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Time blindness—difficulty perceiving and managing time—is a common experience for women with ADHD. Many of the things I see my clients struggle with I recognize as time blindness, but often, it is seen by others as laziness or not trying enough.
This isn’t about being lazy or disorganized. It’s about how your brain processes time differently, often making it feel slippery or abstract. Unlike neurotypical people, who often have an internal clock to guide their time management, ADHD brains experience time in ways that feel disconnected, unclear, or out of reach.
Recognizing time blindness in your life is the first step toward understanding its impact and creating supportive strategies that work for you.
1. Difficulty Estimating Time
One of the most common signs of time blindness is underestimating or overestimating how long tasks take. Neurotypical people often rely on an intuitive sense of time to gauge durations, but if you have ADHD, your brain doesn’t track time intervals in the same way.
You might focus on the immediate steps of a task but miss the bigger picture. For example, cooking dinner might seem like a 20-minute job, but you forget to factor in time for grocery shopping, chopping ingredients, or cleaning up. Afterward, your brain might also fail to encode how long the task actually took, making it hard to learn for the future.
What This Looks Like in Daily Life
- Believing you can prep dinner, clean the kitchen, and send emails in 30 minutes—then running late for your evening plans.
- Putting off folding laundry because it feels like an all-day chore, even though it might only take 15 minutes.
Why This Is a Problem
- Underestimating time can lead to feeling rushed or missing deadlines.
- Overestimating time might make you avoid starting tasks altogether.
What You Can Do
- Time Tasks in Real Life: Use a timer to track how long common activities take. This will help you develop a more realistic sense of time over time.
- Add Buffers: Plan for tasks to take longer than expected, especially those that involve preparation, transitions, or mental energy.
2. Procrastination and Missed Deadlines
Procrastination often feels like a choice, but for women with ADHD, it’s closely tied to time blindness. Deadlines may feel abstract and far away until they’re suddenly immediate. This disconnect can lead to a last-minute rush to get things done, often with high stress and lower-quality results.
Why This Happens
- Time Feels Abstract: The ADHD brain struggles to "feel" the passage of time or the urgency of a distant deadline.
- Poor Estimation: Believing a task will take less time than it actually does can lead you to put it off until it’s too late.
- Living in the Now: Your brain might focus on what feels most immediate or engaging, making it harder to prioritize future tasks.
What This Looks Like in Daily Life
- Waiting until the night before to start a report because the deadline didn’t feel real until it was right in front of you.
- Thinking you have plenty of time to prepare for a trip, then packing in a panic an hour before leaving.
Why This Is a Problem
- Procrastination can lead to missed opportunities, rushed work, and high stress.
- Constant last-minute scrambles might leave you feeling overwhelmed or unreliable.
What You Can Do
- Break Down Big Tasks: Divide projects into smaller steps with individual deadlines. For example, instead of “plan the trip,” set tasks like “book tickets by Monday” or “pack clothes on Thursday.”
- Set Alarms and Timers: Use reminders to signal when it’s time to start tasks, making deadlines feel more immediate and concrete.
3. Poor Planning and Organization
Planning your day or week can feel overwhelming when time doesn’t feel clear or manageable. Neurotypical people often visualize their schedules naturally, but if you have ADHD, structuring your time can feel chaotic or aspirational rather than realistic.
What This Looks Like in Daily Life
- Forgetting an appointment because you didn’t check your calendar.
- Overloading your schedule because everything feels urgent or equally manageable.
Why This Happens
- Without a clear sense of time, it’s hard to understand how tasks fit together or how much space they’ll take in your day.
- Transitions, preparation time, and mental energy might not factor into your planning.
What You Can Do
- Simplify Your Schedule: Focus on what’s truly important, and avoid overcommitting. Add buffer time between activities to prevent rushing.
- Externalize Plans: Use tools like planners, apps, or shared calendars to track your schedule. Don’t rely on memory alone.
