← Overcoming Distractions-Thriving with ADHD, ADD
Overcoming Distractions-Thriving with ADHD, ADD
Reducing Time Blindness for High-Performing ADHD Professionals
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I'm Dave Greenwood and this is Overcoming Distractions. If you are an adult with adhd, a busy professional, an entrepreneur, a high achiever, or just need some strategies to navigate your adult adhd, you're in the right place. Who am I? I'm an entrepreneur with ADHD and the author of two books, Overcoming Distract and Overcoming Burnout. I coach and mentor people just like you, and together we navigate the ups and downs of adult adhd, from getting out of our own way to helping people just like you thrive in the workplace. That's what I do. Want more info on working with me? Hit overcoming distractions.com ready? Let's get to today's podcast. All right, everybody, welcome back.
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It is Dave and you are listening to another action packed episode of Overcoming Distractions. I thank you for joining us and me once again. And if you have been here before, you know this is the place for the busy professional that has ADHD or if you think you have adhd. So welcome back. We chat and problem solve about the things that might be challenging to us that we struggle with. And we try to, like I say, problem solve about how we can make things a little more fulfilling and a little less stressful and maybe we can thrive a little bit and enjoy our weeks and not claw our way to Friday, right? So hey, we're gonna talk about something that I know many of us have a challenge with and that's the topic of time blindness. And again, as you know, or if I can refresh you, I'm not a doctor, I'm not a therapist, I'm not a psychologist. I am an entrepreneur with adhd. I'm a former executive of a very large nonprofit. I ran a public relations firm for many years and still do to some extent. So my experience and a lot of what we discuss is street smart, real life lived, as well as from the people like you who have entrusted me with your time to work one on one. So if you are that person who needs somebody by your side who understands you, who gets you, who understands and has been through some of the challenges that you are experiencing, just hit Overcoming Distractions Calm. That's my website. Book a 15 minute chat with me and see if we are a good fit. And what we do is we work together on a regular basis to solve some problems and figure stuff out. So and if you have enjoyed the podcast in any way, you can always go to buy me a coffee.com overcoming D and you can buy me one coffee, five coffees, 10 coffees. And as I've said before, I live on coffee and I don't even speak to anybody in the morning until I've had my coffee. So. All right, we got that out of the way. Let's talk about when time slips away from us, right? Because I don't care if you're a, you know, a young kid, a college kid, or you are the CEO, the cfo, the chief marketing officer, you're an entrepreneur running a small business, anywhere in between. If you are that busy professional, then you have probably experienced to some extent time literally slipping through your hands, right? It's like that funnel, that thing like you, you drain your pasta in, right? I swear to God, you have that kind of visual of time just literally, you know, disappearing into thin air. So, and, and I know, I've been there. And, and I think many of us, we look at our calendar first thing in the morning, we have great intentions, we're confident we're gonna crush our, you know, top two or three goals or objectives for the day, right? Hey, all of a sudden it's 12 noon, half your to do's are still untouched. You don't even know how you're going to get them done. Maybe it's all of them. Maybe you got completely derailed somehow and we don't know how it happened or another scenario that I know is common and believe me, been there, done that is like you go to jump on something that might take 15 minutes, right? And then all of a sudden, two or three hours later, guess what, you're still there. So. And again, this can be anybody. This can be at the, the highest level of your organization. You can be in sales, you can be wherever you are in an organization. If you're that busy person, then you've probably experienced this. So. And I think for those of us with adhd, it, it does. It's not a lack of effort, right? It's not a lack of effort. I mean, we got really good intentions, but it's time blindness. And it's, you know, that cognitive experience that is like for some reason deeply rooted in our ADHD brain and it's kind of how some of us process time. Now I'm gonna full disclosure here is, have I experienced this? Yes, I have definitely experienced this, but I don't think I've experienced it to the level that other people have. ADHD is a spectrum, as, as I like to say. But I grew up in a military family and we were on time for everything. And I think just over time growing up, this concept of time, quite frankly, was just beaten into my head. You know, so. But that tells me we can learn about time and compensate for it. Right. So have I experienced it? Yes. Are others out there like you maybe having a bit more challenge with time? Absolutely. So, but what's really happening, and I dug into this a little bit because I said