The ODD Way I'm Leveraging my ADHD to Stop Being Late to Everything

A little inner competition against the alarm and my time agnosia doesn't matter

Photo by Andy Beales on Unsplash

Lately, there’s been a weird phenomenon going on in my life.

I’ve been on time to things.

More than that: often I’m early. I show up five, ten minutes before meetings (whether that’s at my desk at home or in the Center for Change where I work) with all the materials I need. I have the agenda for the meeting cut-and-pasted in my note taking app or notebook du jour, and I have my water bottle and my coffee and maybe a fidget toy close to hand.

It’s weird, because I’m not rushing.

And I feel both clever and a little bit dirty about the way I’ve been making this happen.

Agnosia? I barely met ya!

Time agnosia (often called “time blindness” by those who don’t have blind friends that get funny expressions on their faces when they use that term) is one of the biggest manifestations of my particular flavor of ADHD. It’s the simple inability to perceive the passage of time accurately, whether experiencing it (how long have you been writing this article, Gray? Ummmm…five minutes? (checks clock). Oh. Fifteen.) or, worse, estimating how long something will take.

This is one of the biggest failures of the whole “time tracking” exercise so common to productivity books and coaches. “Estimate how much time you expect a task to take” has about as much meaning to me as “Estimate how high is up.” I mean, I can give you a number, and it might even be kind of accurate — but it’s not because I have any visceral, intuitive idea.

One of the ways this disability has consistently bitten me in the ass has been in misunderestimating when I need to leave in order to get anywhere on time. Not only do I pick “best case” scenarios for how long it will take to get there, I also fail to have any idea how long it will actually take me to get ready. I’ll just grab my laptop and head out the door, it only takes twenty minutes to bike to the office I say as I dutifully set my watch alarm to leave twenty-five minutes before the scheduled meeting.

Unfortunately, that time estimate fails to take into account disconnecting cables, packing tech and notebooks into the backpack, trying to find my other glove, realizing the pets need water, the back tire of the bike needs air, and oh, this meeting is not actually at the office, it’s at a client organization half again as far downtown.

At which point I turn into a Tasmanian devil, rushing through the house, grabbing things and leaving things out, hurrying out the door only to turn around and go back and get that other cable I might need, then getting my bike ready, then going back to the door because I can’t remember if I locked it (I shouldn’t worry, it’s always locked when I check it, I only forget to lock it when my partner is coming home while I’m gone).

I arrive at the meeting acceptably late (five minutes), out of breath and often sweaty, and even though I’m almost never the last person to arrive (turns out other people are late, too), it feels like another failure.

Whelp. You did it again.

My ADHD is also ODD

Oppositional Defiant Disorder, that is. Basically it means that one of the biggest motivators for me is either being told “this is just the way it’s done” or “are you kidding? There’s no way you could do that.”

It’s led to rash decisions, like joining the Marine Corps when the recruiter cleverly said “You? Why would we take you?” and also tremendous accomplishments, like when the person supposedly selling me the rights to a major event suddenly backed out, scornfully saying “Just take that money and go make your own event,” in a tone that perfectly expressed her disbelief I would be capable of it.

Her event is gone. The one me and my friends built is still going stronger than ever, even after I left the biz. You could not ask for a sweeter victory.

Those are big examples, but it manifests in small ways as well, whether it’s resenting the fact that broccoli is good for me or that alarm that’s going to interrupt whatever I’m doing and tell me I need to do something else.

I’m not as competitive as some with ODD — I think I didn’t get enough video games as a kid to let that set in — but I do love me a good race, especially simply against myself. Can I do this faster than I did it last time? Or with fewer steps? Or with more at the end than I had last time? That’s a personal development contest I can get behind.

Leveraging ODD against Time Agnosia FTW

It’s a lifehack so simple it’s almost embarrassing to mention it.

Here’s the three step method I use to be not just on time but early and prepared to events, appointments, or even just scheduled work:

1. I set my alarm as best I can. Sometimes it’s a timer — if I have a Teams meeting in half an hour, I tell Siri “twenty five minutes” because the commute from my couch to my desk is about fifteen feet. If my partner calls downstairs “dinner in five minutes, my love!” I hold down my Apple watch button and say “five minutes” because she has a really good sense of time, and I trust her.
   That’s the failsafe. I have set an alarm. Most of the time, when it goes off, I’m going to actually do the thing I’m supposed to do.

2. Then I try to beat the alarm. If I know an alarm is coming, usually that means I’m going to be compulsively checking the time as the hour approacheth. But lately, I’ve been imagining the alarm as a competitor, and so I will smugly and spitefully put away my craft project after two minutes instead of five, and head upstairs to help my partner finish getting dinner ready. Or I’ll log into the meeting five minutes early, my organizer open, pen in hand and ready to sketchnote, to chat with the meeting host for a bit.
   I’ll be putting on my bike helmet, the route already selected on my phone, when the alarm I had set to start getting ready goes off.

3. I enjoy the feeling of smug, spacious victory. This is the part that surprised me, because like many recovering single parents, the norm for “getting ready” is stress: “Hurry! Don’t forget that! Or that! Agh! Where’s your mitten? Why don’t your shoes match? We have to get out the door GO!”
   But this is not that. This is a feeling of being prepared. A strange and seductive sense of liminal space that lets me ease into the next scheduled task or event with a centered grace rather than a careening lurch of “I’m here! Did I miss anything?”

Now I’m the one who tells people what they’ve missed.

It’s not perfect. Just ask my girlfriend how often I’m actually on time for date night. The one flaw in the technique lies in another bad habit, another aspect of time agnosia that I’m still working on: I continue to over-schedule myself, in task and meeting and pastime, often putting things back-to-back because it seems like there’s enough time in thirty minutes between art group and dinner to put away the watercolors, wash my hands, pack my bag, get on my bike, and ride 2.4 miles to her house for dinner.
(Narrator voice: As it happens, that all takes a bit more than half an hour. Eventually, Gray will understand that.)

But more often than not, lately, I’ve been feeling more comfortable with time. Certainly much more than the previous fifty or so years. And even better, it feels like it’s a way to let my ADHD work with me, rather than against.

Time is just a bunch of made-up numbers we inherited from a bunch of patriarchal hustle bros and superstitious Sumerians anyway (that’s true. Look it up.). Why should I feel bad that I don’t get it? I can still function in this neurotypical world, even gracefully, because the skills I need are already in my brain. I just needed to figure out how to use them.

What’s in your brain that might make things easier?