All of this. But also: you can use this information once you have it.
One of the biggest breakthroughs for me in living more comfortably with my adhd happened years before I was actually diagnosed, when I finally grasped the meta concept that my brain doesn’t understand time. That I could not trust myself to make estimates of how long something would take, especially “low value” tasks like commuting to work (I mean, it wouldn’t be FAIR for it to take more than, oh, five minutes, right?) or “high value” takes that absorb me (I reeeeallly want to work on that craft project, I can finish it up in five minutes and then do the other stuff, right?
So I started timing everything.
Seriously. I timed my journey to work from front door to desk, and I wrote that number down. It took a few goes, because I forgot to check the timer when I arrived the first couple of times, but once I had a number, I added ten minutes. Then I subtracted that total from the time I needed to arrive at work.
Then I wrote that new time down and said, “this is the time I need to leave the house to go to work”, and set an alarm every day for that time.
The alarm helped, but more than anything it was the act of doing the cold hard numbers calculation. Of looking at that time (8.20 AM if you’re wondering) written down and learning it like a New Fact, visualising it in my head: 8.20 is when I leave the house for work. Even if my brain is whispering that SURELY that’s too early.
Then I did the same thing for a bunch of other stuff. Other journeys. The washing up. Having breakfast. And over time I got two things out of it:
1. I amassed a little collection of Time Facts that I don’t have to think about any more because I’ve learned them by heart. I know what time to leave the house to get to the appointment because it’s maths I’ve already done, I just have to grab the appropriate number from my mental list.
2. I got better at estimating time in general, because I could compare known times to new ones (do I think this task takes as long as the washing up? Longer? Shorter?)
3. The combination of 1 and 2. slowly gave me back a sense of trust in myself. I didn’t have to be in waiting mode all the time because I knew that I had a concrete time when I had to leave for X, and I would often set an alarm for it, and that until then I could let go and get on with things.
It doesn’t work perfectly or fix everything. I am still very familiar with “can’t do anything because I have a thing at 3”. There are still times I get too absorbed or forget an alarm or drastically underestimate how long something takes. But overall, just having the basic self knowledge of “I can’t instinctively estimate time so I have to do it by recording hard data and memorising that” was a game-changer. I hope it helps someone else.
(And if it doesn’t, remember that you’re fighting against the current on this one, and it’s not your fault if you can’t get far upstream. This is a “here is something that worked for me” post, not an “anyone could get past this if they tried” post.)