ADHD time management secret: Clocks

Best-kept ADHD secret

Actually, it’s not a secret. Though for some of us, it may as well be.

Being time-challenged is one of the classic symptoms of adult ADHD. As a kid, too, but if you’re lucky, someone else will be keeping track of time on your behalf, and then also motivating you! (I didn’t appreciate this enough; in fact I often resisted this motivation. Thanks Mum! Also - sorry…)

Time is strange. I have find time especially strange, as I’m a poet and a nerd, so I can’t think about time without also going into a dreamy reverie about eternity and entropy. That’s a story for another day. But so many ADHDers experience time as weirdly slippery.

Time is, in one sense, a cultural construct. In Aotearoa New Zealand, in most professional and social settings, being on time is prized. Being late is often taken as a sign that you don’t respect someone else’s time. And chronic lateness is one of the more famous ADHD traits - though it’s often transformed later in life into being painfully early for things.

When you think about it, a crucial part of adult ADHD time management is actually knowing what time it is. Time is something that we often need to have a sense of: it helps us to orient ourselves within our day. Is it time to get up, to get dinner ready, to get back to work, to start winding down? Who knows?

I do, now,  because of clocks.

Why are clocks so great for adult ADHDers?

Clocks help us to know what time it, yes. Even better, they help us to UPDATE our idea of what time it is. At some point this morning, it was 11am. Well guess what, buddy? It’s not 11am any more!

If this seems obvious to you, you may prefer to move to another blog post, like this one. If, on the other hand, you’ve ever caught yourself thinking that it’s still whatever time it was when you last checked, you’re in the right place. Hello, friend.

Make time visible

In my humble opinion, every room you ‘spend time in’ needs a clock. Multiple clocks are even better. It’s great if you can see a clock from wherever you happen to be, especially at home, at work, or in the car. Of course, you’ll need to train yourself to actually look at the clock, which you’re more likely to do if the clock face is big and easy to read from the sofa.

Do you prefer digital numbers or classic clock hands? Though this is about personal taste, from what I’ve seen, classic clock faces with hands seem to work a little better for ADHD time-keeping. This is because you can ‘see’ how much time is left in the hour. With a digital clock, if it says 8:48, your brain doesn’t necessarily FEEL how close that is to your 9am work meeting. But it’s close. Very, very close.

Portable time

Do you wear a watch? Watches are super useful. They let you carry the time around on your wrist. How incredible is that? You can feel the watch around your wrist and you can see it when you use your hands, reminding you to occasionally take a peep at it.

Watches also help you to not get sucked into your phone. Who thought it was a good idea to have everything happen through a single screen? It’s great to learn the time without also learning how to make sauerkraut.

Ways clocks help ADHD time management

Do you forget to factor in travel time, or always underestimate it, or get muddled trying to work it out? You can use a clock face to work out when you need to leave the house. Here’s how…

Ignore the current time. Put your finger on the position the minute hand will be in when you need to get to the place you’re going. So 2:30 means your finger is on the 6. You’ll move your finger to count time backwards in minutes.

Now think through the steps it will take to get to the place - either starting from when you leave home, or running back from the last steps, or as you think of them, whatever feels most natural to you. For each step, say how long it will take, and move your finger backwards that amount of time. 

So it might look like this:

• Need to be at the doctor’s by 2:30pm.

• 5 minutes to leave the house (it always takes at least 5 minutes to leave a house - I don’t know why, trust me on this) - finger moves back to 2:25.

• 15 minutes to drive there - let’s add 5 for unexpected traffic - finger at 2:05.

• 5 minutes to find a park - 2:00.

• 5 minutes to walk from car to reception - finger moves to 1:55.

• Then we add in 5 minutes to guarantee that we can arrive unstressed - won’t that be nice - finger moves back to 1:50, so that’s the time we set the phone alarm for (the one with the label “Get the heck out of the house, babe”).

Isn’t that neat? I would also then set a timer for 1:40 to be my ‘Are you ACTUALLY ready to walk out the door?’ reminder. And, crucially, I’d make sure I have something to do in case I’m early, or they’re running late, which is easy because my phone has this fun thing on it called The Internet.

Well that’s all we’ve got TIME for! If you want more musings on ADHD support strategies, please sign up for my email newsletter.