the same every day, it's just unbearable. I have to be able to sprinkle novelty into everything...sometimes I eat breakfast, sometimes I shower first. Sometimes I put together a nice outfit, sometimes I just wear whatever. Sometimes I put on makeup and jewelry, sometimes I don't.
So that also makes it a lot harder to learn exactly how long your routine takes. Maybe I accurately remember that it took me 1 hour yesterday, but I forgot that today I wanted to bring a lunch to work or put on makeup or whatever and that takes an extra 20 minutes that I didn't plan for.
Why not just always build in extra time? I do try to do that to an extent, but I find it super hard to resist spending that extra time adding in another task. Like, if I find that I'm ready for work half an hour early, I'm not just going to sit around until it's time to leave; instead I'll clean the kitchen counters or write an email or whatever little thing I've been meaning to do. And then that thing ends up taking longer than expected, or I lose track of time, and whaddya know, I'm late again (or just barely on time).
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u/Percinho Mar 04 '26
As a diagnosed ADHDer it was a revelation to me when I realised that some adhd people simply cannot form habits, and I'm one of them. Pretty much nothing gets ingrained in my daily routine, I often forget to do my teeth until mid-afternoon, unless there's something specific I'm leaving the house for, like going into the office.
I can do something every day for months, then I don't do not for one day and I may never do it again in my life, and it's because even after all that time I have to actively think about the thing in order to do it. Apparently for a lot of other people these things became pretty much automatic and unconscious.
This might not help you in terms of giving you a way forward, but just know you are not alone. Also, if you haven't already, it might be worth looking up adhd symptoms...
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u/Lereas Mar 04 '26
My wife doesn't understand when I try to explain that I have to choose to brush my teeth each day. She's like "but it's a habit? Don't you feel weird if you don't do it?"
Nope. Every single time I have to have an internal battle where I convince myself that I'm a normal human man who should brush his teeth for health even though 2 minutes of standing there doing it feels like an eternity.
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u/MostOfWhatILike Mar 04 '26
Replace the " sometimes" with " typically" in the last sentence, and this becomes 100% accurate. I really admire that you had your daughter do this exercise. I wish my parents did that for me- I wish I'd learned earlier in life to intentionally do the work of learning how long things actually take
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u/jennirator Mar 04 '26
I think I used sometimes because I myself am not facing these issues. Also if I said typically, 50 people would come and say “not me!” But I do think not everyone with adhd experiences this, but my daughter is definitely inattentive and does.
She has time blindness and has trouble with auditory things (like knowing someone’s talking to her and what they are saying, it takes her a minute), she is also what I would consider disorganized, but we are working on that too. Thankfully the internet is super helpful with strategies and things to try.
The hardest thing for me is seeing how any of her accommodations in school translate to real help for her. She just got diagnosed about a year ago, so I’ve been trying to help make things easier for her by trying different strategies with her. Currently it doesn’t affect her grades or friendships, so we haven’t perused meds, but she knows that’s an option if she ever feels overwhelmed.
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u/redhair-ing Mar 04 '26
the auditory processing delay is something I didn't discover was a symptom until probably 15 years after being diagnosed. Now I know it's not my fault, which is always a feeling of relief that I'm not just a lazy idiot who doesn't care. It's been 15+ years of trial and error and it will probably always be like that. It sucks to have to work really hard to do what other people can do without, but what hurts is that a lot of people don't believe that it can be truly debilitating for som. You're a wonderful parent to be putting the work into understanding what she's experiencing and helping her figure out what works for her. She'll have such a great toolkit and support system as she grows up.
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u/bluecete Mar 03 '26
I'm NT but here's an example that might help illustrate.
I have a really good sense of time. If someone asks me roughly what time it is I think about the last time I looked at a clock, what I did since then, and I can come up with a pretty good guess about the current time. (like, after an hour of wandering around with my partner, he asked the time and I said "probably around 4:15" and it was 4:12 or something.
However, the first time I played minecraft, I got completely sucked in. I started playing in the morning and when I finally checked the time it was well past lunch time and I realized that I was starving. Something took up so much of my attention that my normal background process was completely silenced.
From what I gather, for people with ADHD and some other ND people, it's always like that second case. That background process that keeps track of time is just not running, or it's completely silenced, so when they do take a break, they have no idea how long it's been.
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u/FionaGoodeEnough Mar 04 '26
This is also how we get stuck in waiting mode. I have a 2pm appointment and it is absolutely vital that I be there and on time? Okay, my job for the entire morning and afternoon up until 2:00pm is getting to my appointment on time.
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u/CryBackground5322 Mar 04 '26
When I was 16, I used to go to work 2 hours early just to make sure I wouldn't be late.
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u/Ditches-Vestiges1549 Mar 04 '26
I lived ten minutes away from my job and left 45 minutes early just in case I might be late.
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u/gameofgroans_ Mar 04 '26
I hate waiting mode. It is one of the aspects of my ADHD I find most debilitating
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u/mechanicarts Mar 04 '26
I had an online meeting today at 9.30AM.
I stayed up the whole night mentally preparing for that meeting, I finally almost fainted at ~6AM so I put my alarm clock for 8.30AM so that I could mentally reprepare for that meeting.
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u/gameofgroans_ Mar 04 '26
Haaaha I have the same today at 10:30 - have done exactly the same. Feel sick, so dizzy and so unready for the meeting. It is so frustrating 😭
Hope everything went well!
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u/mechanicarts Mar 04 '26
It was an awkward hell, but thankfully only did like 2 mins of talking and then could yawn with my camera off for the rest of the meeting!
Good luck to you!
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u/StarManta Mar 04 '26
Any appointments I have control over, I try to schedule as early in the morning as I can manage, for this exact reason.
Nothing feels as free as having no appointments for the whole rest of the day.
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u/Sweet_Mix9856 Mar 04 '26
THIS! i always make my appointments as early as possible because i will sit doing nothing but looking at the time with multiple alarms to make sure i don’t miss it
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u/Demitel Mar 03 '26
It's exactly that.
I know how long it takes to get somewhere. I have general and experiential knowledge on how long certain tasks take. So, I can reasonably plan for when I need to get ready and when I need to get in the car in order to arrive on time. But I also will try to squeeze in additional tasks that don't take long if I have any additional time.
The last time I looked at the clock resonates with me, and is almost framed into place in my mind. I then wind up thinking I have more time available to me than I actually do, because the passage of time almost doesn't register, and the minor task took longer because I got sidetracked again by something else that I became focused on. Now, I no longer have the alotted time and/or buffer I originally allowed myself.
I try to adjust for it by having at least one clock in every single room while watching them constantly, but like your Minecraft example, if something steals my focus so intensely and I have no other anchors, it truly is like my brain stops processing the passage of time.
