By Katie Azevedo, M.Ed.
Most students have heard of the concept of time management. Maybe you’re good at it, or maybe you think it’s something you need to get better at. Either way, you’ve heard of the concept of managing time.
What’s less well known is the concept of time blindness. But for someone with time blindness – especially a student with ADHD – time management can feel almost impossible.
In this tutorial, I explain what time blindness is, how it affects students with ADHD, and some strategies to get better at managing time as a result of time blindness.
Related resource: If you’re still a little fuzzy about what time management really is, read my guide called What Is Time Management Really?
What Is Time Blindness?
Time blindness is the inability to perceive how much time has passed and how much time is needed to complete a task (time estimation).
In simpler words, it’s the inability to accurately sense time coming and going.
Key Terms Related to Time Blindness:
Time perception: being internally aware of time coming and going. This includes how long events last.
Time management: the ability to make time visible (calendars, planners, etc.), create plans, prioritize, and match tasks/goals to available time.
Time estimation: the ability to accurately predict how long recurring and new tasks will take to complete.
Time blindness is not a medical condition. It’s a deficit in time perception, which is the result of differences in the brain regions responsible for time awareness. The next section explains more.
What Causes Time Blindness?
Again, time blindness is not a medical condition, it’s not an official diagnosis, and it’s not something that can be cured. Rather, it’s a phenomenon that happens as a symptom of something else. In this case, we’re talking specifically about ADHD.
ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects behavior. This means that the actual brain structure of someone with ADHD is different from that of someone without ADHD.
A key structure that’s impacted in an ADHD brain is the prefrontal cortex. This is the part of the brain that we use to plan, organize, start tasks, stay focused, and manage time. (These are the executive functions, which you can learn more about here.)
Because someone with ADHD has a structurally different prefrontal cortex (and some difference in their brain chemistry), they will often struggle with time blindness. In other words, they will struggle to manage, perceive and estimate time.
How Does Time Blindness Affect Students with ADHD?
If you’re a student, you need to be aware of time and manage it all day long. Therefore, time blindness can affect every single part of your school day.
Time Blindness and Its Impact on School
Arriving to class on time
Arriving to class on time requires working backward from the class start time, factoring in transportation, showering, dressing, eating, and even getting out of bed when the alarm goes off. This is even more challenging for college students who need to arrive on time to class multiple times per day.
Studying for tests
We learn information best when we study it in short study sessions spread over several days. This is called spaced repetition. Time blindness impacts your ability to plan out these study sessions in advance. Therefore, time blindness leads to cramming, which does not work.
Completing homework on time
Completing homework on time requires time awareness on several levels. First, you have to accurately estimate how much time an assignment will take. Next, you have to know your current time availability. Finally, you have to be aware of time as you’re completing the task (knowing if you’re spending too long on one step, zoning out, or not planning enough time to complete the entire assignment).
Getting enough sleep
Time blindness can lead to procrastination, which leads to late nights and insufficient sleep. You can’t reach your academic goals if you’re exhausted.
Finishing long-term projects on schedule
Completing and submitting longterm projects on time requires strong time awareness. Students have to break a project down into smaller steps of a reasonable length, assign deadlines to those smaller steps, and accurately estimate the time needed to complete each step so the final deadline is met. Time blindness can interfere with every part of this process.
Grades
Every single one of the impacts listed above culminates in grades. Showing up to class, studying sufficiently and effectively, completing homework, getting enough sleep, and completing long-term projects by deadline lay the groundwork for getting grades that reflect how smart you really are.
3 Methods that DON’T Work to Support Time Blindness in Students with ADHD
Because time blindness has such a significant impact on student life, it’s important to use legitimate strategies that work. The following three strategies do not work, despite their appeal.
1. Denying there’s a problem.
The first step in addressing any problem is to admit there is one. Students who are not yet able to recognize their own time blindness will struggle to use strategies to support themselves.
Maybe you have a new ADHD diagnosis and you’re still learning what that means, or maybe you’ve internalized your struggle with time to mean something deeper about who you are. Regardless, denying the existence of time blindness and its role in your day-to-day life is not a good approach.
2. Relying on your memory.
Your brain is not a calendar. Students with time blindness often try to keep track of deadlines, appointments, and commitments entirely in their heads. This doesn’t work.
Time blindness distorts your internal sense of when things are due and how far away they really are. What feels like “plenty of time” on Monday becomes a crisis by Thursday. Writing things down is not optional. It’s non-negotiable. The best system for tracking and managing assignments so you can complete them on time is my Assignment Management Power System.
