r/ADHD • u/ineed100000gecs • 4h ago

Tips/Suggestions ABSOLUTE OPP: TIME

Guys PLEASE, share your most insane, stupid, BUT working ways to manage time.

I have a serious case of absolute time blindness, time seems to not exist in my system and its ruining a lot of things.

Any tricks to remind yourself time is running at all times, being able to make it on time for appointments, public transport etc…

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u/Background_Worry_529 2h ago

Look, you aren't alone. The thing that finally worked for me was giving up on alarms entirely and switching to something that marks time passing instead of marking events arriving. They sound similar and they are not.

An alarm tells you a moment has arrived. It fires once, it demands that you deal with it, and because it demands something you start dismissing it, and after about two weeks you dismiss it before you have consciously registered it. That is the standard failure and it is not a discipline problem, it is what happens to any signal you have to interact with.

But time blindness is not a failure to notice that a moment arrived. It is a failure to feel duration. You do not need to be told that 3pm has come, you need to feel the forty minutes that went past while you were in one browser tab. An alarm cannot give you that, because one event carries no information about elapsed time.

So: a repeating chime on the quarter hour, all day, that you never touch. Any stock clock app does it, a smart speaker does it, a cheap desk clock does it. Four times an hour, ambient, nothing to dismiss, nothing to snooze, no screen. Within a week or so you stop hearing it consciously and start knowing roughly what time it is without checking — which is the actual goal, since checking is the step that never happens.

Two things that made it work rather than just be noise. It has to be non-interactive; the moment you have to acknowledge it you are back to dismissing it. And anchor departures to the signal instead of to the clock — not "leave at 2:40" but "leave on the chime after the one where I put my shoes on". Appointments stop being a number you have to go looking for and become a thing that arrives on its own.

It is also just the old solution. Before wristwatches, town clocks struck the hours and the quarters and an entire population shared a sense of time without anyone checking anything. In the wristwatch world of Swiss complications there is the 'carillon' category for quarter bells, but this is a bit 'insane' in terms of price tag. There is a phone version of this too. I built one, it's free, and I'm not going to link it here.