Time has always felt a bit … theoretical to me. People talk about “ten minutes” or “next week” as if these are solid, tangible things you can hold in your hand and stack neatly in a calendar. For those of us with ADHD, time is usually either “now” or “not now” – and everything in the “not now” bucket has a nasty habit of ambushing us later.
This slippery relationship with time is often called time blindness. It’s not a moral failing, laziness, or a lack of care. It’s a very real way that ADHD brains experience (or don’t experience) the passing of time.
What time blindness feels like
For me, time blindness shows up in a bunch of really mundane, annoying ways. I cannot tell how much time has passed; time feels both endless and elastic all at once.
- Sitting down to “quickly” reply to an email and resurfacing 90 minutes later with three tabs of research open and no lunch.
- Stopping to have a quick chat with someone and not realising my next meeting is now half over.
- Underestimating how long anything will take: travel, getting ready, writing, even “just jumping on a call”.
- Feeling genuinely shocked when I’m late, because in my head I started early and was “on time” right up until reality intervened.
The internal sense of time that other people seem to rely on – that quiet background awareness of “you’ve been doing this for 20 minutes, you should wrap up” – is either very quiet or completely missing. ADHD time is punctuated: hyperfocus, distraction, scramble, repeat.
It’s not about caring less
One of the most corrosive myths about ADHD and time is that we simply don’t care enough to be on time, to remember deadlines, or to respect other people’s schedules.
In practice, many of us care a lot. Sometimes too much.
- There’s the shame spiral when you miss something important (again).
- The overcompensation: arriving comically early to avoid the anxiety of being late, or being transfixed by the one thing you have to do at 11.30am so you cannot do anything else.
- The mental load of constantly second-guessing whether you’ve forgotten something.
Time blindness is about how the brain processes time and priorities, not how much you value other people or your commitments. Executive function – planning, sequencing, estimating, shifting gear between tasks – is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and ADHD means that system is unreliable at best.
How time blindness shows up at work
In knowledge work, especially in tech and data, we’ve built entire cultures around calendars, deadlines, and “quick” tasks that are rarely quick at all, with lots of context switching. ADHD time blindness bangs into this, hard.
Some greatest hits:
- “This will only take half an hour” optimism that turns into a multi-hour rabbit hole.
- Blocking time for “deep work” and then misjudging when to start, so the block evaporates between meetings.
- Struggling with context switching, because every switch resets your internal clock (which is unreliable at best).
Ironically, the same brain that loses an afternoon to hyperfocus on a problem can then completely misjudge how long it will take to write a two-paragraph email. Estimation becomes a gamble, not a skill.
Tools that help (a bit)
Because time is so abstract, anything that externalises it can help make it more real.
Some things that have actually helped me:
- Visible & audible timers: Countdown timers for tasks, not just tiny numbers in the corner of a screen, but huge alarms and noise.
- Alarms with intent: Multiple alarms with labels like “leave the house” or “stop writing and send the damn email”.
- Overestimating by default: If my brain says “30 minutes”, I double it. If it says “no problem”, I get suspicious.
None of this “fixes” time blindness, but it does build scaffolding around it. It’s less about forcing the brain to behave and more about accepting how it works, then designing around that.
Designing kinder systems
The usual productivity advice – just plan better, prioritise, use a calendar – often assumes a neurotypical sense of time. For ADHD brains, the systems themselves need to be different.
Some shifts that make a real difference:
- Shorter planning horizons: Today and this week, not the next quarter in exquisite detail.
- Chunking tasks: Breaking work into much smaller, more concrete actions with clear “start” and “stop” points.
- Generous margins: Building slack into the day, not scheduling every minute like a Tetris game.
At an organisational level, this is also an inclusion issue. If your culture depends on perfect time estimation, back-to-back meetings, and instant context switching, you’re quietly excluding people whose brains don’t work that way – and not just those with formal ADHD diagnoses.
Being honest about it
The hardest part of time blindness for many of us isn’t the logistics; it’s the shame. The stories we tell ourselves about what it means to be the person who is “always late”, who “never finishes on time”, who “can’t just get it together”.
Naming time blindness as part of ADHD – not as a personal flaw – creates just enough space to try different approaches without the constant self-critique. It also opens the door to better conversations with colleagues, friends, and family about what support actually looks like.
Some days that might mean letting people know you need a reminder before a meeting. One thing I often do is say to someone who wants to meet with me “please send me a calendar invite” so I do not forget to send one. Other days it might mean being upfront that “I’ll get that to you later today” is more realistic than “I’ll do it right now”.
Time blindness won’t disappear with the right app or the perfect planner. If I had only invested every dollar that I have spent on new planners over the years I would probably be a multi-squillionaire by now! But with a bit of self-knowledge, a few external supports, and a more honest conversation about how different brains relate to time, it becomes something you can work with rather than constantly fight against.
