For people with executive functioning challenges, time doesn’t flow in neat bundles of minutes and hours
Temima glances at her watch as she hops around her bedroom tugging at the shoe hanging from her foot. Her dentist appointment is in 60 minutes. If she leaves now, that should give her plenty of time to get there. She hobbles into the kitchen, other shoe in hand, and notices a work email from last week that she hasn’t answered yet. “This should only take a minute,” she reasons as she plops herself onto her kitchen chair.
Twenty minutes later, she rises from her seat. “Where did I put my keys?” she murmurs to herself, eyes darting around the room. Ten minutes pass until she locates them on the sink in her bathroom. Her eyes unwillingly land on her watch and inform her that she has 30 minutes to get there. “If I leave now, I can just make it.”
She darts out the door to her car. As she turns onto Main street, the Starbucks sign tantalizingly appears in her rearview mirror. She pulls into the drive-through, certain that this will only take a minute, even as she sees a string of cars lined up in front of her. Twelve minutes later she is on her way. Beads of sweat begin to form on her forehead as she increases the pressure on the gas pedal, says a kapitel of Tehillim, and wills her GPS to indicate that traffic has cleared (she hasn’t factored in time for traffic). To her utter dismay, she arrives 30 minutes late, is charged a hefty co-payment, and is asked to reschedule.
One of the hallmarks of executive functioning challenges so common to people with ADHD is difficulty noticing and feeling the passage of time. This phenomenon is known as time blindness, but can also be called time optimism. For people with executive functioning challenges, time doesn’t flow in neat bundles of minutes and hours. Everything seems to run together in an unpredictable, continuous flow, making it difficult to accurately gauge the passage of time.
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