Time blindness

What people mean by it

The phrase comes from clinicians and from the ADHD community rather than from a diagnostic manual. A 2021 review argued that differences in time perception, such as the sense that time is moving faster and less accurate estimates of duration, are a central experience for many adults with ADHD, not a side effect (Weissenberger and colleagues). A meta-analysis of studies in children and adolescents with ADHD found differences on tasks that ask people to judge, estimate or reproduce a length of time (Zheng and colleagues).

Misjudging time is not unique to ADHD. In the studies that named the planning fallacy, people underestimated how long their own tasks would take, even when they knew that similar tasks had run late before (Buehler and colleagues).

How it shows up in a workday

• A reply that should take ten minutes fills the morning.
• A meeting reminder arrives and there is no time left to prepare.
• One absorbing task swallows the afternoon, and lunch never happens.
• Commitments sit back to back with no gap, so the first delay makes every later one late.

Approaches people use

Most approaches make time visible instead of relying on a felt sense of it. People keep a clock or a timer in sight, draw the day as blocks rather than keeping a list, write an estimated duration next to each task and compare it with what actually happened, and put the fixed parts of the day in first so the flexible work has to fit around them. Leaving a gap between commitments absorbs some of the error.