O'Ryan: Hey there, my name's O'Ryan, and today I am joined by my two co hosts, Trina from MyLadyADHD

Trina: Hello.

O'Ryan: and coach Noel.

Noelle: Hey.

O'Ryan: today we are talking about,

Trina: Time. Time and

O'Ryan: yes, think time is a thing that all of us definitely have a spiky relationship with.

Trina: Spiky is a good way to put

O'Ryan: so what is it about. Time I know for me. I I sometimes just forget that it even exists.

Noelle: I mean, does it?

O'Ryan: Does it exist?

Trina: Is that the, is that where we're

O'Ryan: do

Trina: today?

O'Ryan: Are we going to talk about quantum physics?

Noelle: I mean, I am constantly saying time is an illusion to, try and excuse the fact that I have a really hard time with time. Haha. you know, showing up to things late or forgetting that time exists and spending six hours on something instead of 15 minutes, all kinds of stuff.

Trina: I feel like our relationship to time is different than

maybe like a neurotypical person, but I don't, I don't know why that is. I strongly feel like we see time differently and we experience time differently as people with ADHD. so I'm excited to talk about this today because I feel like I have a lot to learn on this subject, but I definitely struggle here. Every aspect of my life seems to be impacted by my inability to calculate time, to estimate how long things are going to take. I'm always forgetting birthdays and holidays and I can't really even tell you what today is, most of the time and often will forget my own birthday. So, yeah, this is definitely a struggle.

So I'm interested to learn like a little bit more about this today.

O'Ryan: It's interesting in areas of design, like product design, or even like software design, there's this, this phrase that's like, people will never recognize your work unless it's broken. A good piece of software is usually invisible. And I feel like time for most people is invisible, right?

And as ADHDers. Because it's so broken for us, we notice it so much and we struggle with it. And it's, it's always that constant source of shame. I know, at least for me.

Trina: Yeah, I don't think I connected the dots to time and how, how much I was struggling with time until I was diagnosed with ADHD and started, learning more about it. So,

O'Ryan: Yeah.

Trina: of those failings were just, you know, taken on and, and like the shame that you're talking about. but yeah, I don't think it really occurred to me how much. It affected everything.

Noelle: for sure. Like, think I was the same way as far as There were so many adaptations and coping skills that I had to come up with on my own that I thought I was making up for my own personal failings and then found out, Oh, I'm adapting to ADHD, which causes me to struggle with time.

O'Ryan: Yeah. It's, it's another example of like, when you're surrounded by horses and you're a zebra trying to fit in with horses. Cause it's the same. Like I remember prior to knowing that I had ADHD, Looking around and seeing people seem to have a good, like, a fine time dealing with this stuff. Like, people are managing, so why am I unable to do these simple things of, like, showing up on time?

Or, being able to plan ahead or just budget my time appropriately.

Noelle: I'm now, apparently, my meds are wearing off because I am now thinking about, don't know if you guys are nerdy enough to have read the Animorphs series when you were kids, but it was my favorite series for a long time. And

O'Ryan: I just remember, I always remember the covers, where, with the weird kid to animal transition in the library.

Noelle: The thing that I is making me think about it right now is that the, the alien and their little team some internal like clock that allowed him to keep track of how long they had been morphed The thing was, don't stay morphed for more than two hours or you're stuck, right? so this alien race that he was a part of, they just kind of naturally evolved that internal timer because they had that morphing technology. But the human kids had to, you know, wear watches and things like that to make sure they didn't forget how long they'd been morphed.

Trina: Oh,

Noelle: that kind of makes me feel like, We're the kids and neurotypical people are the aliens, you know?

O'Ryan: mm

Trina: that is

O'Ryan: hmm. We're at

Trina: or I guess comparison. That's interesting.

O'Ryan: risk of getting stuck in our animal bodies. I definitely feel at risk of getting stuck all the time.

Trina: I had, help with an ADHD coach once, with a list. I basically had to write down how long tasks were taking me every day, and maybe we can get to that later. but

O'Ryan: Hmm.

Trina: I kind of discovered how severe my time issue was, was because I was like, Oh, putting on my makeup, that takes five minutes. That's not true. yeah, this, we can talk about that later. Maybe that's a way to get a handle on it. But, um, that's kind of how I found out it was as bad as it was.

O'Ryan: so in this situation where we are clearly anamorphs, why is it so hard for us ADHD folks to deal with time? Whereas maybe for a neurotypical, it might not be so much what's going on here.