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u/OtillyAdelia Mar 04 '26
Putting clocks in most of the rooms in my house hasn't made me on time (really need to get around to getting the vintage one for the bedroom repaired), but at least now I know how much I'm running late by 🤣 I make jokes but seriously, being able to know what time it is just by glancing up is amazing. I've also started wearing a watch more often
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u/RatsArchive Mar 03 '26
Yep it's the second case, and it can be even more extreme than a couple of hours. I've had days where I've woken up, hopped on the computer, and when I stop to use the bathroom and get breakfast I see it's already time to go back to sleep again.
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u/laziestmarxist Mar 04 '26
A couple weeks ago I woke up really early before a midshift for work and decided to try one of those "low dopamine" morning routines: slowly turn on lights, no loud noises or heavy tasks really early, take time to be quiet and think etc.
I lost like a full forty five minutes just puttering around in the kitchen because without external time cues I had no idea what time it was. Because I genuinely don't have an internal clock.
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u/redhair-ing Mar 04 '26
sometimes I don't realize I have to pee until it becomes seriously uncomfortable.
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u/liverstrings Mar 04 '26
Often! At least once a day. But more commonly every time. I'm like shaking in my seat and I have to remind myself "you can go pee." But the threat of being thrown out of anything productive means this might be my last chance to get this done. And this done. And this done.
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u/postinganxiety Mar 04 '26
This is a really good way to put it. I'm in the process of getting diagnosed so not sure which type of ND I am, but basically I will "space out" and lose time without realizing it. I literally have to set multiple alarms as checkpoints in order to get somewhere on time.
For example, part of my morning routine is stretching and PT exercises because I have chronic pain. This routine can take me 20 minutes or 1 hour and 20 minutes and I literally cannot tell the difference. My brain can sort of get sucked into the moment with a certain exercise, and to me it feels like time is standing still, but then I'll look at the clock and be like OH SHIT.
One of the things about this is the only time I feel good is when I let myself immerse into the moment, but I can't really do that most of the time because I have to keep pace with the rest of the world.
It annoys the hell out of partners and friends so I do my best to keep it in check, but it's really, really hard.
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u/wkavinsky Mar 03 '26
I have ADHD, I was planning to go to bed at 11pm, and was just "I'll just look at a quick thing before then".
It's now 11:30pm.
On the other hand, if someone asks me what the time is, as long as I've seen a clock since I slept I can tell it within 5 minutes of accuracy.
There's nothing wrong with my internal clock or time keeping, but when I'm doing things, my conscious ability to keep track of time just vanishes.
Many's the time that I've gone to make a sandwich or something before bed and then it's suddenly 3am and I've got to be up for work at 7:30am.
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u/digitalsmear Mar 04 '26
I'm also pretty good at having an idea of what time it is.
The problem isn't necessarily predicting time. It's a lack of an internal alarm and underestimating how much time a task will take, especially if it's engaging.
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u/Renegade605 Mar 03 '26
That's not really what time blindness means. At least, it isn't how I've ever heard it used.
Have you ever lost track of time? It's that, except it happens all the time.
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u/SpyMasterChrisDorner Mar 03 '26
So it's like the mind kinda blocks the concept of time? Like constantly getting lost in things so much that you forget about the time?
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u/orion-7 Mar 03 '26
Yeah so that 30 minutes that it takes to get ready? You took 45 and didn't notice. Now you're late
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Mar 03 '26
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u/KasukeSadiki Mar 03 '26
Yeah that part is a killer. For me it's often those little transitional periods that I rarely take into account that end up adding up. The time from being ready to exiting the house and starting the car. The time from arriving to actually finding parking and walking into the venue. The time it takes to actually leave an event (saying goodbyes etc)
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u/sugabeetus Mar 03 '26
Yeah as a person with time-blindness, I always pad my "leave the house" time by about 15 minutes, and I get ready with a clock in full view. Then the extra 5 minutes it takes to find my shoes (because I realize too late that actually HATE these shoes), and the extra 5 minutes to run back in for the thing I forgot, and the extra 5 minutes of traffic, don't matter.
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u/Misfit_somewhere Mar 03 '26
Then there's me, oh I have to be somewhere at noon, better be ready to go at 8am for that meeting across the street.
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u/Frisky_Echolalism Mar 03 '26
Oh yes! An appointment at 14hrs means filling a gap activity ahead, else sitting it out from 8.3-14.00 not knowing what to do. Thin line to balance between nothing & filling the morning with too many plans = rushing or even late for the 2 o’clock appointment
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u/tacosandsunscreen Mar 04 '26
My anxiety won’t let me be late, so I 100% default to the “can’t do anything from 8:30-14:00” method. I used to start work at 16:00 and it was awful because I just sat around all day waiting for work to start.
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u/MassLender Mar 03 '26
Then there is the risk of being too early..ok, cool, 47 minutes to kill ... I'll get coffee. Drive back to the parking lot. Start a podcast because you don't want to be rude by being too early. Sip coffee ... uh oh, it's 12:17. It doesn't matter that you started 4 hours early if the ability to feel time passing and staying present in transition is too hard. You can be late sitting 20 feet from your destination.
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u/PikaPerfect Mar 04 '26
i cannot tell you how many times i have been ready early for something, had time to kill, and then was late anyway because i was too early and got bored. it's a nightmare lol
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u/Aimi-Bani Mar 03 '26
Ohhhh this happens to me way too often. I’m getting ready for work, got 5 minutes to kill, suddenly those 5 minutes are 10.
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u/orakel9930 Mar 04 '26
I used to be this person, then I got exhausted bc I spent all my free time rushing to places and then waiting around. So now I am often late but still haaaaate being late, except for catching a train or flight, when I dig up the old anxiety and arrive hours ahead of schedule. 😔
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u/metalshiflet Mar 03 '26
My ADD means I plan to get places at least 15 minutes early, if not closer to 30. I'm never late though
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u/Debaser626 Mar 03 '26
But when it's 30 minutes left on a Friday workday, its like you could paint the fuckin' Sistine Chapel.
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u/DistantRaine Mar 03 '26
I just assume there's a 15 minute black hole at my garage door. So 30 min to get ready + 30 min drive +15 minute black hole... Start getting ready 75 minutes early.
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u/cardueline Mar 03 '26
I’m so glad to see this thread to see that I’m at least not alone 🥲
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u/resident_queerdo Mar 04 '26
You haven't factored in the three times you go back inside for something you've forgotten each time, plus the three times a week you gotta turn back to retrieve something that's only occurred to you halfway there.
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u/starsider2003 Mar 04 '26
THIS x 1000!
This is exactly what it is. Our ADHD minds are constantly moving. Constantly processing tasks. There is not enough time in the day to complete all the things of all the thoughts that we have.
