ADHD and Time Blindness: What It Takes for Me to Be on Time

Seven alarm clocks, five-minute snoozes and appointments entered half an hour early. The effort you don’t see.

I have trained myself very hard to be on time. That is probably worth saying before I write anything else about ADHD and time blindness, because people sometimes assume that if you manage to arrive when you are supposed to, you cannot possibly struggle with it.

My arrangements have involved seven alarm clocks with five-minute snoozes. I put appointments into my calendar thirty minutes earlier than their actual starting time. I have had to build reminders around reminders and allow for the gap between knowing I need to do something and actually getting myself to do it.

There is a considerable amount of preparation behind something that, from the outside, looks like an adult simply arriving for an appointment.

I take being on time seriously. I know other people have things to do, and I want them to be able to rely on me. That is precisely why I have worked so hard at it. But the effort involved tends to disappear the moment the system works. You arrive, the appointment begins, and nobody sees the seven alarm clocks that helped get you there.

I think that happens with quite a lot of adult ADHD. People see what we manage to do and draw conclusions about how easy it must have been.

When I arrive on time, you are seeing the result of the work. You are not seeing how much work it took.

“Time blindness” is a term used to describe difficulties noticing time passing and judging how long things will take. It can be part of ADHD, although it does not look the same for everyone. For me, the difficult part is the distance between what the clock says and what time feels like while I am doing something.

I know perfectly well what five minutes means. Whether those five minutes feel like five minutes is another matter entirely.

Give me something that interests me and I can disappear into it. Researching the book is a very good example. One question leads to another, something I read changes how I understand a subject, and suddenly I need to look into that as well. I can be completely involved in what I am doing while becoming increasingly unaware of everything that is supposed to happen around it.

Then put me in front of a boring task and time seems to go into slow motion.

I am aware of the effort of continuing. I want to move on, look at something else, do almost anything that gives my mind more to work with. The task may be perfectly manageable in practical terms, but staying with it feels far more demanding than its apparent simplicity would suggest.

That contrast is difficult to explain to somebody who has watched you concentrate for hours on something complicated. They have seen the concentration. They know you are capable of it. So why does this other, much smaller thing seem to require such an exhausting negotiation?

I understand why it looks inconsistent. It feels inconsistent from inside my own head too.

Writing a book has given me plenty of opportunities to observe both extremes. I can become deeply absorbed in an idea and then struggle enormously with the repetitive details needed to turn that idea into a finished book. Research can hold my attention for hours. Repeatedly correcting spacing can make a few minutes feel ridiculous.

Both jobs need doing. Unfortunately, my interest in them does not divide itself according to their importance.

There is also a problem with the little word “just”. Just answer the email. Just finish the page. Just get ready. It makes a task sound as though it contains one action, when there may be several decisions, interruptions and things to find before it is actually done.

That matters when you are estimating time. You can picture yourself doing the main part and forget how much happens around it. You also have to stop whatever you are already doing, which can be a task in itself when your attention is fully occupied.

Putting an appointment thirty minutes earlier into my calendar is one of the ways I try to allow for that. The extra time has a purpose. It gives me room for the parts that are so easy to underestimate.

I would like people to understand that these arrangements come from paying attention to my difficulties and trying to take responsibility for them. They are evidence of effort. Yet there is something quite uncomfortable about needing so much machinery around an ordinary part of life, especially when the advice you keep hearing is that you should simply be more organised.

I have put considerable organisation into being on time. There are seven alarm clocks involved.

The harder question is how much of your life you want to spend supervising yourself.

A reminder can be useful. So can a buffer. But there is a difference between having support around you and feeling that you must constantly watch yourself in case you get something wrong. I think that distinction deserves more attention when we talk about adults who appear to be managing well.

You can become very good at making the effort invisible. You prepare, compensate and check. Eventually, the people around you become accustomed to the result. Sometimes you do too, and you stop allowing yourself to acknowledge how tiring the preparation can be.

Then, if something goes wrong, it feels much bigger than one missed alarm or one badly estimated task. You have worked so hard to prevent it that the mistake can feel like evidence that you still cannot trust yourself.

That is the part I want to be careful with.

I want to be dependable. I want to finish the things I begin and keep the commitments I make. I also want a relationship with myself that can survive an imperfect afternoon.

I want to be able to trust myself without having to monitor myself every minute of the day.

Building Neurodazzled and writing the book bring this into focus because there is always more I could do. Another page, another correction, another idea that seems worth following. When you care about what you are making, it can be difficult to decide where a reasonable working day ends.

And when something takes longer than expected, it is tempting to make the explanation entirely personal. I should have been quicker. I should have stayed focused. I should have finished this by now.

Sometimes there is something useful to learn about how I approached the work. Sometimes the estimate was unrealistic. Sometimes I have asked too much of the hours available. Those possibilities deserve looking at before I turn a delay into another reason to be disappointed in myself.

With boring tasks, I think it is worth acknowledging the experience honestly too. The task may be short, and the boredom may still feel intense. Pretending it should be easy does not make staying with it any easier. There is room to experiment with a shorter stretch of work, a visible endpoint or a break, instead of insisting that struggling means you have failed before you have even begun.

I don’t want to offer a beautiful system and pretend it has resolved all of this for me. I am still learning how to judge what I can realistically do, how to stop when something is absorbing me, and how to continue when it is doing the exact opposite.

The alarms and early calendar entries help me manage appointments. There is other work involved in learning how to live with the hours in between.

Some of that work is practical. Some of it involves being honest about what I find difficult without feeling obliged to apologise for my entire personality. And some of it means noticing when the effort to keep up has become so constant that I have left very little room to enjoy the life I am organising.

I want time for the people I love. I want to become absorbed in something wonderful occasionally without turning every lost minute into a problem. I want to finish the book, and I want to remain a person with a life while I am finishing it.

That is what I hope a better understanding of time blindness can make possible: more realistic expectations, useful support and a little less misunderstanding about the effort involved.

If you see me arriving on time, please don’t assume that time has suddenly become easy for me. I have worked hard to get there. I would like that effort to count, even when the only visible result is that I am standing in front of you when I said I would be.

October 2026 update: I’ve since created the Time Blindness Survival Workbook, with reflection pages, a time-estimation tracker and planning exercises to help you explore your own patterns. Choose a page that feels useful and start there. You do not have to complete the whole workbook to get something from it.