Noelle: Well, it can look a lot of different ways, but. But, you know, underestimating or overestimating how long something will take is a super common one. Being late a lot another kind of stereotypical ADHD symptom. and being able to plan ahead for things because if you underestimate or overestimate how long something's going to take, naturally it's going to be difficult to plan ahead for anything. I mean, procrastination, losing track of time during hyper focus.

Trina: it's so interesting though because I also know some people with ADHD who are super early to things because they're so hyper aware of this issue and they've created all of these, tools and resources to help them with that one specific issue. so it's so hard to, you can't just blanket say like, yeah, like, oh, if you're ADHD, you're late all the time because that's not true for everyone. some

O'Ryan: yeah.

Trina: like overcompensated too. You know, help curb some of that.

O'Ryan: Well, that's kind of like those assessment questions, right? People are like, do you struggle to pick a pair of socks to put on and you're like no I don't struggle with that. I have a whole system

Trina: Yeah.

O'Ryan: because I feel the same thing like I I mentioned this in the last episode Is or one of the last episodes is that?

I was always late in junior high and high school. and now it's to the point where as an adult, I don't want to be seen as the late person. So I overcompensate and like, I'll, I'll do research to find out where I'm parking, where all this stuff, how early I need to be there.

And then I'll get there like an hour early. And then I just find myself waiting. I

Trina: Cause I think that's also really common. I think we've been beat up for being late so many times that at some point in our lives we make the switch and we just overcompensate to try not to be late. So you can't always just look at it as like, Oh, if you struggle with time management, you're probably late all the time.

That's, that might not be true.

O'Ryan: think even just a signal. Is the fact that you, you have struggled in the past, but now you have built up like a very robust series of things that you have to be really diligent about with yourself. And then it doesn't just come naturally.

Noelle: Or even I wouldn't say I ever had trouble with it, but that's because growing up just within family culture and everything. It was. Relayed to me that being late is a sign of immaturity and irresponsibility and stuff like that. And my biggest anxiety was coming off that way. And so in grad school, I. When I went to therapy for OCD and anxiety, that's where I thought it was coming from. I thought it was, Hey, I'm arriving to places an hour ahead of time because I'm so scared of being late. I thought that was the OCD, and then I got diagnosed with ADHD and I'm like, oh

Trina: It's

Noelle: I'm, I'm, I have this anxiety about time because ADHD I know. I'm going to struggle with this, but I didn't know why.

Trina: so interesting. And I, I'm thinking about like looking back, like I always had, and this is going to show my age, but I always had problems clocking in and out for work. that was a huge problem that occurred just because one, I couldn't remember to clock in and out, but, I kind of feel like it's all just related to just not having an awareness around time.

Noelle: kind of similar. I, this year realized that, I think the amount of time I'm logging as far as how much I've been working. it doesn't feel like it's accurate. It feels like I'm working a lot more than what I'm actually logging. so I was like, all right, for a couple of weeks, I'm going to be super diligent about every single minute that I spend working and write it down. And I was shocked that I was not estimating correctly when I wrote down how long I worked on things. I was like, oh my gosh, underestimating so much. it can be really. Really sneaky, like you may not know if you're if you're struggling with it.

Trina: it's funny because the tasks that I think are going to take me hours usually take me a few minutes, and then the tasks that I think are going to take a few minutes always take me a few hours. Like, it's always the opposite. It's really difficult, I feel like, in the workplace specifically to, have this as an issue.

Like, to be struggling with this at work Can be a difficult thing. this might be a good time to like talk about why this happens

O'Ryan: Why does this happen?

Trina: Noelle?

Noelle: Well, there's some vocabulary. I think we need to define first to be able to understand The first term is time horizons or planning horizons, which is basically a fixed point in time in the future at which you know a certain event or process is going to end, a lot of us right there will struggle to know, like, what does it mean for this task to end? am I done? know, So it's a time horizon is the measure of how close you are to the end of the thing and we really struggle with that estimation. there's temporal discounting, which I think a lot of people have probably heard that, Oh, ADHD time is either now or not now. And that's kind of where this temporal discounting comes in, which I guess actually came from the world of economics, it basically means that the further into the future, a reward or a punishment or whatever it is, the less attention we pay to it, the less important it is, which right there explains a lot of the symptoms that we experienced with procrastination type stuff, because it's far away. It doesn't matter. I can do it later, you know.

Trina: Yeah that resonates

Noelle: Mm hmm.