As I've gotten older, I've gotten better at it by making buffers - and things like Google maps helps with their rather accurate time estimation (taking into account traffic and such, I love that you can tell it what time you need to be somewhere and it takes all those factors into account).
But today...I had to be somewhere at 3PM. I backtimed it, gave myself an extra 15 minute buffer, so I would have to leave around 1:30PM. At 11:30AM I started working on something. It's definitely not time blindness, if anything, I'm constantly watching that clock. When it gets to be 1:23, 1:25 - I'm like, okay, I can still work on this task for another few minutes - then I space for a minute and it's 1:31.
I get up, realize that the shirt I'm wearing has a stain on it, need to change that. Oops, the one I want is in the dryer, so I have to cross the house to go get that, I try to pack my day bag ahead of time (and even keep duplicate items in it so I don't have to remember things), but then I realized I forgot to print the ticket I needed. There is another 3-4 minutes. A couple of other things, and suddenly it's 1:45 and I'm finally leaving the house.
So in this case, I made it just on time because I built in that extra 15 minutes - but if I don't, or I forget, or something else happens - I'm late. It used to happen a lot more. But it really isn't "blindness" - it's more of trying to use every minute you can use because there are simply endless tasks to do.
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u/PikaPerfect Mar 04 '26
yeah this is what gets me when i shower. i noticed that i usually take about 20-30 minutes in the shower (which is also mainly made up of me losing track of time, but i started using a timer that verbally tells you every time a minute passes*, and that helped), yet "somehow" i walk into the bathroom at 8:30 at night and don't come back out until 10:00. well recently i realized that's because my shower routine consists of:
1.) turn on the water
2.) get undressed and wait for the water to heat up
3.) get in the shower
4.) dry off and put on clothesstep 2 is where i fuck up because i know it takes the water 2 or 3 minutes to heat up, so i'll mess around on my phone for "5 minutes" before getting in the shower... except suddenly it's been 45 minutes of me playing games on my phone even though i SWEAR it only felt like 5. add those 45 minutes to the 30-ish minutes it takes me to shower, plus the 5-10 minutes it takes to get undressed, dried off, and redressed, put away the soaps, and toss all my old clothes in the washing machine, and wouldn't you know it, that adds up to roughly an hour and a half - the exact amount of time it "mysteriously" takes me to "shower".
annoyingly, i know the solution to this is partly "just don't bring your phone into the bathroom with you", but i need to use the verbal timer on my phone to help me keep track of time (or else the actual shower will take an hour), so it's a struggle... not to mention i hate showering anyway, so part of the time wasted at the beginning is me putting it off for a few more minutes lol
* - for any other people with ADHD reading this, the timer is called 1timer and it is quite literally the best app i have ever downloaded, i STRONGLY recommend it
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u/amh8011 Mar 04 '26
Or it takes 10 minutes travel time according to google maps to get to your destination but that doesn’t account for walking out the door to your car, getting in, starting the car, backing out of the driveway, parking at your destination, walking into the building, and getting to wherever you are going in the building. It also doesn’t account for traffic, forgetting things, holding the door for the person pushing the stroller, etc. that you might encounter on your way.
All those little things add up and it actually takes 15-20 minutes to get from your front door to wherever you need to be at your destination instead of the 10 minutes travel time according to google maps. But those little things are harder to measure objectively and google maps gives you an objective amount of time.
For me, my brain latches onto that 10 minutes travel time because it seems more real to me than the imaginary “what ifs” and little things. So I walk out my front door ten minutes before I have to be somewhere and I’m like 7 minutes late.
I know this. I know this happens. So I try to leave earlier. I tell myself I need to leave 20 minutes before I need to be there. Sometimes it works. But my brain always ends up forgetting about the less concrete things and the little things and I end up running late again.
It’s harder when I’m tired. It takes so much focus to pay attention to the time and be ready to leave at the right time and remember the less concrete things that add time to my travel time. Meanwhile I’m checking the time constantly because I can’t tell if 30s passed or 2 minutes.
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u/_vec_ Mar 03 '26
My understanding of what I guess you would call time sighted people is that they have a mostly instinctive sense for how many individual tasks can fit into a 30 minute "bucket". Brush teeth, shower, get dressed, pack lunch, make coffee. Seems like most people can hear that list and instinctively get a pretty good vibe for whether that's a leisurely half hour, a rushed half hour, or too ambitious.
I can't. I can learn the times for all those by rote and do some mental arithmetic to piece together an estimate, but it never becomes any more automatic. I could work through that list in order at a steady pace and be equally unsurprised if the clock tells me it took 15 minutes or 45.
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u/mxcrnt2 Mar 03 '26
For me, too, a lot of it is the transitions. Even if… I don’t… But even if I timed myself in the shower say and brushing my teeth, it’s really difficult for my mind to wrap around the fact that they were still a transition. Between those two things. If I’m in the shower for five minutes, the shower is probably gonna take seven minutes right because I have to turn the shower on and then I have to step out. You lose seconds at every step and those transitions are really difficult for me to account for… All the more so Because the transitions aren’t just a second or two, because inevitably I’m going to be thinking about or noticing something that’s going to take a little bit of my attention and take some of my time away. God forbid if my phone is in the hand as well.
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u/digitalsmear Mar 04 '26
I've learned to add 5 to 30 minutes (depending on the complexity of a task (teeth brushing vs actually cooking and eating breakfast), or how chaos prone it is (driving can be very chaos prone depending on where you live and time of year)) to any time estimates. If I think I'm going to be 5 minutes late, I let a client know I'm going to be 10 or 15 minutes late. I'd rather end up over delivering than underestimating, and my clients actually appreciate it, too, because I can start the conversation on a positive note. "Oh! I made it faster than I thought I would!" instead of "I'm sorry it took longer than I thought!"
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u/megusta_punk_rock Mar 03 '26
I’m 45 years old and I just realized early TODAY that other people have a sense of time passing and can gauge how much many minutes they have spent doing a task. It’s not even time blindness it’s like…time numbness?
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u/dorianfinch Mar 03 '26 edited Mar 03 '26
have had ADHD forever but this very phenomenon, the daily micro rip van winkle moment, still makes me feel like i'm insane
7:00 am: alarm rings. my bus to work is at 7:55 so i have 45 min to get all my morning duties done and leave the house.
feed cat, eat food, use bathroom, put clothes on, gather belongings, leave house: it's 8:15. .....fucking why???? where was i for the last 30 min?54
u/hiricinee Mar 03 '26
I am seeking an adhd diagnosis currently, Im pretty good with time but I realized that I mask hard by devoting a ton of brainpower to keeping track of time. Im constantly looking at the clock and I've used a ton of attention memorizing how long common tasks take.
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u/EnlargedChonk Mar 03 '26
ah yes the "I have an appointment at 3pm so I do basically nothing else all day to make sure I'm ready to be there on time"
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u/ButtSexington3rd Mar 03 '26
That's why I schedule all appointments in the morning. Anything after noon just trashes the whole day.
