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Summary
You said you'd "just tidy the side" at 11 o'clock. You look up and it's half past one, the kitchen looks worse than when you started, and you genuinely can't account for the last two hours. In this episode, Heather Tingle talks about time blindness. A genuine, documented part of how many ADHD brains work. Drawing on her own experience of starting ADHD medication and noticing, for the first time, what time feels like when it isn't "bendy." She breaks down the three ways time blindness shows up in decluttering and daily life: losing hours to a task with no sense of time passing, avoiding tasks because they feel far longer than they actually take, and "waiting mode".... the habit of doing nothing before an appointment so you don't lose track of time. Heather explains why this isn't a discipline problem, why generic productivity advice (yes, including all those planners and the Pomodoro technique) hasn't worked for you, and shares practical, decluttering-specific ways to work with it instead of fighting it.
What you'll walk away with
- Why time blindness is different from poor time management, and why productivity advice hasn't worked for you
- The three ways time blindness shows up: the "Bermuda triangle of time," the overestimation trap, and waiting mode
- Why a visible, physical timer works where phone timers don't
- How timing a task once (like putting laundry away) can chip away at the "everything feels bigger than it is" feeling
- Why setting a hard "leave by" time works better than a vague window before an appointment
- How accountability — a lift arriving at your cutoff time, or body doubling — can anchor your sense of time passing
- The one habit to take away that interrupts all three patterns
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Time Blindness and Its Impact
02:17 Common Patterns of Time Misjudgment in Daily Life
04:10 Time Blindness vs. Time Management: Key Differences
06:03 Three Common Patterns in Time Blindness
07:28 Overcoming the Overestimation of Task Duration
08:52 Waiting Mode and Its Hidden Costs
10:41 Practical Tools: Timers and Deadlines
12:22 Using Time Awareness to Reduce Clutter and Anxiety
14:13 Accountability and Body Doubling Strategies
15:10 Final Tips and Encouragement for Managing Time Blindness
Visual timer (Amazon Affiliate link)
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