Trina: The now or not now I definitely have always resonated with that ADHD

Noelle: Yeah,

O'Ryan: I find a lot of times the now or not now thing, it, it shows up, especially in my work where. If there's like a little task, somebody's like, Hey, this needs to be taken care of. And I'm like, if I don't do this right now, I'm going to forget about it. But then it costs me because I have to task switch and I, I like flip.

I go and do that thing. Maybe it takes longer than I thought it would. Maybe it doesn't. And then I have to then transition back into the thing I was doing before, which takes time as well. And so then you get this big additive effect when you have lots of little things pop up through that day. Which then accounts for not being able to account for your time.

we have this thing going on where time is just really messed up for us. It's, it's really hard for us to track. It's really hard for us to estimate. It's really hard for us to even recount how long we spent on tasks in the past. what is the thing that's happening? What's going on in our brains here that's causing this to happen?

Noelle: Well, there's a few different things f s in the prefrontal cortex, which is The front part of your brain, that's the sort of executive team, your brain management skills and, working memory and. several of the executive functions are all involved with the time estimation and perceiving it and all of that. the reason we struggle with a lot of those executive functions, is that we have a a dopamine deficiency where dopamine is like the fuel that it's, it's the coffee for those executives sitting in the management room. and that affects our brain's internal clock. And there's also, differences in connectivity between different brain regions.

So the region of your brain, that's management team that needs their coffee, the hallways that connect to other parts of the brain, other offices and the brain are connected in really weird ways. so it's harder to

Trina: I'm, picturing like an uneven hallway with like the walls kind of falling in a little bit. That's what mine looks like anyways.

Noelle: the forest

O'Ryan: I was

Noelle: and ocarina of time where the hallways are like

Trina: It's a cave with no light.

Noelle: Mm

O'Ryan: These are really weird offices that you guys work in. I love this metaphor of the executive team in an office building. I think that's a really that's really smart.

Trina: Yeah, all of my office mates need their coffee and I don't drink caffeine.

Noelle: hmm.

Trina: I need it in different, I need to get it in different ways. So that's a different conversation, but that's a very interesting way to look at it. I'm picturing like the inside out characters in my head right now, by the way,

O'Ryan: Yeah, me too. I'm imagining mostly that it's like Ennui and Anxiety. Ennui's like, no, we'll do that later. And Anxiety's like, we have to do it now.

Trina: anxiety's had too much coffee, needs to

O'Ryan: Yeah.

Okay. So my, my office. is a maze and inter department communication is messed up. now that we kind of have an understanding of that, which, which again, I love this metaphor because like executive function, executive dysfunction becomes very clear in an office scenario. how do we deal with this then?

obviously this isn't, we can't change the layout of our brain. So how do we work with this to solve this problem for ourselves? How do we manage this time issue?

Noelle: Yeah, well, I think as with many of the other topics that we've covered, the first step is getting a really clear picture of challenges you're experiencing that are connected to this, because like, With me, I've known I had ADHD for about five years now, and I just in the last six months realized, Oh, I'm not counting my time correctly, you know, so, so it's really important that you some time kind of teasing apart, okay, which of the things I'm struggling with are connected to this. I, I think one of the first. that I usually start people with to illuminate some of the, the time related challenges they're facing is what you said, Trina, that coach had you do is to track how long various things take you. And almost every single person comes back completely shocked about the results. even when we know, yeah, I can underestimate or overestimate time. We don't, don't really know how much Oh, you know, be guessing five, 10 minutes. more or less, and it's usually much, much more.

O'Ryan: It was three seconds or two hours. I don't really remember. Five minutes sounds about right.

So doing an audit of like actually how long things are taking and not relying on your own memory for it, right? So maybe that's using some sort of tool. Maybe writing down when you started, stop something, just being more intentional about paying attention to that time.

Noelle: Yeah, there's a lot of different ways to try and track that for yourself, but many of our symptoms, but this one too, I think connects to almost the same metaphor as the Animorphs where, okay, the aliens had this internal clock, so they didn't need, external tools to help with that. a lot of our brain processes not on autopilot. with neurotypical people. we have to find manual ways. to do a lot of our executive functioning. so while a neurotypical person might pretty decent ability, you know, they, they're probably off a little, but pretty decent ability to do that. Their brain just automatically estimates. Ours doesn't. And so we need clocks and timers and planners and reminders and and alerts and time you know, AI ones that. Can make that a little easier, assuming you're working on your computer, but we need to find external tools to do a lot of our executive functioning, especially around time.

