🧠 Help for Time Blind ADHDers

So whether you’re a parent, a teacher, or an ADHD coach trying to help a student with time blindness, this is a real thing. It’s a real issue.

I’m going to share something that a father sent me. It’s right here — I’ll show it to you in just a moment. Basically, in one of my coaching programs called Momentum, for kids with executive function challenges, one of the things I do is one-to-one appointments. Students and parents can set up a one-to-one session, and before the appointment I ask them, “What do you want to focus on during the session?”

In this particular session, I’m going to show you exactly, word for word, what the father wrote:

“Improve ability to keep track of time. Time blindness. Usable tools for my son to track periods of time. Traditional reminders and memo tasks, etc., not working.”

So we’re doing the session, chatting about different things, and eventually we get to this. I said, “Okay, let’s talk about this keeping-track-of-time comment that you wrote in here.”

When I first read this before we even had the session, I had to chuckle a little because of the last sentence: “Traditional reminders and memo tasks, etc., not working.”

And here’s my thing about that: there are not non-traditional things that are magically going to work.

Okay?

We have to understand that the brain is developing. This front part of the brain — the prefrontal cortex, the frontal lobe, the front third or so of the brain — as far as executive function is concerned, helps us track time realistically.

And if you’re like me and you have executive function challenges or ADHD, time blindness is a real thing. It can be very difficult to gauge and calibrate a realistic sense of how long something is going to take or how long something actually is.

Often students underestimate or overestimate how long things will take.

Now, in my methodology, I do teach a certain way of planning that helps with this, but it doesn’t fix it. It doesn’t solve it. It doesn’t magically go away. The brain is developing.

So the funny thing here is that the traditional ways — the traditional reminders — are really where it’s at. Sadly… or maybe not sadly, but realistically. The brain is developing. It takes time. It takes practice.

This doesn’t just happen in one month, two months, or even three months of practicing. This takes a long time. The brain is developing. Neurons are firing. They’re wiring.

So the traditional things matter.

I love simple, cheap timers like this. You can buy multipacks and put them all over the house. I love timers like this one — this one’s pretty cool because you turn it to different sides and it automatically sets for 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 25 minutes, whatever you want.

I love sticky notes. I love putting a note in the middle of the floor or on the door as you’re walking out of the house. These traditional things.

It’s not that those things aren’t working.

That’s why, as I read this, my challenge to them was: Is the tool really not working?

What they want is an improved ability to keep track of time. That’s fair. That’s important. That’s necessary.

They want usable tools for their son to track time, but they say traditional ones are not working. The reality is that the usable tools are the basic tools we already know. There’s nothing special. There’s nothing magical out there.

You’re not going to find some magical app, magical apparatus, or magical system that suddenly solves this problem.

It is basic, simple, traditional, boring, unsexy, regular tools:

• calendars

• schedules

• to-do lists

• notes

• sticky notes

• timers

• asking people to remind you

• setting reminders on your devices

• using devices to announce reminders

That’s really it.

Now, what I want to make very clear — and this is the most important part of this lesson — by the way, my name is Seth Perler at sethperler.com and executivefunctionsummit.com. I’ve been doing executive function coaching since the beginning of the industry. I love my work. Check out my site, grab a freebie, all the things. Leave a like, comment, whatever.

The thing I want to leave you with is this:

It’s not a matter of traditional versus non-traditional tools.

It is a matter of building a reliable — triple underline reliable — system for practicing the use of the tools.

Okay?

Behind me I have three guitars. They’re all different, but they’re the same tool: a guitar. They all sound different, they all have different characteristics, but they’re still guitars.

Just like timers, sticky notes, calendars — they’re all tools.

Now, I can buy a super expensive guitar and that doesn’t make me know how to play guitar.

I can go to three guitar lessons and that still doesn’t make me know how to play guitar.

This takes time.

The brain is learning how to create music on the instrument.

Some of the most popular guitars on the planet are actually old traditional guitars — 1950s Telecasters, Stratocasters, Gibsons. You may not know what I’m talking about, but some of your favorite musicians collect and play these old traditional tools.

So you have to build a system — a system designed to practice using the time-management tool over and over and over until you can effectively use it.

I’ll give you two simple ideas here.

For guitar, if I want to practice and get good at it, I make it easy to access. I have ADHD. If the guitar is locked away in a case and there’s friction involved, it’s harder for me to do it.

So I keep the guitars out in the open.

I have my amplifier right there. My picks are right there. My guitar tools are right there. My songbook collection is right over there.

Everything is easy to grab.

Now if you look behind me, you’ll also see pens, pencils, and things I use daily. Behind the plants I have sticky notes, note cards, and different writing tools. I have whiteboards everywhere. I have markers everywhere. I have timers everywhere — timers on the refrigerator, magnetic timers around the house.

I’ve created systems:

• systems for playing guitar

• systems for using time-management tools

And that’s the takeaway I want you to leave with:

How can you — ideally with buy-in and ownership from your child, because otherwise they won’t execute much on it — create systems that reduce friction and make it easy to use these traditional tools?

Again, it’s not that the tool isn’t working.

The tool works fine.

The person simply does not yet have a system for practicing the use of the tool.

So think in those terms:

• What system have we built?

• Is everything random and chaotic?

• Or is it structured in a way that reduces friction and makes practice easy?

It takes a long time to get good at any tool in any domain you can think of.

Do we have a system that makes it easy?

Make what’s hard easier.

Do we have a system that makes it easy?

My name is Seth Perler at sethperler.com and executivefunctionsummit.com. The summit is coming up before you know it — year eight.

Hope to see you there.

And if you like my work, share it around.

Be well. Wishing you peace, joy, and connection with the people you care about.

Take care.