Watch a video I've made on Time Blindness
@kristenmccluretherapist Time Blindness in ADHD #adhdtips #adhdtiktok #adhdwomen #adhdtherapist #adhdandtime ♬ original sound - Therapy for Adhd Women
4. Difficulty Prioritizing Tasks
When everything feels equally important—or equally unimportant—it can be hard to decide where to start. This often leads to jumping between tasks, over-focusing on small details, or neglecting high-priority items altogether.
Why This Happens
- Disrupted Urgency: Tasks due tomorrow might feel just as important—or unimportant—as tasks due next month.
- Overwhelm: When all tasks feel critical, it’s easy to freeze up or avoid them entirely.
What This Looks Like in Daily Life
- Spending hours organizing your desk instead of working on a pressing work project.
- Jumping between cleaning, answering texts, and prepping for a meeting without finishing any of them.
What You Can Do
- Focus on Just Three: Write down three top priorities for the day. Start with the most important one and don’t move on until it’s finished.
- Set a Time Limit: Use a timer to focus on each task for a set period, like 25 minutes, to prevent distractions.
5. Problems with Prospective Memory
Prospective memory is your ability to remember to do something in the future. For neurotypical people, this often feels automatic—like setting a mental "alarm." If you have ADHD, however, future tasks might feel vague or disconnected, making it hard to act on them at the right time.
Why This Happens
- Blurred Future: The ADHD brain often struggles to connect the present with the future, so deadlines don’t feel urgent until they’re right in front of you.
- No Internal Clock-Checking: Neurotypical brains naturally "check the clock" to stay on track. This doesn’t happen as easily with ADHD.
What This Looks Like in Daily Life
- Forgetting a doctor’s appointment because you lost track of time.
- Neglecting to RSVP to a wedding until it’s too late.
- Missing recurring deadlines, like paying bills or renewing your car registration.
Why This Is Important
Prospective memory is essential for everyday life. When it doesn’t work well, it can lead to missed opportunities, damaged relationships, or feelings of frustration.
What You Can Do
- Create Visible Reminders: Use sticky notes, whiteboards, or alarms to make future tasks impossible to ignore.
- Tie Reminders to Habits: Pair important tasks with daily routines, like checking your calendar every morning with coffee.
6. Feeling Rushed and Overwhelmed
Even with plenty of time, you might feel like you’re always running behind. This sense of urgency can leave you stressed, exhausted, and disorganized.
What This Looks Like in Daily Life
- Agreeing to too many commitments, then panicking as deadlines pile up.
- Rushing to appointments because you didn’t leave enough time to get ready or travel.
Why This Happens
Time blindness makes it hard to evaluate how much you can realistically achieve in a day, leaving you overcommitted and overwhelmed.
What You Can Do
- Say No More Often: Protect your time by declining commitments that stretch your limits.
- Schedule Downtime: Block out periods for rest or transitions, and treat them as appointments with yourself.
7. Difficulty Learning from Past Experiences
Why Is This So Hard to Grasp?
It's important to recognize time blindness isn’t just about being late—it’s about how your brain organizes and processes time-related experiences. For most people, past mistakes create clear lessons, like landmarks on a mental roadmap. For ADHD brains, those landmarks might feel foggy or disconnected.
What This Looks Like in Daily Life
- Repeating the same mistakes, like underestimating how long it takes to get ready, even though it’s caused delays before.
- Struggling to see patterns in your behavior, making time-related mistakes feel random.
What You Can Do
- Reflect Without Judgment: Spend a few minutes at the end of each day noting what worked well and what didn’t. Use this insight to adjust your approach.
- Track Patterns: Track tasks, their durations, and any challenges to identify recurring issues.
Learning to Recognize Time Blindness Can Help
Time blindness isn’t a reflection of laziness or failure—it’s about how your brain experiences time. By learning to recognize time blindness and its patterns and building strategies that align with your natural rhythms, you can reduce stress, meet your needs, and regain a sense of control over your time.
A little about the impact on women of time blindness