O'Ryan: Yeah, that's, that's a good call out. I, I feel like that's something that we, we maybe overlooked in the accommodation episode a little bit is that people aren't always working at their computers. And that, if you are somebody who's working in a trade, for example, it's not necessarily going to be easier for you to, especially I can imagine you being like, how long is this job going to take?

And you having to estimate that time. I think. While a little bit more frustrating, maybe wearing a watch, having a notepad, and manually writing the times down and just making sure that you're keeping track of that at least a few times while you're doing this just so that you can get a better reference point for how you're using your time.

Noelle: a lot of challenges with that is like, okay, am I going to remember that I have my notebook and I

O'Ryan: yeah.

Noelle: remember to write in it at the time I start or stop things? And so that's a lot of, a lot of what I do in my coaching sessions is just figuring out, okay, here's a strategy we could use, but like, how do I do that strategy?

Because all my

O'Ryan: Yeah,

Noelle: make that strategy hard.

O'Ryan: I almost feel like being able to work whatever that thing that you you're introducing into the process. in as almost like an autopilot behavior, right? Something that you can do really, really easily. And so maybe that is making sure that you're wearing a watch and that you're just constantly looking at it just so that you can keep track of the time.

Trina: it's really interesting too. Cause I feel like a lot of people with ADHD will be like, yeah, I tried that one strategy and it only worked for a little bit, but. part of what's working for me is just trying out a ton of strategies and like some of them, like maybe I just haven't found the right calendar system that works for me.

Like maybe I haven't found the right, you know, and then just keep trying to like find the right tool. I just told O'Ryan earlier today that I'm trying a new tool to help me with my, planning. that can be frustrating to like, Oh, I set up this big elaborate thing to help me,

O'Ryan: Yeah.

Trina: you know, but maybe keep trying.

O'Ryan: But I think, and, and I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this, Noelle, but almost think that the tool that you use is not as important as you being aware in learning and doing the audit itself, right? So maybe, maybe using a timer tool on your computer or using a notebook or, or just wearing a watch, whatever it is, is more about the process of you being able to be aware of Oh, wow.

My time estimation was off in that instance. I need to be more intentional about figuring out what to do. like the executive office again. If you bring a consultant in to do an audit of your processes, you don't have to have that consultant around all the time, You just have to have them come in one time and say, Hey, here are some areas to pay attention to.

And now I can just be a little bit more intentional in those areas. So Maybe you use a tool, maybe you use a planner, maybe you use some piece of software or some AI thing and then at some point you get bored of it and it doesn't work for you anymore. you still learn something in the process of using it and I think that's more important.

Trina: Yeah. I think that's what I was getting at. I think you take something from each of those things and learn.

O'Ryan: Yeah. And there is no shame in trying a tool and it not working for you and moving on to something else.

Trina: if the tool worked for three days, worked for three days. Congratulations.

O'Ryan: you go.

Trina: a win, I think. but yeah,

Noelle: I always try to stress when I start coaching with someone, tell me what tools you've tried and whether or not they worked, even if it was just for a day or two. A week because that tells me something.

O'Ryan: Yeah.

Noelle: for a little bit and then it stopped working, wanna talk to them about that because I wanna figure out what made it stop working. 'cause if we can figure that out, oh my gosh, it's so helpful. And usually that reason is probably impacting all the other things they're trying.

Trina: yeah, because

O'Ryan: Yep.

Trina: like, oh, I got stuck. I didn't know what to do, so I just stopped doing all of it. And so, okay, well, let's figure out that one block and try

O'Ryan: Yeah.

Trina: yeah.

O'Ryan: Was it the tool? Was it the, the shame that you felt in maybe feeling stuck

Trina: Yeah,

O'Ryan: and then the tool just reminds you of that shame?

Trina: it? Like, there's other,

O'Ryan: Yeah.

Trina: things? So,

O'Ryan: Do you just forget that the tool exists? Yeah.

Trina: make it more obvious. Like, it is, it's tweaking the tools that you have,

O'Ryan: So what are, What are some actionable things that you think, can help in this area? I know we've been talking about tools, but I don't know if there's maybe a little bit more of a pay attention to these things or,

Noelle: okay, let's say you're struggling with being late on a regular basis. Well, a lot of times the, some of the things that I discover when I'm working through that with someone is that, they're misjudging how long it's going to take for them to get ready.