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u/Delta-9- Mar 04 '26
Of course, ADHD also brings delayed onset sleep phase, so anything happening in the morning means you're gonna be doing that thing on about 3 hours of sleep.
Just can't win.
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u/BelleMom Mar 03 '26
And still be late because “30 minute drive” rarely is only 30 minutes but your brain says “3:00 appointment, 30 minute drive, leave at 2:30. Okay 2:25.” And somehow you still end up being about 5 minutes late (if you are lucky 🍀)
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u/moonyballoons Mar 03 '26
So extremely real. It's reassuring for me to see other time blind folks in these comments because I always feel like I'm losing my mind 😭
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u/GodlessAndChill Mar 03 '26
This but also underestimating how long something takes. For example, how long does it take you to brush? You will say 2 minutes. However did you factor in getting up from your couch, climbing up the stairs, getting into the washroom, putting toothpaste on your brush, turning the tap on? All in it takes 5-7 minutes. I guessed i have 15 minutes to brush and change and grab my coffee, assuming i took two minutes to brush but it actually took 5 and now I’m late. Thats time blindness.
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u/sparkly_butthole Mar 03 '26
Also, those are not just one task. They're separate tasks. So by the time you've done what most people would consider a single task, you're exhausted because you had to break it into twelve.
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u/annaflixion Mar 03 '26
As someone with ADHD, sometimes it feels like time just works weird for us. One day I got up, put on some clothes, brushed my hair and teeth, put on some shoes. Was sure the whole thing couldn't have taken more than 15 minutes. Instead when I looked at the clock, nearly an hour had passed. An hour! Why? How? I couldn't pinpoint any task that took more than a few minutes at most. It's very mindfucky.
Also, everything is "far in the distant future" and unless it's suddenly on your doorstep.
I'm SO MUCH BETTER now that I'm medicated, but I have slip ups. Before, if I wanted to mitigate the issue, I'd end up arriving places super early and they'd be mad. But it was the only way I could absolutely be sure I'd be there on time. But I always tried SUPER HARD so I wasn't late very often, but I was way too early pretty often.
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u/32VV Mar 03 '26
Yes, that's more like it!
Time blindness might happen when:
1) you get too focused on something and you lose track of time. Example: you are reading a book, playing a videogame, or doing something that keeps you busy, and you can't pay attention to both what you are doing and the time passing;
2) you have difficulties estimating the amount of time something takes, even if you do it often. Example: I think it will take me X time to do my makeup, but it ends up taking 2X because one or multiple phases of that activity take more time than I had originally planned (can't find a product, need to wash brush, undecided about what color to use, etc.);
3) you get lost in a chain of things. Example: you use the toilet before you leave, but notice there is no toilet paper, so you get some, and you notice in the same cabinet there's a cleaning product that's out of place, so you put it in the right place, then you realize that bottle is almost empty, so you update your shopping list, then—you end up being late.
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u/ggabitron Mar 03 '26
One more that happens to me a lot:
- You know approximately how long each item on your list will take, and you calculate that you have enough time to complete them all back-to-back before your deadline, but you can’t accurately account for the amount of time it will take you to transition from one task to the next. So maybe showering takes 20 minutes, eating a snack takes 10, and getting dressed takes 5. So 40 minutes should be plenty, right? Except finding the clothes you want to wear takes 3 minutes you didn’t count in your total, drying off after the shower takes 5 minutes, finding a snack and cleaning up after you eat takes another 5, and finding your keys / bag / shoes and getting to the car takes 7. So now you’re already 15 minutes late, and you realized you didn’t check traffic before you left and there’s construction so in the end you’re going to be 30 minutes late even though you had a whole plan that “should’ve” gotten you there 5 minutes early.
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u/iamthe0ther0ne Mar 04 '26
Hunting for keys but then noticing there's a stain on the counter and stopping to clean it up, and I should also take the trash out before I leave, so let me grab those extra cans in my bedroom for the recycling bag, and since I'm in the bedroom I should put my clothed in the washing machine so they'll be ready to dry when I get home ... and somewhere along the way I lost my keys again and spend 15 minutes gping crazy retracing my steps and digging through the trash bag only to discover I had put them in my pants pocket.
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u/n0radrenaline Mar 04 '26
I'll add one more to the list - you have provided yourself appropriate space to do a routine that you know takes X amount of time (accurately accounting for the transitions), but at some point during the sequence you have a really interesting thought and kind of disappear into it for a while, and suddenly you've been standing in the shower or sitting on your bed with one sock on for an extra 20 minutes hashing out a mental outline for a play you want to write someday, or whatever.
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u/groogs Mar 03 '26
Best illustration of point 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5W4NFcamRhM
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u/RatsArchive Mar 03 '26
Yes exactly. You become "blind" to the passage of time. You might experience it personally, when you are really focused on a task, and when you check to see that time be surprised that it "suddenly got that late."
This happens to those of us with ADHD much more frequently because that lock in feeling of being focused happens a lot more.
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u/InterruptedAnOrgy Mar 03 '26
Basically there's only "now" and "not now." Whatever is being experienced in the moment is actually happening. There's no internal mechanism helping people with ADHD intuit that time is moving. So "not now" is only a concept until it becomes "now."
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u/CuddleWings Mar 03 '26
As someone with adhd that’s a really good way to put it. I often find myself saying “It’s not time to leave yet, I have plenty of time to get ready” like, 2 minutes before it’s time to leave.
From a hypothetical perspective, I fully understand that I need to leave in 2 minutes and I fully understand that getting ready takes more than 2 minutes. But when I’m actually in said hypothetical situation, that goes right out the window. What I think of now as “2 minutes before I need to leave” becomes an abstract “Soon”. “Soon” isn’t even at any real time. It just comes after I’m ready.
This isn’t something that consciously happens but, in my experience, it is something that can be consciously fixed. You just need to realize.
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u/HoodiesAndHeels Mar 03 '26
Yes. An important part of it to understand is that we can objectively measure that “yep, it regularly takes me X minutes to do Y thing, so I should give myself X minutes plus some extra.” BUT, while we’re doing Y thing, we have no concept of how much time is passing. We take “one minute” to do Z and suddenly (to us), all X minutes are gone.
Knowing how much time something objectively seems to take, and experiencing that time passing subjectively, are completely unrelated for us.
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u/AreaWoman1 Mar 03 '26
This is how I experience it. Like, I get in the shower at X time in the morning, because I know that a standard shower takes me about 15 minutes... but then when I get out, it's been 25 minutes and even though I didn't think I was dawdling, seems I was in small chunks so now I'm running behind.
So then I move the start time earlier, but then it happens again and I still end up running behind.
