Why Your Team Doesn’t Trust Your Deadlines (ADHD Time Blindness Explained)

Presented by Understood.org

You think it’ll take two days.

Your team knows it’s two weeks.

And after a while, they stop saying anything.

In this episode, Skye and Robert break down why ADHD founders consistently underestimate time, not because they’re overconfident or disorganized, but because their perception of time is genuinely off.

They walk through the research behind time blindness and estimation failure, and how this shows up in real businesses:

• why your timelines feel right when you set them
• why your team starts padding estimates (without telling you)
• how this quietly damages trust and reputation
• why this problem gets worse as you scale

If you’ve ever felt like you’re constantly behind - even when you’re trying to be realistic - this will explain why.

If you're enjoying ADHD Skills Lab, you may also enjoy Understood.org’s new podcast, Sorry, I Missed This.

Listen here: https://lnk.to/sorryimissedthisPS!theadhdskillslab

 P.S. Losing work because the admin layer around your business can't keep up with you? Invisible Systems is a 90-day done-for-you sprint where I (Skye) extract the processes from your head, build the operating layer, and find the right person to run it. Six spots left at the founding price, book a call at invisiblesystem.co

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

If you're a smaller business owner and you have a smaller team, the person who absorbs this inaccuracy is usually going to be you. And often that's where you'll start to see a hit to reputation. If your team isn't padding this estimation struggle, the people who start to notice this are your customers. Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week's episode of the ADHD Skills Lab, brought to you by understood.org, the leading nonprofit helping millions of people with learning and thinking differences like ADHD and dyslexia. Today I'm joined, as always, by my wonderful husband Robert Waterson, and we're gonna talk a little bit about time blindness, both for the individuals who are experiencing it and also the team who is experiencing it with them. Now, before we get started, as you guys know, we help people who have businesses, particularly service business owners making over 100K, who need help with feeling a little bit unorganized, a little bit, I would say that scaling that we talk about a lot. Maybe you've gotten to a point now where you feel like you have built a business, but the scaling is starting to get to you. You're feeling overwhelmed, you're feeling like you don't have all those pieces properly together. That's what we help with. So if you're interested in that, you can go ahead, click the link down below and book a one-on-one chat with me, and we'll see if you're a good fit for what we do. Robbie, the estimation problem. Why founders think it will only take two days when it will probably take two weeks?

SPEAKER_02 1:28

So, yeah, just to distinguish it, we're talking about time estimation when you're planning a project. Yeah. As opposed to we've discussed previously, the brief gap where the the project plan is missing details, missing tasks, or the sort of now, not now temporal myopia where things only feel urgent as they're coming up to the deadline.

SPEAKER_01 1:46

Yeah, so this is the idea that it's not just when things feel urgent, it's this idea of particularly just time estimation in general being off. So let me give you an example of this. I want you to take you back to that story that we've talked about a couple of times before, where you have a founder and they have a team and there's a project, and this project is due according to the founder by Friday. But according to the team, they know from experience that this is probably gonna be a multi-week project. The founder's confidently saying, Hey guys, we'll do it by Friday. No worries, we've got so much time, and then we'll do this, and then we'll do this, and they have that feeling of knowing that things are gonna get pushed, things are gonna become frustrating, they might get blamed for it, but at the end of the day, their founder is not estimating time correctly.

SPEAKER_02 2:41

The scope expands, the timeline collapses, extra resources are needed, and the CEO ends up absorbing all of this the impossible timelines, under resource projects, and yeah, the team sort of quietly learns to pad every estimate.

SPEAKER_01 2:53

Yeah, that padding every estimate is a little bit frustrating though when you're working with a team leader because they're like, What about the you know, because I can just imagine if somebody in my team padded an estimate like that, then I would be like, Cool, well, what did you do with that extra time? And the answer is the thing you told me to do, because it actually took double the time that you estimated.

SPEAKER_02 3:15

Yeah, it could definitely potentially be a source of tension.

SPEAKER_01 3:17

Mm-hmm. 100%. If you're a smaller business owner and you have a smaller team, then the person who absorbs this inaccuracy is usually going to be you. And often that's where you'll start to see a hit to reputation. So a lot of times when I'm working with clients who are scaling, they'll say, I started really good and I was working, you know, to meet these deadlines at work evenings, weekends, nights. But as you scale, sometimes you don't have the energy to do that anymore. And as a result, you start missing deadlines. And so the people who notice that if your team isn't padding this estimation struggle, the people who start to notice this are your customers, which can have a huge effect on your business as well.

SPEAKER_02 4:01

Yeah. So estimation failure is the consistent ability, inability to accurately assess how long something's gonna take before it begins. And I think in this case, it's not random, it's always an underestimation in the case of ADHD. We'll go through a list of things that it's not. So it's not overconfidence, it's not arrogance or bad planning. The founder's often an excellent strategic thinker in other contexts, but this is like a unique place where they're always off. It's not just optimism bias and it's not a deliberate management style. Some leaders will intentionally set aggressive timelines, believing that work will sort of expand to fill the time that's that is given for it, but that's not what's going on here. This is a specific neurological deficit in time reproduction. Like the internal clock is measurably inaccurate.

SPEAKER_01 4:41

Can you imagine if you had a business and you were the CEO and you thought you were setting very reasonable timelines for your team, and your team thought that you were doing some kind of hardcore business system where they gave aggressive deadlines that weren't real.

SPEAKER_02 4:56

Yeah, that I mean that probably is what goes on, right? Best case scenario, they kind of quietly suspect your ADHD and they sort of think it's just, you know, that's just how he is. We're going to just sort of work around it. They haven't sort of fully acknowledged it, they're not totally aware of what they're doing. But yeah, worst case, they're thinking, like, man, this guy's I really don't like this style of management.

