152 - Why We MUST Externalize Time

If you have done your deep dive on ADHD, then you know that time blindness is a serious issue for us adults with ADHD. Today we are going to talk about the importance of externalizing time and I'll share my method for doing so. I'm curious, how do you externalize time for yourself? Let me know! 

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Transcript

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I want to talk about time. I why is it that the concept of eternity, it's really easy for me to grasp when I have to do things like the dishes? Like I can feel internally what eternity, like an eternal hell, might actually feel like. And it's why I never seem to have time to do the dishes. Let's crack the mystery of time. You are listening to ADHD Big Brother, the podcast for adults struggling with their ADHD and comorbid depression symptoms. I'm your host, Russ Jones, author of The Standing to the Top, believer that you can actually have a smile in your life despite this diagnosis. So let's make some sense out of the struggle. Let's learn some stuff. Let's laugh at some stuff. Ladies and gentlemen, here's some stuff. And welcome to the podcast. Welcome. I one and all. My goodness, it's been a rough couple of uh weeks. My first experience with COVID, thank you very much. That was pretty suctastical. Uh I'm starting to feel better, but man, my energy's pretty zapped. Yeah, and it's wreaked havoc on my mental health. So let's just do this mental health update. Uh get that out of the way. If you're new here, every week I give a quick update on my mental health. It's like a way to embrace talking about our skull spaghetti. Like the good, the bad, and the weird. Like, let's normalize talking about this bullshit. So my mental health, it was wasn't great this week. Getting over COVID, I get really down on myself when I uh when I don't have much energy. Like it's easy for me for me to feel like I'm a lazy turd. Like, am I really too sick to get out of bed? Or am I kind of really just leaning into this as a valid excuse for not doing anything? So I struggle to be cool with myself uh when I'm lethargic and the output's low. But I also didn't get to see my kids for probably a week and a half because I was six, and that just kicks me in the ass mood-wise. So, but on the positive side of things, I had a uh a good walk with my buddy Brian and uh hanging out with my kids this weekend. Now it's made me feel pretty hopeful, pretty good. So let's say this. Let's say initially it started things started out sucking, and I'm closing out the week feeling a bit better. So we are trending in the right direction. Very good. I do have an announcement to make. I'm really digging putting on these webinars. These are super fun for me. And so this month I've put together a workshop specifically to get us through the brain dump and into actionable next steps. So it's it's gonna be an experience that we go through together. Uh, we'll brain dump together, then we'll organize that brain dump, then we'll prioritize it, and we'll have those actionable next steps. And I tested this with a community member, uh, and this process, which seems like it would take all day, can be done in less than an hour. And I know it can be done because we dunned it. We jitterized it. And so it's it's much easier to do when you do it with other people. So if you'd like to sign up for this as a paid workshop, the link will be in the show notes. And then for those of you that are members of the community, it's no additional cost. I'll just shoot you the link if you wanna if you want to come. So why is time such a hard thing for us to wrap our heads around? You've most likely already heard like that uh how ADHD years are time blind. We don't have a strong internal time mechanism thingy. Uh things that take 10 minutes might feel internally like they take hours, and things that take long to accomplish might feel like they're, you know, quote unquote really quick. And that's one reason why we might procrastinate on uh simple tasks. Because we just don't have the time for it right now. Or this is also why we might be late to appointments, because we don't always factor in the minutia of getting ready, or we think, oh yeah, I'll just well, I just gotta water the plants real quick, or I just need to answer these couple of emails, then I'm out the door. Our concept of time is spotty. One case in point is this workshop I was just talking about. I wanted to test it on a community member because it seemed like it would take way too long. And we blasted through it. It's just that it's a really shitty task. So, like the vibe is that it'll take way too long. A metaphor that I think is really helpful, uh, that works with this is uh for time, is uh the it's the metaphor of traveling down a river. Like time is this river, and when we can see clearly, we get a sense of how fast the boat's gonna be traveling, we can see the destination up ahead and the distance, so we can gauge about how long it'll take us to get there. But with ADHD, it's like the river's caked with this really thick fog. So we can't see the end destination, we can barely see in front of us, we only have the idea of it, and we don't really know how fast the boat's going because we're inside of this really heavy fog. There's no ability to discern time. And with the fog, it's impossible to stay the course, right? So we keep bumping up against like distractions. Let's call them the giant logs in the river that we smash into from time to time that take us off course. They wreck our metaphorical boat, they leave us stranded in the water, floating down time, with like trying to float our way, and then ultimately we pass our destination, and that's why we're late for the appointment. So, what to do? What to do? Um, on an episode about time blindness, I think you should already know that I'm gonna talk about timers. There's just no way to get around this. I, and it is the greatest system for untime blinderizing. It's ourselves. That's a real word. You don't have to Google it, you just go with it, trust me. Um, it sounds like it's a real word, doesn't it? Untime blinderized. I would say that the biggest takeaway that I've gotten from like the years of ADHD, like learning and training and studying and blah, blah, blah. It's that externalizing is the global answer to ADHD. We don't keep things in our head, we don't have the working memory for it. And this goes with planning, it goes with our accountability, and it goes with time, it goes with everything. So, how might you externalize your time? I'll tell you how I do it, but there's not one way to do