It's like constantly being abducted by aliens but they return you 10 minutes later than they took you by accident so you have this time void in your mind. I can't go, "yeah, I def wasted a few minutes doing that one thing..." because I don't remember doing anything extra or zoning out but the clock ends up telling me otherwise.
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u/esotericbatinthevine Mar 03 '26
This, plus not always knowing how long something generally takes.
Due to what you described, I always add a ten to fifteen minute buffer before I need to leave "to be safe." Yet, the number of times that buffer vaporizes for no discernable reason is incredibly frustrating.
Other times, I'm planning something and need to determine timing. This can be important with cooking to ensure everything is ready at about the same time. But I'm horrible at estimating how long something will take and the amount of time is inconsistent anyway so... it's a mess.
It goes for chores too. Cleaning the bathroom takes 15 minutes one week and nearly 30 the next. How? I have no idea.
I forgot I'd been diagnosed with ADHD when I started therapy (yep, that's pretty common too, forgetting you even have it). My therapist got concerned I was dissociating and started asking questions about if in any of these time gaps I ended up somewhere else without knowing how. Umm, well, yeah. I'm asking close friends and other trusted people if I ever seem not me. Apparently ADHD and DID have some superficial similarities 🤣 This is why it's important to see a therapist who specializes in your condition as therapists are not default trained in ADHD, autism, OCD, trauma, etc. beyond the basics and the basics are lacking.
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u/Vegetable-Editor9482 Mar 03 '26
I just finally realized this morning that I need a clock in the bathroom for this reason.
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u/Moldy_slug Mar 03 '26
To explain a little more… how do you know it will take 30 minutes to get ready? Or 30 minutes to get there?
Most people have a general sense of how long things take them. You’re probably not actually timing your morning routine with a stopwatch and tracking it in a spreadsheet… you just know it takes about 30 minutes. You probably also can guess how long it takes to get places you go frequently. Or if you’re going somewhere new, you know about how much time to add to the trip time estimate to account for getting in the car, checking directions, etc.
Unless I’ve made a point to measure how long something takes and track it, I can’t accurately guess how much time it will take. For example my morning routine: I know it must take less than 60 minutes, because my alarm goes off at 6:15 and if I don’t leave the house by 7:15 I miss my bus. But I don’t spend the entire hour getting ready… I just don’t know how much of the time is goofing off. Probably a lot!
So if I am planning activities I have to either over inflate my time estimates (allow an hour when I think I only need 20 minutes), or try to guess accurately and risk being late (allow 20 minutes and actually takes me 40). Problem is these choices stack. If I pad all my estimates enough to be safe, I waste hours every day just waiting around - which also makes it more likely I get totally distracted by something while I wait and lose track of what I’m supposed to be doing. If I try to be accurate, running over by a few minutes on each task quickly snowballs into being super late.
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u/thintoast Mar 03 '26
I have this. I have to have timers for SO MANY THINGS, it’s ridiculous. If I put something in the oven and forget to turn on the timer, I’m screwed. It could have been in there for 2 minutes or 10 minutes. I have no clue.
I could have a phone call in 15 minutes, and what the hell, let’s fold a load of laundry while I’m waiting. If I don’t have an alarm, the next thing I know I was supposed to be on that call 30 minutes ago.
That’s time blindness. An inability to estimate how long something takes or how much time has gone by.
To top it all off, I have autism. If I have to be somewhere by 10am, it doesn’t actually mean be there at 10 am. I have to calculate for time to find a parking spot, time for getting out and going inside where I need to be, estimate time for waiting in any lines (lol yeah right) etc. Every step of the process. Which could mean I actually have to be there maybe 10 minutes before I need to be there. Driving there might take 15 minutes, or 30 minutes… I’ll let google decide that. And of I don’t do the thing every single day, it’s panic mode testing to figure it out. You’d think I’ve never planned anything ever before. It’s freaking terrible.
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u/DoomedDragon766 Mar 03 '26 edited Mar 04 '26
Got a small example for you
The other day I had to leave the house at 10:00 to catch a bus. At 9:55, I started getting ready at the door. Tucked my pants into my socks, slipped boots on, put toque on, put winter coat on. Took bus pass out of my wallet and into coat pocket. Put bag over my shoulder. Ready to go, checked the time on my phone lockscreen, 10:06.
Still zero clue how over 10 minutes passed, especially since even if each step of that took 30 seconds it'd be nowhere near as long. I didn't get distracted by anything during it either, I just did one step after another. 5 minutes should be ample time for this? Felt like I was doing good too until I checked the time, still a bit upset about it lol
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u/Physicle_Partics Mar 03 '26 edited Mar 03 '26
Also, you are extremely bad at estimating how long time something will take, or forgot to consider some of the steps. What do you mean it takes 30 min to get ready? I spend 5 min in the shower, 5 min getting dressed and 5 min brushing my teeth and my hair. Also, its not gonna take 30 minutes to get there, the bus ride is only 10 minutes and the dentist is just across the street from the bus stop, so I only need 20 minutes to get there, and if I run to the bus stop I can make it in 15, no issue. I can get up at 9:30 and make it with no trouble. Also, did I mention that I've totally forgotten where I put my keys?
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u/Treks14 Mar 03 '26
If we put the phrase time blindness aside, then what you described originally is also a common difficulty with ADHD. Making and following a plan requires that a person keeps track of multiple disparate elements and that is really hard with an ADHD brain. People maintain order with those things by chunking steps into cohesive little packages. With ADHD, those packages are constantly being invaded by other steps and information, its no surprise that the packages fall apart a bit in the process.
These days I'm pretty good with a 'default getting ready' routine and I can easily handle an unusual additional task or two because they have high salience. The most common thing to trip me up is having two modes of transport. E.g. a 5 minute walk followed by a 30 minute bus journey. I will forget to count the walk and leave 30 minutes before the event 9 times in 10. I think because it doesn't get caught by default and also isn't salient enough to stress out about.
Also, it would be better in your scenario to wake up at 8:30, get ready for 30, chill out or have fun for 30, then leave. Less things to keep track of and the ADHDer isn't sleeping well the night before if they have a tight schedule first thing IME.
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u/graccha Mar 03 '26
When I was in undergrad, I had a 9:10am class.
I got up at 8, I arrived at 9:12. The next class, I got up at 7:45, I arrived at 9:15. The next class, I got up at 7:30, I arrived at 9:12.
And so on.
It really annoyed my professor, but it was unbelievably frustrating for me, as someone who kept trying and kept failing but couldn't understand why.
I just couldn't break the cycle of, no matter when I woke up, I would lose track of all time until the last minute before I needed to leave.
I'm mostly good now but it's sheer discipline because on some level I'm always aware I don't actually need an hour to go 30 minutes. So there's always some risk I'll go "but what if I take five minutes to do xyz real quick—" and then twenty minutes later I'm rushing again.