I'm not a psychologist, I'm not a doctor. Okay. And I think there's, there's a few things going on here that I think kind of relate to how we can kind of understand this. And I think first of all, at the basic level is like, this is kind of like a, you know, just a difference in our brain. Right. I guess they call it a neurobiological difference, but I think some of the research in this area has shown that there's like, differences in the brain areas that are responsible for our executive functions and time. You know, that's the prefrontal cortex. You know, if you've done any type of research on your own adhd, you realize that pretty much the, the prefund prefrontal cortex is, is kind of running our world. Right. And that's the region of the brain that kind of manages our, a whole host of executive functions. So dopamine. Right. Okay. If, if you, if you've done any reading on adhd, you know that, you know, our, the word of the day always is dopamine. Right. And how we, how we get motivated, how we, you know, walk into a room and remember why we went there. Right. It's timing. You know, dopamine is that neurotransmitter that we, that we need. And it's dysregulated in those of us with adhd, which means sometimes our internal clock isn't like other folks. So. And many times those of us struggle with estimating how long something may take. That's everything from a project to, you know, the, our travel time from the office to home. Right. Okay. How long we spend somewhere. So. And then there's something that Russell Barkley, he's like a giant in the ADHD world, if you haven't heard of him. He's done a ton of research. Psychologist with a lot of credibility. He coined the phrase temporal myopia. And that kind of describes our ADHD tendency to struggle with future time that involves deadlines, that involves like that kind of long term planning that many of us struggle with. And I think sometimes for the ADHD brain, some things just seem too kind of far away. Right? This is, it's a measurable difference in how time is perceived and literally coded into our brain. Right. So let's, you know, and. And let's get something straight. You know, we're not bad with time because we don't care, right? Our brains are just kind of, you know, firing a little differently, and those signals are a little differently. So. And that is why. And we've talked about this before, but when it comes to time blindness, I think this can help minimize or mitigate some of the challenges with time. Is that visual structure, everything needs to be in our face. And if you are challenged with time and you're listening to this and you're saying, yeah, that's totally me, I recognize this, then we need to kind of build a case for that visual structure, and we'll get into that in a second. But some of the costs of this in your. In your role, whether you're a business owner, you're, you know, in, you know, an executive in some level or, you know, or just in a demanding career, is we live reactively, right. Our weeks go by instead of being more intentional. Our strategic thinking is kind of crushed by urgency. Right? Hey, I'm urgent. I win. I mean, think about it. I mean, there's. There's a few things that sum up adhd, and I think kind of like the urgent, you know, if you went to college, university, and you were the ones that stayed up till four in the morning writing that paper that was due the next morning, you know what I'm talking about? About urgency, you know, stressed energy from constant switching of things like context or tasks. Right? And then the people around us, our teams, our family, they can get strained, those relationships, I think, because of the way we shift our timelines. So. And I think maybe we can kind of reframe this a little bit and maybe we're not so much bad at time is putting up the. The guardrails and the structure with maybe some kind of visual structure, visual aids, things that help us protect ourselves from our time blindness. Right. So. So let's talk. I know you've heard me talk about this before, but it really is one of the things that has been a game changer for me, running a business or being an executive and having people under me that reported to me is. Is the ability to just block out those chunks. Time. Call it time blocking. I don't care what you call it, okay? But I am convinced that long stretches of time. You can define long all you want, okay? It can be two hours. It can be an entire day, which is a super. You know, that's my, my type of thing. It is. It's your Best friend. Okay. And maybe it's not so much. Rigid scheduling is a, is a visual reminder in your calendar that like you've made a decision right in advance that these are the times that I'm going to actually get shit done. And what I mean by this is maybe is a smart approach is using categories instead of like minute by minute micromanagement. I love to call them theme days. I've talked about this before. I think I did an entire episode on it and maybe we need to do another one again because it's been a while, but when I was running my PR firm and I had people under me and we had a bunch of big clients, I figured out that the only way that I could get meaningful work done is to kind of build theme days where I did kind of the same thing, the same type of thing for an entire day. I know many of us can have difficulties