a thing. I have done my dishes well over a thousand of times. I know conceptually about how long it takes, depending on how how long I've let it go. And yet, every single time I think about doing the dishes, there's an eternity concept that covers me like a thick, shitty blanket. I know that it maybe only takes 10 minutes, but the vibe, the vibe is that it's gonna be forever. And I don't know that a normie would get that concept because it it doesn't even make sense when I talk about it. So if there's a thing that internally feels like it'll take forever, how can I externalize this in order to do it? Rather than try to have some kind of a fight with my brain where I try to convince it that it's not that big of a deal, or I try to will myself to have motivation. I try to manufacture it in from thin air. Rather than try to fight this losing battle, how can I externalize time so that I can see it? And for me, this is the ultimate. I set timers for lengths of time that I can actually see myself committing to a forever task like these god-awful dishes. And I eliminate the concept of done. I'm only going to do the work until the timer goes off because I understand 10 minutes. I understand it how short that is, and I understand how doable that is. It's literally just mental witchcraft. It's not meant to be debated or like, yeah, but I really need to finish this goddamn thing. Oh, you know, it's seditious. I want to make sure it's it has nothing to do with that. It's mental witchcraft. It's just the hack to get moving on a forever task, you know, or a nightmare task, or a god-awful task, whatever the horrificness of your task is. This is a way around the time-blindness aspect of like this is going to take forever. And I spent decades thinking that I had to outthink myself. I have to convince myself of how the normies think. I need to be better at internalizing time. And I think that was a huge fucking waste of my time. And I think it's a big disservice to our community. The idea of trying to be something that we're not, we're masking it to cover it up. It's so much easier for me to say, I'm shitty at time, and I'm cool with myself about it. So I use timers for things. And this is truly where it gets fun for our community. Like for me, this is the part that I love about it the most. It's this where we get to collaborate, it's where we get to share ideas. Everybody knows that I pray unto the timer gods. They've they've had such a profound effect on my life, my efficiency, my productivity. Like I'm doing shit, I'm accomplishing shit, and I'm succeeding at shit. A lot of that is because I can get started on shit that sucks. The non-fun stuff, right? The non-interesting stuff. And that's the thing that I can talk all day about. But you might have a special idea that works for you. And you might be able to share that. And this is where I'm gonna sell the shit out of the ADHD Brother community. Other members will have methods, right, that work for them, things that they've tried, maybe unique ways of using a timer, maybe unique ways of externalizing time. Maybe some people use the length of time that it takes to like brew a cup of coffee. Okay, and they have it stack, or they can do a shitty thing while the coffee brews. Or maybe some people externalize time by timing lots of things in advance. So they maybe time themselves doing the dishes, see how long that truly takes, and then challenge themselves to defeat that time the next time. This is really the power of an ADHD community, and I think you should experience ours. Try for seven days, seven days, you're really back guarantee. Or even just join for a month, see how transformative it can be for you. I've got this onboarding situation where you like you watch videos to see how the how the whole thing works, and then you create a couple posts, and when the checklist is done, I'll give you a free 30-minute coaching call to like really kick things into gear for you. So you've ever wanted to experience the power of an engaged ADHD community, and I'm talking engaged, like these people show up, man. Uh, they inspire the hell out of me. And I think that's what we need. We need this collaborative inspiration pool that we can draw on when our motivations are low and then share insights when we have them. It's beautiful. Oh my god, it's so beautiful. So, my question to you guys, or let's call it, let's just say this is the challenge for this week. When it comes to time, how are you externalizing time? How are you putting it outside of yourself and in front of you where you can see it? Do you have like a special hack that you use? Do you use timers? You know, you've you hear about the Pomodoro technique all the time. I do these for work sessions uh all day long. I'll set a timer for 45 minutes. When I'm doing when I'm able to do deep work, I'll set a timer for 45 minutes. And then when the timer goes off, I stop and I take a 15-minute break. I just do something completely different. And then I'll set a timer for another 45 minutes. And that's how I get through my workday. This allows me to keep recharging my executive function. It keeps uh like like my go juice, right? My ability so that I don't burn out um by trying to go too hard for too long without any kind of a break. But I could not do that without a timer because I would just go. I would just do the thing and I would go until I burn out. I would be super curious about how you guys externalize your time. Like I've tried to do things like set reminders on my phone, but I I'm one of probably many of us that reminders just become blurs, they become inconsequential. Like I they just become a a notification to silence so it doesn't really do what it needs to do. I have to externalize time for appointments and things like that by creating the practice of looking at my schedule in advance the morning of to see what's coming up, and then to continually be looking at my schedule. How do you guys do it? How do you guys stay on top of time management for yourselves? I would be curious to know. Shoot me an email. You can click on the contact form on the website and let me know. The more we know, the more we can share, the more we can help each other out. And that is how an ADHD community works, man. That's how it works, man. It's really rad. And that's gonna do it for this week. I hope you guys are getting stuff out of this podcast. If you like it, don't forget to subscribe. That way you get all the alerts or the notifications when the new episode comes out. And reach out, say hi to me. I love uh hearing from you guys. And with that, I hope you guys have a fantastic week, and I will talk to you later.