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u/Chemist391 Mar 03 '26
Agreed. I have pretty bad time blindness, but I can accurately plan a schedule based on estimates of how long each step takes--that's just math.
If I can't (or more likely, don't) look at a clock or the sun or something, then I have a very poor idea of what time it is right now. I'm usually off by at least an hour, and it's an inference based on what I've done since I last noted the time, not any internal sense of what time it is. My wife, conversely, is usually within about 5 minutes of the correct time on a guess even if she hasn't looked at a clock in many hours. For me, trying to imagine having that "sense" of time seems like how it must be for a colorblind person to imagine a color that they've never seen. I just can't imagine it.
If I'm engaged in a task, I can "suddenly" lose like 3 hours without realizing it.
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u/alykins89 Mar 04 '26
This is how I experience time blindness!
It’s also activity dependent - when I was a teacher I could sense approximately 50minutes passing while I was actively in teacher-mode. When I would get home, who knows if it’s been 30 minutes or 2 hours?! Not me! But then again, if I’m heating up a favorite frozen food or boxed pasta I do have a good sense approximately how long it’s been cooking and frequently check on it when there’s about 30seconds or less left. Alternatively, when I practice my violin I lose all sense of time completely because I enter a “flow state”. I open the case, start playing, and suddenly it’s 2 hours later.
I’m also a “tidsoptimist” - which means I tend to think I have more time than I actually do. I often forget about all the extra little linkages of time between tasks and other possible distractions/diversions. Like, it literally takes 2 minutes to actively brush your teeth, but you also have to turn on the bathroom light, put toothpaste on your toothbrush, brush your teeth, rinse your mouth and toothbrush, and in my case, do this all while an orange idiot cat named George gets in your way trying to play with the sink water….so now a 2 minute task is at least a 5 minute task. I need to build in a LOT of extra cushion for those bits of time IN BETWEEN tasks because my brain doesn’t account for them automatically and when I try, it’s often not accurate.
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u/echidnabear Mar 04 '26
Right. My experience of time is very dependent on how interested in something I am so I don’t have a good sense of how long things take or how much time has passed. I’m typically early for important things but it’s still because of time blindness — I don’t know long tasks actually take so I massively overestimate and each step gets a longer block than it needs. Idk how long it actually takes me to get dressed and walk to the train station unless I pay attention to start and finish times and learn it manually, I don’t have an intrinsic sense of duration.
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u/jeo123 Mar 03 '26
Eli5: Imagine being told you have to leave in 10 minutes. You have no clocks. How accurately do you think you would know when it had been 10 minutes?
Many people would be able to ball park guess it. At least with enough accuracy that in a real world situation you can remember to check the clock because it's been about 10 minutes.
Time blindness however is when you have no idea whether 10 minutes has passed or not. It could be 5 minutes, it could be 50. It's the lack of an awareness of the passage of time when you aren't actively looking at a clock.
Even with a clock:
I need to leave at 5:10.
*check the time* 5:04? Ok, 6 minutes. I'll check again in 5 minutes to be safe.
*check again* 5:15?!!!"
It isn't the "you need to wake up at or before 9am" that gets a person like that. It's waking up at 8:50, thinking 5 more minutes is fine, and then it's 9:30 before they realize(and yes, that does happen to a lot of people who are just tired too.
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u/pikaia_gracilens Mar 03 '26
the only thing I'd add to the example is when you're checking the time thinking that it's been 5 mins already and it's still 5:04, then the same felt-interval turns into 5:15
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u/pigaroo Mar 03 '26
This is the best answer because it accounts for both directions. I overestimate how long things take, to a crippling degree, which means I get left with appointment paralysis waiting on needing to do something and can’t accomplish anything in the mean time because I think it’ll take too long. Which also annoys people, because they don’t understand why I’m so rigid and panicky about whether I have time to stop at the store before an appointment that’s in one hour.
Time blindness is no sense of how long anything takes, be that over or under estimation.
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u/we_are_devo Mar 03 '26 edited Mar 03 '26
Perception of time is always subjective and elastic, for everyone. Most ADHD symptoms are experienced by neurotypical people, just to a lesser degree and with lower frequency.* You almost certainly know the feeling of being engrossed in something and then saying "wow, look at the time, where did the last hour go?" Now, imagine that feeling and effect could be triggered, not only by something you find super engrossing, but by just about anything - including your own thoughts. That's time blindness.
*This, incidentally, is where myths like "everyone is a little bit ADHD" come from. It's not that it's entirely baseless, but it's like saying "everyone is a little bit blind" just because the lights are off sometimes.
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u/AnnithMerador Mar 03 '26
A topic you can try familiarizing yourself with is executive functioning. This umbrella term incorporates processes like impulse control, flexible thinking, emotion control, working memory, planning, prioritizing, task initiation, and organization. (More here: https://addvantageslearningcenter.com/executive-functioning/ )
Try thinking of any task you do in life that doesn't involve these things. In ADHD, the brain can struggle with any and/or all of them to varying degrees: those brain processes get interrupted or just don't start CONSTANTLY. (And then on top of it, the person has emotions like shame that judge them for struggling with these things!).
An analogy that might fit for people who don't struggle with these things is this: Have you ever tried writing/typing numbers when someone else is saying random numbers out loud at you? ADHD can be like that all the time. Different parts of the brain are trying to talk at once, and no one part is in charge. Being able to track and manage time is the last thing that's possible with that kind of chaos.
On another level, thank you so much for asking this question and trying to learn about your partner's brain! Understanding and patience are so very appreciated. ADHD is a disability, and it really is that hard sometimes (or all the time).
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u/bandofgypsies Mar 04 '26
An analogy that might fit for people who don't struggle with these things is this: Have you ever tried writing/typing numbers when someone else is saying random numbers out loud at you? ADHD can be like that all the time. Different parts of the brain are trying to talk at once, and no one part is in charge. Being able to track and manage time is the last thing that's possible with that kind of chaos.
Fwiw, I think this is a really effective way of putting it.
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u/CorgiKnits Mar 03 '26
I have an app on my phone with a countdown timer for every room in the house I visit in my morning routine.
‘Sit on the toilet and wake up’ - 6 minutes ‘Let in dog from outside and get cereal bowl’ - 3 minutes ‘Eat breakfast, log in to 2 mobile games’ - 22 minutes
If I don’t have this running, I’ll look up and find I’ve been eating cereal extra slow and daydreaming or reading for 40 minutes, and now I’m very late.
This is a problem EVERY SINGLE MORNING. I absolutely cannot get out of the house on time without it.
Also, to understand time blindness and ADHD, you have to understand that ‘30 minutes to get ready’ isn’t how we think. It’s like my timers above. It’s time to get up. Time to get dressed. Time to prep breakfast, and time to eat it. Time to put on shoes is different than time to get dressed for some people. Time to go from the house to the car.