getting away with that, but that was my goal, so. But some of the categories, whether it's blocked out time or an entire day, is that deep work that you need to get done. Meetings, for me, I love to get all my meetings done in like an entire day rather than sprinkling them. I know some people with ADHD don't like that because their brain explodes, right? Other categories can be administrative tasks, right? The kind of bullshit that we hate doing that just has to get done. Maybe it's strategic thinking or planning or etc. Etc. Maybe it's like you got to write this proposal for a client and you really need to not only do some research, but make it look good and sound good, right? And then there's kind of those recovery times, whatever that may be. Maybe it's Friday afternoons where there's no meetings or it's just kind of open ended where you can just kind of get your shit back together. But I do believe, and I'll say it again, that when we can do the same types of things for long stretches of time, it does provide those conditions for being in flow, not hyper focus flow, where things are just going. You're, you're not making mistakes, you're being creative. Maybe you're a little bit challenged that, that, that is flow to me. So. And doing all the types of things that I just listed in one day is, is sometimes difficult for the ADHD brain. So that's why we need to build in buffers. We need to maybe build in some overflow blocks to maybe catch up a little bit. And I think we also, and hear me out, plan for reality and not perfection. Not every Week is going to go exactly as planned. I think we know that by now, but I think we just need to keep telling ourselves this. So how can we do this? These are some of the things that I've tried to do and I continue to kind of reshape over and over again because your commitments change, projects change, etc. Etc. Think of this as kind of like maybe it's a weekly template where you kind of set up, okay, I'm going to do meetings and this type of work Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, but I'm not going to do any meetings or I'm going to have blocked out time. Mondays and Fridays, whatever the case may be. You pick your day, I don't care. Maybe it's like Wednesdays, there is one meeting that I have to go to, maybe it's a company meeting or whatever, but the rest of the day is free. Okay, cool. Maybe we can work around that. Also we've talked about this is. Maybe it's not so much a clock or time based planning, but I'm a big fan of planning around energy. Right? We can't, I've said this before, I'll say it a thousand more times. We can't really talk about time management without discussing energy because just because something in your is in your calendar doesn't mean it's going to get done. And you know that and I'm telling you again. So. But think about this for a moment. It really is a great exercise for you to just sit back, chill out, close your door and really think about what are the high focus or high energy times that I'm really sharp. You know, for me it's mornings. It's that first half of the day up till probably like 2 o' clock or so. Then I begin to kind of, you know, my energy starts to go down. You need to identify the low energy ones. You got to know when, when it's going to be a little more challenging to actually do work. And then you got to kind of match what you want to do with that type of energy level. I've done this, I continue to do it. I continue to kind of bob and weave a little bit to try, you know, figure this out. This isn't a, you know, let's just set it and forget it. Things are going to change, life is going to change. High energy is those things like strategy. Maybe it's writing because I was in, you know, PR for many years, a lot of writing, complex decisions, thinking about again, things that, you know, how to better your company or your department or etcetera Etc. Problem solving for, for clients. When you have kind of a medium level of energy, maybe it is meetings, right? Maybe it's time to collaborate individually with other people in your, your company or your organization. And then I think low energy, maybe it is those admin tasks that we hate doing. Maybe it's email. I know a lot of us hate email. I mean, so many people come to me and say, I have like 10,000 emails in my Inbo. Right? Those types of things. But figure out what you can get done when you have high energy and when you have low energy. And I think creating those repeatable systems or just some type of awareness of where those energy spots are and the natural rhythms I think is a big win for us. The next thing I think we need to do when it comes to maybe a little bit of time blindness is we need to kind of understand how we transition between things. And I think that's kind of a, you know, some of us are challenged with that, right? We, we don't, sometimes some of us don't do well stringing things together. And that's kind of where the, the time just kind of escapes us, right? We struggle with switching. So maybe it's starting to kind of figure out how you're gonna give yourself like a five minute reset between meetings. It's right, the next kind of step down before leaving a certain task, right. To remind us that's that kind of visual thing that helps us maybe stay a little better on track with our time. You know, the basics, stand