Are You Time Blind?

How far away is later? Especially to those with ADHD, later is somewhere out there. Maybe later actually has a time and date, but remembering what that time and date is, or even what today is, may be somewhat of a challenge.

Do you have any of these issues? Finding it difficult to estimate how long something might take, or lack of awareness of how much time has passed and suddenly you’re “out of time”?

It’s possible that you have a short time horizon. Think about how a child will ask, “is it tomorrow yet,” or similar questions along those lines. As we grow up typically our time horizon expands and we can make future plans…unless you are time blind.

Creating timelines, especially visual ones, can be really helpful. A simple timeline is a map. You know where you are and you have an idea of where you want to go. Timelines are common, and can look intimidating, in project management. The trick is to be able to break things down into manageable bits. It also helps to understand the order of those bits; let’s say you want to take a bath, you fill the tub, bathe, and then empty the tub. Fill, empty, then bathe doesn’t work.

For example, when my husband and I drove down from the San Francisco Bay area to our current home outside of Guadalajara, Mexico, I first had to look up the best route and how many miles we’d be driving. Then I calculated how many miles we could manage each day including rest stops and a little padding for emergencies. Next, I looked for dog-friendly motels along our route and made reservations.

Each day included some recalculation depending on various unknown factors, but the day by day planning and review made our trip a success.

If you can’t see far into the future, think about what you did yesterday and can do today. You can then project forward day by day and week by week, refining with each review.