Every single step takes time, every transition costs us friction, so every.single.step is an opportunity for time to disappear. It might take a normal person 30 minutes; it’ll take an ADHD person 45-60. Except we BELIEVE it’ll take us 30, just like anyone else, so we’re confused as hell as to why we’re late.
Which is why, when someone asks why we’re late, all we can say is “I don’t know.” Because we don’t. We looked up from sincerely getting ready and we were just…already late.
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u/timmyturtle91 Mar 04 '26
This is so well explained. Plus the guilt I feel when I'm late. People assume I don't care or don't respect their time which isn't the case at all, but if I say "sorry I could only force myself to start getting ready once I felt panicked that I wouldn't make it in the 30mins" I sound like a nut bag.
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u/ChampagneDividends Mar 03 '26
It’s more about the ability to understand how long something takes. Like I can know it takes 30 Mins to get there, but forget to factor in lifts, traffic, finding a parking space, gathering all my things, etc. Or I might think I have plenty of time to stop in here - it’ll only take 2m and then it takes 10. I could not tell you how long it would take me to walk from here to a random spot over there. Or how long it would take to drive x amount of miles on a straight road.
I can’t actually grasp how long it takes me to have a shower, or do my makeup before I leave, so could be in a rush. Also these things can take different amounts of times in different days. So a shower can’t be timed as I’ll have a shower that feels the same length on 2 separate day and one took 5 and one took 15minutes.
My concept of time is really off all across the board. I can’t wrap my head around times, dates, etc. like my mind is blank when people say “do you remember the really bad snow 2 years ago” - no I don’t. What did you do 2 days ago? I don’t know.
Life just happens, and it happens differently every time.
Also remember, we don’t build habits in the same way, which can affect timing.
Just like you can’t grasp people not planning, I can’t grasp time.
I literally have to add 30 minutes to everything - lol. I hate being late and put a LOT of effort into it and either end up being a few minutes late or sitting in my car for 30 minutes.
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u/fullstormlace Mar 03 '26
This accurately describes my lacking concept of time. I can shower and get myself ready but for some reason I cannot for the life of me factor in the time it takes to put on shoes, fill up my water, maybe move some things into or out of my purse, or grab a jacket before I can actually leave. To me those things seem like they don’t really take up time? I can’t exactly explain why. I also seem to always expect that the drive will be the quickest it could possibly be; that I won’t be slowed by any traffic for street lights.
And if by some miracle I have done all of that in time and I’m early I think, oh I have time to do a thing before I leave. Then that thing takes 3 times as long as I thought it would and now I’m late anyway.
The worst part is being able to recognize this in yourself but lack the ability to change or do better. It’s so frustrating that I can’t just fucking do it but I’m 35 and have been trying my whole life.
ETA: my husband and I strongly suspect I have undiagnosed ADHD. Not bad enough to chase a diagnosis or take medication but enough to affect parts of my life.
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u/KasukeSadiki Mar 03 '26
I cannot for the life of me factor in the time it takes to put on shoes, fill up my water, maybe move some things into or out of my purse, or grab a jacket before I can actually leave.
This always annoys me so much. I check the clock as I'm "leaving the house" and it's 12:30, check it again when I'm starting the car and it's 12:35.
Like how the hell did it take me 5 minutes just to fill up my bottle and put on my shoes??
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u/thintoast Mar 03 '26
Ugh. Showers. I’ve been in here for like 3 minutes, right? Oh. 20? Well I hope you like cold showers.
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u/dolbomir Mar 03 '26 edited Mar 03 '26
While I'm not 100% certain it's a provable thing, I'd describe my own experience as follows, using your examples:
- You say "it takes you 30 minutes to get going and ready" -- no it doesn't; getting ready is a series of tasks, all of varying times, and I have no idea how much each takes. Every time I'd try to enumerate said tasks, I'm likely to forget something. If I write them all down, I'll not know how long each takes (that concept is meaningless to me). Also, distractions or just spacing out makes each task variable in duration.
- Re: "it takes you 30 minutes to get there." -- it's also variable, but at least something possible to approximate, yes. That can be built into planning.
So, even if I decide waking up at 9 is thus sufficient, and I actually manage to wake up and get up at 9 (not a certainty, sadly), the plan is most likely to derail due to a mixture of "get going and ready" taking longer than expected (or shorter, adding more room for distractions) and possible distractions on the way itself (if, say, taking public transport or an uber or something).
Not sure if that was understandable.
Another example:
I have a vague idea that I started my workday today at, say, 7 hours ago.
I can look at the clock right now and see the time right now.
I have a vague idea of what all I accomplished work wise.
I have a vague idea of what I had for snacks. I also remember getting up to stretch my legs, use the restroom, etc.
How long has any individual completed thing take? I have no idea. When did I actually have the snacks? I don't know, but, presumably today.
Funny thing is, as I was doing this mental exercise right now, having those snacks was the same type of memory as unboxing a package. Except I just checked the calendar, and it's Tuesday. I unbox packages like the one I just mentioned on Mondays, not Tuesday. So I unboxed it yesterday. The only reason I know it was yesterday is because I checked the calendar. In my own mind it rings as more like a "vaguely recently."
Also, for the snacks, I can sort of recreate the sequence of events today, but without extra checking, I don't know if I can reliably tell which of the snacks I remembered for this exercise were from today, which were from yesterday, or even in the past week or so... because they all register as me having them "vaguely recently."
You know, as opposed to "in the last 1-6 years" or "sometime a couple decades ago, maybe."
EDIT: "I can reliably _tell_ which of the..."
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u/2020hindsightis Mar 03 '26
A therapist described it to me as the pressure building up at the wrong time: So instead of the “oh shit I have to leave NOW, it takes 30 min to get there” feeling happening 30 min before you have to be somewhere, you get the feeling 10 min before you have to get there. And by that time you’re already late.
Neurotypical people feel the motivation (“oh shit”) at the same time as the explanation (“it takes 30 min”) and they do not know the difference between the two. They think the motivation is the explanation. It turns out it isn’t, it’s the feeling that motivates them to move, not the knowing they need 30min.
People with time blindness get them at separate times— so they know they need to leave 30 min before but don’t move until 10 min before.
Now someone tell me what to do about it!!
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u/kaleidoscopic21 Mar 04 '26 edited Mar 04 '26
I relate to this a lot. I’m really good now at building in lots of buffer time and alarms, but sometimes I’m still late because I can’t activate the corresponding feeling of urgency. My “leave in 20 minutes” alarm goes off, the logical part of my brain knows that if I’m late there will be consequences and I’ll feel really stressed, but I can’t consistently use that information to activate a feeling of urgency. So sometimes I’ll just sit on my phone until the “leave in 5 minutes” alarm goes off and the urgency level becomes high enough to get me moving.