up, move around a little bit, hydrate, go outside real quick, just get some fresh air. And I also think that, and I know this is tough for people, but if you can, to the extent you can close like unrelated tabs on your computer that don't pertain to the next type of thing that you're going to do because guess where your time is going to just literally evaporate. It's when you go down that rabbit hole, right? Okay. And then I think also those visual cues. Can we keep a cleaner desk or that cleaner computer screen? Right? Because we, we tend to again, that rabbit hole where something is in our line of sight and then time just explodes on us. Okay. So also, you know, I learned this as well and maybe you've heard it before, but it's like landing and launch method. I'm not even sure where this came from, but like simply put, we need to, when we're working on something, we need to land the plane, right? And we need to kind of capture where we stopped and I think where that helps us with this time issue and time blindness. And I can clearly define this when writing books. And I would take days and days to literally I blocked out weeks sometimes to write the book. And the reason I did that is because if I stopped then it would take me an enormous amount of time to recapture and figure out where I left off. I had to retrace my steps and writing a book, as you can imagine, I. There's a lot of steps, so. And you're talking to people and interviewing people and trying to weave things together. So I had to capture where I stopped so I wouldn't waste a ridiculous amount of time retracing my steps. And then I think the launch part of that is we need to define that first action step for the next thing. Right. If we know anything about, you know, procrastination or motivation, when we can just step off the curb a little bit, we can take that tiny little step. It gets us going and then we don't waste as much time and then we don't enter that, that place of wherever in space, avoiding ridiculous amounts of time. So here's where I think we can minimize some mistakes, if you will, when it comes to time. Overfilling blocks scheduling to 100% capacity. I remember working with somebody and they, they took every 30 minute block and color coded it and put something different in there. And when I looked at this, my head was going to explode because there's no way we could commit to that. It was overwhelming. It was actually, it was stressful to look at. And I can imagine, I mean this person had the right idea of blocking out chunks of time, but not every little tiny second of it. So. And that's going to backfire. So the, the other mistake is like ignoring our, our energy and the good energy times and the bad energy times. And then I think another thing that I think we avoid sometimes is just not hitting the reset button, which can help us save time because we waste a ridiculous amount of time retracing our steps as, as you might imagine. I think the other thing is not having structure because the structure hopefully is going to reduce the decision fatigue. Right. I don't think it's gonna totally eliminate it, but again, we're talking real world here. So the more you have those guardrails and structures and routines in place, but understand flexibility, the less time I think we're going to waste. So think about this this week. Can you sit in a quiet room in your office? I don't care where it is, go to the coffee shop. Bring your calendar, whether that's your Google Calendar or whatever you use, and just open it up and start to figure out where can I, where can I kind of block out some large chunks of time? Where, where am I? Big energy, time frames, day parts, so to speak. And then maybe it's also try to build in like that transition type of ritual that we talked about. Okay. I mean, the other basic things at the, that the core level is obviously the timers, those types of things, setting a timer, like if you're in a meeting, all those things to help you protect yourself, which we've talked about, which some people laugh at, but they can save us the bottom line. Keep it simple and revisit these things weekly if at all possible. I highly recommend it. Just remember, time blindness when it comes to this stuff. It's not, you know, we're not broken. It's just the way our brain works. And the more we can build in some visual structure to help us not waste a ridiculous amount of time, the better. And I think when we can shape our week to the extent that we can, then I get, I gather that we're going to have a little bit more clarity. Okay. And think about this. There's only 24 hours in a day, right? We don't need more hours. We just need to structure them better and protect ourselves from just wasting a ridiculous amount of time. All right. Hey, if you need more help with this or other things, navigating the workplace, your business. I work with a number of people that I guess I would call high achievers, people in demanding careers, executives, business owners, anywhere in between. And we work together to solve problems and hopefully make things happen. Move the needle in your favor. Just hit overcoming distractions dot com, click the 15 minute button. Let's hop on Zoom. Let's meet each other and let's see if it is appropriate for us to work together. All right, gang, have a great week. We'll catch you next time.