My complicated relationship with time

On ADHD, time blindness, and learning to stop fighting the clock

I’ve spent most of my life fighting time. I struggle with it as a concept, fight against it as a limitation, and face off with it as an adversary every single day. This sounds overdramatic, but I wish I could help you understand how true it is—the way my mind fixates on, worries over, underestimates, and panics about time. I often imagine what a different person I’d be if I didn’t labor at this feud most hours of every day.

Last year I was officially diagnosed with ADHD. Learning the truth—that I’ve been neurodivergent my entire life—was not only a relief, it gave me the framework and tools to start observing and managing my relationship with time.

Some things I already understood about myself: I’d always been a stressed-out student and employee. My cycle was to overcommit, procrastinate, freak out, and ultimately deliver—nearly always with excellence, but never without anguish. I always had too much on my plate, and I frequently dropped the routine balls: paying bills on time, keeping up with household chores. If you asked me ten years ago how I was doing, I would probably have answered with some variation of overwhelmed, exhausted, stretched thin. I also would have said something like: “There just aren’t enough hours in the day.”

The paradox of modern busyness

Recently I was listening to an episode of the 10 Percent Happier podcast with the guest Michael Easter, author of Scarcity Brain. He pointed out that as humans, and especially as Americans, we now have more available time than ever in history. Most of the tasks we once labored over are automated or digitized. We have machines for everything, and computers handle the rest. We outsource more. Hunter-gatherer societies—the lifestyle humans lived for most of our existence—averaged just fifteen hours of “work” per week, with labor, family time, and leisure blending together. We’ve theoretically engineered even more efficiency than that.

And yet, we all feel busier than ever. There’s more demand on our time and attention, and a lot of us are suffering from anxiety, depression, and burnout because of it.

Easter’s argument is that it’s not that we have less time—it’s that we fill the time we do have with more things now. Our brains evolved to constantly seek, consume, and acquire because resources were once scarce. But now, with infinite options competing for our attention, that ancient wiring backfires. We don’t experience abundance as freedom; we experience it as pressure.

What I discovered about my own time blindness

Once I began to pay close attention to the way I mentally grapple with time, I discovered several interesting things:

I crave large, uninterrupted blocks of time. This is because of my ADHD superpower: hyperfocus, which allows me to lose myself in a project and become totally time-blind as I work. When I don’t have a large time block to work, I’m reluctant to start anything because I worry so much about being interrupted or not making enough progress.

Large, unstructured blocks of time also fill me with anxiety. An oxymoron, right? This happens because I start planning all the things I want to accomplish during this open period and begin fretting about using the time in the most productive way. I feel pressure to make the most of it but struggle to get started.

I overestimate how much I can actually do in a day. You should see my to-do lists in the morning. They’re optimistic. You might also call them delusional. So many things I want to polish off—I let myself list them all, even when I’m facing seven hours of meetings and know I’ll be wiped out by late afternoon. I also overestimate my store of energy, which runs down rapidly with the sun.

Zoning out is my mental buffer. Once I’m facing down the insane to-do list, my ADHD brain does the obvious thing: it wanders completely off the premises. This is when I habitually go down social media rabbit holes, tinker with the New York Times Spelling Bee, check TMZ (do not judge me), or just stare at the computer screen while my mind strolls away to greener pastures. The discipline it takes to recognize I’ve unraveled and reel myself back in is considerable.

Making friends with time (sort of)

Friends and family have been asking me lately how I’ve been making so much progress with my writing on top of a full-time job and everything else. My honest answer is that I’ve found so much joy in my writing—not just as a craft but as an endeavor—that I’ve begun treating it like a business: setting goals, managing projects, and building long-term plans toward creating and publishing fiction.

But it’s also required me, in the middle of my life, to transform my hate-hate relationship with time. Time and I have had to come to an understanding. I can’t do it without her, but we need to be on healthier terms. I don’t think we’ll ever be best friends, but we can be congenial colleagues.

I think we can make it work. Here are some things I’m trying:

I create structure where there isn’t any. I take a big expanse of a day and divide it into short blocks, mapping them out in my paper planner. I use a green marker to check off each block once I’ve completed it. There’s something almost embarrassingly satisfying about that green checkmark—proof that I stayed inside the container I built for myself. This eliminates anxiety about falling behind or missing something.

I use timers. Setting a timer is the best way to get started on a new task, but it also helps me relax into my hyperfocus without worrying I’m going to miss my next meeting. The timer becomes a guardrail, not a constraint.

I pare down my to-do list to the next three things. I still let myself make my out-of-control to-do list every morning, but then I pick the three most important things to focus on first. This lets me stay present and direct my attention to the highest-priority items without anxiety about not ticking off the list faster. When I’ve finished the three, I pick three more.

I schedule breaks when I know I’ll need them. Around 2:30 or 3 in the afternoon, my energy always flags. Instead of fighting it, I’m trying to allow myself time to rest: to close my eyes for twenty minutes, take a walk, read a book, or just zone out. The first few times I did this, I felt guilty—like I was stealing from my future self. But after a break, I come back for an hour or two with renewed energy to finish the day. Turns out my future self is always grateful.

The gift of contained time

Here’s the strange alchemy of my ADHD brain: the same hyperfocus that makes me lose track of hours can be a superpower—if I set it up right. When I give myself a dedicated block where I know I won’t be interrupted, something shifts. I stop fighting time and start disappearing into it. The writing comes easier. The internal narrator who usually chirps you should be doing something else finally shuts up.

I’ve learned I can’t always manufacture this state at home, where the laundry silently judges me and my email pings with false urgency. So I take myself to a café for a couple of hours, order something with too much caffeine, and let the ambient noise become a kind of cocoon.

Even better are group write-ins—those dedicated quiet focus sessions where a bunch of writers show up and then ignore each other for two hours. Something about the silent accountability of other people doing the same hard thing makes the time feel protected.

These blocks have become non-negotiable. Not because I’m disciplined (I’m really not), but because I’ve finally accepted that my brain needs a container to do its best work. The container isn’t a limitation. It’s the thing that sets me free.