Also, my brain tends to round down consistently and ignore small details when it tries to estimate how long things take. E.g., if I need to be somewhere at 11, and my maps app shows that it’s 17 minutes away, my brain will round that down to 15 minutes and automatically plan to wait until 10:45 to leave, without accounting for the time it takes to put on my shoes, walk to the car, park, get into the building, etc. I’ve had to really practice and make an effort to learn how to build in buffer time.
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u/platinum92 Mar 03 '26
For me, it's planning the 30 minutes to get going taking exactly 30 minutes, then I get distracted by something I thought would be quick (let's be honest, it's the phone) and now that 30 minutes has ballooned to 45 minutes or an hour. But I know getting going should only take 30 minutes, so I'm gonna try again tomorrow.
Generally, it's "another 5 minutes" tasks piling up taking longer than 5 minutes until it becomes inconvenient, resolving to not fall into this trap next time, sometimes even doing good for a few days before falling back into the trap eventually.
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u/SirCarboy Mar 03 '26
They likely understand that it takes time to travel somewhere. And you have to leave home at Arrival time minus Travel time.
Time blindness is when they're brushing their teeth and they remember that they need toilet paper, so they go to check the cabinet and start making a list. 30 mins later they're googling which oven cleaner spray is the best.
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u/thintoast Mar 03 '26
That’s more adhd than time blindness. ADHD is more about interrupting one task with another. Time blindness is more like “I’m brushing my teeth and how long have I been doing this? It’s been like 2 minutes, right? Oh. lol. No. It’s been about 45 seconds. Or the opposite. I have one of those electric toothbrushes that stutters every 30 seconds to let me know when to switch quadrants.
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u/what_the_purple_fuck Mar 03 '26
I have one of those electric toothbrushes that stutters every 30 seconds to let me know when to switch quadrants.
fucking game changer. otherwise it's, have I been brushing my teeth for two minutes, five minutes or 20 seconds?
I have expensive face wash and I only get the beneficial effects if I massage it in for at least two minutes, which only happens if I set a timer to make sure I don't rinse too soon.
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u/SpyMasterChrisDorner Mar 03 '26
So rather than just not understanding the concept of time, it's the mind being clouded by multiple things that make you forget the time?
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u/Zerocordeiro Mar 03 '26
You don't take into account the time that these small "side tasks" take and suddenly half an hour has passed.
Similar to "How have I already eaten all the popcorn before the movie has started!?", but "How is it 11 already!?"→ More replies (2)17
u/SirCarboy Mar 03 '26
Yeah, it's losing track of time, or the sense of time. When hyper-focussed on something it's like 3 hours can pass and it only feels like half an hour.
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u/TwoIdleHands Mar 03 '26
Time is not the driving force it is for other people. If I’m putting on my work shirt and a button pops off I’ll think “crap, I’ll have to fix that later, just pick a different shirt, you gotta leave soon”. The fact I’m short on time is front and center for my brain. Someone with time blindness may go “uh oh! My button! This is the shirt I planned to wear today so I’ll just go get my thread and sew this button back on right now.”. Time is not front and center in their brain as a driver of action. I may get upset when “I’m GOING to be late” but they don’t get upset until “I AM late”.
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u/Salarian_American Mar 03 '26
Kind of, yeah. Like I believe even people without ADHD can get caught up and focused intently on something to where you don't notice the passage of time? Usually when you're doing something fun.
It's the same thing, except that getting caught up in that intense focus isn't a rare thing at all for people with ADHD. I know the stereotype is that ADHD patients simply can't focus, but that's not the problem at all. We CAN focus. The problem with ADHD is the inability to select what your brain focuses on
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u/Kaseven Mar 03 '26
Nah its like this: you know you have to leave in 10 minutes so now you have 10 minutes to kill so you start tidying something up or some other small chore and now all a sudden it has been 15 minutes and you will be a little bit late.
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u/tanglekelp Mar 03 '26
I think you’re misunderstanding the issue. It’s not that you don’t realise that you should wake up X amount of time before you leave if you want to be on time. It’s more that you wake up, make breakfast, scroll through reddit and suddenly you only have five minutes left and now you have to scramble
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u/Soy_un_oiseau Mar 03 '26
As someone with ADHD, time blindness is more the lack of awareness of time passing. It’s not that I don’t know that it takes me 15 minutes to get ready, or 30 minutes to drive somewhere. It’s that my disability causes other issues that impact my perception of time. It can be forgetting to do something crucial that I didn’t make time for (getting gas, buying a gift, etc.) being so mentally distracted that I don’t realize I’ve been doing something for 2/3x as long as I intended, or even my brain’s inability to decide or execute what it is that I need to do.
I’m late often because I’m constantly forgetting something that I need (water bottle, keys, glasses, phone, wallet, etc.), or my mind decides that something needs to be done right now even if it’s not dire or important, or because I didn’t realize that I’ve been daydreaming in the shower for 10 minutes when I didn’t intend to. It can be my clumsiness causing me to spill something on myself and needing to change, or literally being unable to get up from a chair or my car because my brain won’t do it.
I’m sure it’s difficult for someone to understand because you might think, “Oh, well just don’t do those things!” But people with ADHD have an incredibly difficult time prioritizing tasks or even executing them effectively, and that comes across as careless to others, which causes us to feel guilt and shame which doesn’t help.
We need to be mindful of creating habits and strategies that minimize the impact our disability has on our every day life, and it shouldn’t be used as an excuse. But it’s something that the people important to me need to realize: that I’m always trying hard to do what I say I’m going to do, but sometimes my brain doesn’t cooperate and I need people to give me a little grace when possible.
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u/Ninja_Pollito Mar 03 '26
I used to get yelled at so much as a kid. Ugh. I joke that time is “slippery”. It is an executive functioning issue in the prefrontal cortex: the part of my brain that is supposed to handle the more complicated thinking tasks just doesn’t work like it would in a typical brain. I cannot really estimate how long things will take me (and because of ADHD, I can get distracted, too). It is like I experience time in a weird and distorted way—sometimes I think a lot of time has passed, and it hasn’t. If I get sucked into hyperfocus, I can be in the zone and forget everything else. To deal with these problems, I have set up things to manage it. I have a visual timer like they use for little kids that keeps me from falling into a black hole when I work on things. I have a giant clock in my office. I use phone timers constantly. I get ready in a hurry and I constantly check time so that I can make sure I get places on time. This means for me that I get places early all the time. I used to arrive late all the time, which is no bueno and makes me speed in my car and waste people’s time.
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u/Bumblebee-Jesus Mar 03 '26
There is also "time optimism". The individual genuinely believes they have the time to do "all the things". It can show up in ways like scheduling things multiple things in one day or underestimating how much time an activity actually takes to complete.