3. Using complicated systems.
Complicated systems often look productive, but are not. Color-coded planners, elaborate apps with seventeen categories, and a five-step morning routine you saw on YouTube might look interesting, but the problem is that complex systems require the very skill you’re struggling with — sustained time awareness — to maintain. If a system takes more than a few seconds to use, you won’t use it consistently. Again, that’s why the Assignment Management Power System is so effective.
Supports That Really Work for Students with Time Blindness
The goal here is not to “fix” your brain or change your wiring. The goal is to make time visible and external, so you don’t have to rely on internal time perception that isn’t working the way you need it to.
1. Make Clocks Impossible to Ignore
Most students glance at a clock when they think to, and that’s usually enough. Students with time blindness need clocks everywhere (the bedroom, bathroom, workspace, kitchen, etc.).
Analog clocks are especially useful because they show time visually and show the passage of time. In other words, the arc of the hand moving gives you spatial information that a digital display doesn’t. You can see how much time is left, not just what time it is right now.
2. Combine Timers and Alarms
An alarm tells you when time is up. A timer tells you time is passing. Those are completely different things. It can be helpful to set a timer for the amount of time you want to spend on a task before you start it. When the timer goes off, you have information that can help you with time estimation on future tasks. Did the task take longer than expected? Shorter?
3. Build a Calendar Habit That’s Easy to Use
Students with time blindness need to develop the habit of putting everything in a calendar — assignments, appointments, practice, work hours, social commitments — and checking it daily. Preferably at the same time each day.
The calendar is an external brain for time. It doesn’t forget things, distort time, or tell you the due date is next week when it’s actually tomorrow. This strategy pairs well with strategy #2 (pair alarms and timers) because digital calendars allow you to attach an alarm to events you create.
Here are my best strategies for using Google Calendar for school.
4. Set reminders strategically
Reminders work best when they give you enough lead time to actually do something. A reminder that pops up five minutes before class starts is useless if you’re still in your dorm room.
The strategy is to build in buffer. How? Set reminders earlier than feels necessary. Also, try setting reminders that are connected to actions you need to take in order to achieve the larger thing on time. For example, if class starts at 9:00 AM, it would be more helpful to set a timer for when you need to start getting ready, and another one for the latest you can leave the house by.
5. Build Consistent Work and Study Routines
Routines reduce the number of decisions you have to make about time. When you do your homework at the same time and in the same place every day, you stop negotiating with yourself about when to start.
That moment of negotiation is where time blindness does its worst damage.
A consistent routine essentially automates the decision, which means you spend less mental energy making the decision and more energy doing the thing.
To support time blindness, it can be helpful to plan study sessions right up against a non-negotiable event or appointment. For example, if you have a soccer game at 5:30 PM, plan a homework or study session from 3:30-4:45. This gives you a hard stopping point that prevents you from losing track of time (as long as you set an alarm).
Pro tip: If you’re in college, don’t underestimate the value of the time in between your classes. Here are my suggestions for maximizing this time.
6. Deliberately Practice Estimating Time
Time estimation is a skill, and like any skill, it gets stronger with practice.
Before you start a task, write down how long you think it will take. Then track how long it actually takes you. Compare the two numbers. That difference between predicted and actual time is valuable information you can use the next time you have to complete a similar task.
Note: Most students with time blindness underestimate how long tasks take, so if you write down “20 minutes,” you might start budgeting 35 and see what happens. Over time, your estimates get more accurate.
Example:
- You have 30 math problems to do.
- You estimate they’ll take you 20 minutes to do.
- Knowing you regularly underestimate time, you will give yourself 35 minutes to do them.
- However, after doing them, you realize they took you an hour and 15 minutes (75 minutes)
- The next time you have 30 math problems to do, you give yourself 75 minutes to do them.
How to Get Better at Estimating Time
I have a full podcast episode on how to get better at estimating how long things take to complete. It goes deeper into the science of why time estimation is so hard for students with ADHD and walks through a concrete process for getting better at it. Get the time estimation podcast episode (and video) here.
Final Notes About Time Blindness and ADHD
Time blindness is real, it’s common in students with ADHD, and it affects nearly every part of your academic life.
The good news is that once you recognize time blindness in yourself, you can move onto using strategies that support you.
The strategies above (clocks, timers, calendars, reminders, routines, and deliberate practice) work because they make time external and visible. The key is to create external systems support a perception that sometimes works against us.
Start with one strategy from the list above. Get consistent with it. Then add another. And another. That’s how we get better at anything.