Okay. I'm always late to work. How long does it take me to get ready for work? They think it's half an hour and it's two hours. Okay. Now let's look at that two hours and where are you getting stuck? And what are you estimating there? So like breaking all of that down, but there's

O'Ryan: Uh huh.

Noelle: time. So how long does it take you to transition between one thing and another? And are you accounting for that? because,

O'Ryan: take you like, it could take you five minutes to do something, but if it takes you 30 minutes to transition from that first task to the next task, then you're like, yeah, it takes me 20 minutes and five minutes. So that's 25 minutes, but you missed that whole transition.

Trina: Yeah, I

O'Ryan: I always forget about the transitions.

Trina: I've learned from my coach or I've learned through coaching, I guess, is, um, just I need to overestimate everything.

Noelle: yeah,

Trina: add time to everything have planned.

Noelle: yeah. I think one of the books, I forget which ADHD person it was, but one of the books I read, the suggestion was, at first, multiply your estimate by three. Just start by multiplying it by three.

O'Ryan: I love that. It's not too, you're like, Oh, we'll just double. No, we need to go more.

Trina: Oh, Lord. Yeah. The routines thing is funny because I feel like I'm actually decent at time management because my husband is very routine oriented and I kind of follow his flow. I'm like, Oh, he's eating breakfast. That's my cue to do X, Y, Z. Okay. He's eating lunch. I should eat lunch. I actually have another human in the house that's decent with time that I can just kind of so yeah, I think that might help some people, but it definitely helps me.

O'Ryan: I think that's interesting because in that scenario, you're not asking your partner to do more work. It's, it's, they're already doing things and you're using those as milestones.

Trina: Yeah, I

O'Ryan: And I think that that's,

Trina: when he strays from his routine, then my day is just completely shot. And when he's on vacation or well, not vacation, but maybe a work trip or something, my routine is completely gone. And I forget to eat. Don't know. I stay up too late. I, I, it's just a free for all. So, I don't know.

I find that kind of interesting. I noticed recently that like, I'm kind of my, the flow of my day is very, in tune to hit the flow of his day because we both work from home,

O'Ryan: that's an interesting point. Then are there ways that you can externalize your time? awareness to something else. And if it is going to be a partner in a way that it does not ask them to do more work, right? You're not, you're not giving them the responsibility of managing your time

that's something that you've both consented to.

Okay. Um, I

Trina: you could do something during that time, you know that that's when you do a certain thing, I think there's ways that you can use your surroundings to help you.

Noelle: it kind of reminds me of habit stacking in a way. a sense, you're, you're creating cues for yourself to help you remember, okay, when this happens, or when know, I noticed this, whatever it is, then I do this. So it's almost like kind of related to working memory too, because you're recognizing that, I don't always remember what has to come next.

And it's a lot easier to remember what comes next. If I am connecting it to another event.

Trina: Yeah, I feel like habit stacking would be really helpful in, for people who might be struggling with time. we should do a whole episode on habits.

O'Ryan: if you had one piece of advice for somebody who is struggling with time,

What's something that our listeners could take away and say, I can do that?

Noelle: When you are making estimates, it's the things you dislike that you're estimating way more and the times you like you're estimating under. So pay attention to that. Whenever you're doing your time tracking or even if it's just, you know, you notice one thing that you're over underestimating, think about do I like this or not? And that's really going to impact all of your executive functions because things that we like and that are positively stimulating are giving us dopamine, which it makes sense that we're gonna, estimate very differently when we have dopamine versus when we don't. pay attention to whether you like or dislike something when you're over underestimating.

Community Tag: hello, this is Sahil and you're listening to Brainwaves, your guide to all things ADHD, brought to you by Shimmer, the number one coaching platform for people with ADHD.

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O’Ryan: Today we talked about time and how it can feel really slippery when you have ADHD. Maybe you've noticed that estimating how long something will take while planning doesn't always line up, or remembering how long previous tasks actually took feels off. Perhaps time just seems to vanish during those in-between moments when you're switching gears. Paying attention to where time feels distorted for you—whether it's planning, recalling, or those lost transitions—can be a helpful step toward managing your time more effectively.

You'll find links to a whole bunch of additional resources and more if you're subscribed to the newsletter or at shimmer.care/brainwaves.

If you have a question and want to be featured in a future episode, head over to shimmer.care/brainwaves where you can submit your audio questions and check out all our past episodes.

Until next time.

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