Dr. Michaela Thorderson

Dr. K's idea of timing yourself is one of my favorite tips to better learn how to manage your time.

You can do this by timing yourself for the whole project or you can do it by timing yourself in increments.

Both strategies are helpful because it's really useful to know how long is it really gonna take me to get something done.

With ADHD, we look at tasks and we're like, oh my God, it's gonna be so much work.

And we overestimate how much effort and time it's gonna take us, which ends up leading to lots of procrastination.

I don't know how many things I've had to do on my to-do list.

I'm like, oh, it's going to take forever.

It's going to take forever.

I put it off for months and then I get to it and it takes me 10 minutes.

Do I learn from that?

Not often.

And these strategies can help, right?

Because then instead of looking at that and being like, oh my God, it's going to take hours.

I can look at a task and say, hey, I don't like that task.

And it's only going to take me 15 minutes if I can just get it done.

On the flip side, for tasks that do take longer periods of time, it can be really helpful to set smaller increments.

Any two hour task is going to be, at least in my opinion, a little bit overwhelming to get started with.

And so it's helpful for me to look at, okay, what can I get done in 10 minutes of time?

So that that way it's easier for me to approach because I can think, oh, this is all that I need to do.

Or you can think about, well,

I only have 10 minutes right now, and 10 minutes is still a meaningful amount of productivity to be able to be kind of like working away at that bigger picture.

Learning how much time things takes us is much easier because when we think about what we need to get done, instead of thinking, oh yeah, that's fast, or oh, that's going to take forever, I can think concretely about how

the amount of time.

So instead of relying on my sometimes impaired internal clock, I'm relying on my logic and learning about the facts about how much time things are going to take me.

Part of having ADHD is getting distracted.

You can map out routines or tasks to the exact number of minutes that it's going to take you and still almost every time below that time.

And you think to yourself over and over, how is it that this took me an hour and a half when I knew it was supposed to take me an hour?

And the reason for that is we didn't factor in any cushions for distractions.

So let's think about a specific routine, right?

Morning routines, we all do it.

We all have to get up, get ready and get on with our days.

We know exactly what we need to do every morning.

It's a pretty predictable experience.

And so you can break down that routine into really specific increments of time.

It takes me how many minutes to get dressed, brush my teeth, wash my face, use the restroom, right?

I love my electric toothbrush because it times it for me.

I don't have to think about it, I just know it takes two minutes, two and a half minutes, right?

I know exactly how many active minutes a morning routine takes me.

However, every morning, without fail, I manage to get distracted too.

So I'm doing something and, oh look, a text message.

Or I'm brushing my teeth and wait a second...

Do I need to be doing something with my eyebrow?

So we need those cushions to account for the fact that we can reliably expect ourselves to be distracted.

So if you are somebody who gets mildly distracted or slightly off task, you might factor in like five, 10 extra minutes of cushion into that morning routine.

If you're someone who is real slow moving in the morning or someone who is really highly distracted or has a very distractible environment in the morning, you might build in more like 15 to 20 minutes

So often, time blindness is so excruciating or confusing for us that we get really focused on what we're trying to do.

And it's a lot of effort to stay focused and stay on track and go step to step to step.

What we then think about afterwards is the impact it has downstream, right?

And a lot of those times, those impacts are social in nature.

So I get so distracted in my morning.

I'm late every day, even though I try so hard.

And what that ends up doing is creating resentments or kind of like feelings in my coworkers.

We needed you here on time.

We needed you at the start of this meeting.

That can generate anxiety in me.

I'm like, ah, what's it gonna be like when I get to work?

Ah, I'm not sure if I'm doing this well.

We can also think about tasks around the house that take a lot of time or more time than were anticipated.

And then we have frustrated partners and roommates.

We can think about social events, right?

Where we're expected to be somewhere at the start of an event or we made dinner reservations for 6.30.

So we get there at 6.45 or 7 and now we have a really frustrated and probably pretty hungry party of friends who are kind of like, why did I invite you in the first place, Dr. Michaela, right?

Time blindness is hard in and of itself for us, but then layering on top of that, the people creates all these complicated ripples for us.