SPEAKER_01 5:15

Yeah, yeah. It'd be strange if someone's like, your style of management is too aggressive, and you're just like, What? It could be both as well. Like we did you are leaving space for the idea that maybe you have a aggressive and ADHD founder.

SPEAKER_02 5:28

Yeah, ADHD founders aren't immune to doing all of those failings or or choices, uh, what have you. Yeah, they're not immune to doing those things too. But the point is this should be the default assumption if you're dealing with an ADHD founder.

SPEAKER_01 5:39

Yeah. And I think, yes, the person who's making the if you've got a bigger team where the CEO isn't necessarily as involved in the process and the operational side of it, then technically they're not absorbing the consequences of this as much as their team is when it comes to bad estimation. But I do feel like they are still absorbing it to some degree in people leaving, increased turnover, things like that.

SPEAKER_02 6:05

They're not necessarily the one absorbing all of the downstream issues of it necessarily, but it's still a problem. And as the CEO of the company or the founder of the company, they it's still their problem.

SPEAKER_01 6:14

Yeah, yeah. And and like I said before, one of the ways it's a problem, at least the ways I've seen it come up, is with reputation damage. One of the biggest things people say in business is you should underestimate and undersell what you can do so that you can do over and above, and then you can like kind of, you know, give a really great experience to the customer. If you're always late, that's the opposite of that.

SPEAKER_02 6:38

Yeah, and how this feels for the team is they start padding if you're going past deadlines every project, eventually that concern and that sort of feeling of accountability for missing the deadlines that just becomes the norm. And so it stops being a motivating factor there.

SPEAKER_01 6:52

Yeah, that is true. Like it you stop having a team that really cares about deadlines, which is not great.

SPEAKER_02 6:58

Yeah, you're almost stealing their urgency. Yeah. To the degree that any of them also need urgency as motivation, you're yeah, you're undermining it.

SPEAKER_01 7:05

Yeah, a hundred percent. So when we go into the mechanics of what's happening here, like why this is happening on a mechanical level. We'll go into it a little bit more in the research, what's actually happening, but I wanted to just identify the idea of an internal clock. Because a lot of this stuff has to do with an internal clock, and some people don't even know that this is a concept. But it's basically it's a timekeeping system involved in the prefrontal cortex, basal ganglia, cerebellum, other areas of the brain as well. So there are actually parts of the brain responsible for this kind of timekeeping. And you know, dopamine dysregulation disrupts the timing signals that these systems depend on. And we'll talk more about how that works.

SPEAKER_02 7:49

And that clock's basically supporting the question like how long is this gonna take?

SPEAKER_01 7:53

And obviously, whenever we talk about anything neuroscience, we are 100% simplifying the process because it's always very complicated. So this is a very cool paper, I thought. It's by Barclay and Fisher from 2019. So it's a relatively old, you know, for what we're doing. It was uh time reproduction deficits at young adult follow-up in childhood ADHD, the role of persistence of disorder and executive functioning from the Journal of Developmental Neuropsychology. The reason that this paper was really interesting was because it was a longitudinal paper of this time reproduction. And you know, when it came out, they specifically referenced that this had not been done before. Anytime somebody manages to do a longitudinal study, especially with as many members who came back to do the study as this paper had, it's always a very impressive feat.

SPEAKER_02 8:44

Looks like they got over 80% return candidates.

SPEAKER_01 8:48

Yeah. Well, even just 131 ADHD candidates and 71 community controls is a really great number. I would be stoked with that number for a longitudinal study. But yeah, so they looked at time estimation. They wanted to see if time estimation is a real and measurable effect, and also if it affects people over time. So these people for and you know, when you're doing longitudinal studies, just for people who are interested, they're not just studying this for 20 years, they're studying a whole variety of different things about people, and this is one of them. So these people are doing a bunch of studies, but yeah, these people were followed for 20 plus years, and there was the the average age at follow-up was 27. This one was really interesting. So basically, they um had two groups they have people who had ADHD according to the diagnosis at the time, and that's a little interesting one because we're planning on doing an episode soon about ADHD diagnosis across time, and they referenced that here because when people originally got diagnosed back in the day when they first meeted these people, it was called hyperactive child syndrome. Yeah, exactly. So they had three groups that they were looking at. They had people who had ADHD or hyperactive child syndrome at the time, as it was called, a group of people who were from the clinic but did not have ADHD, but they did have other issues. So they had like all kinds of different psychiatric issues, and then a group who were just from the community and they didn't have any issues. So that's what they were measuring. They did these kinds of tests with people about four different times over their over their life, from when they were young all the way to when they're in their late 20s, early 30s, and they were also specifically looking at did these people continue to have ADHD? So there were some people which they can consider they wrote as H who still had ADHD later on, and people who didn't, based on that later on. So they were testing for ADHD at each stage.

SPEAKER_02 10:55

Yeah, still diagnosable versus no longer meeting the threshold.

SPEAKER_01 10:58

Exactly. Before we get back to the ADHD Skills Lab, I want to share a podcast I think you're gonna love. It's called Sorry I Miss This from the team at understood.org. We know that our executive functioning challenges don't just stay at our desks, they follow us into every part of our lives, including our most intimate relationships, whether it's dating or longer-term commitments. Hosted by Kate Osborne, the show explores strategies that will actually respect how our neurodivergent minds are uniquely wired for love and connection. I listened to an episode called Oh Baby, it's an ADHD pregnancy, which I've been through three times now, and I love what they said about sensory struggles we can have, how we remember, and all of those little differences you don't realize until it gets there. So to listen to Sorry I Miss This, search for sorry I missed this in your podcast app. That's sorry I missed this. I'm gonna specifically focus on the time reproduction task test that they did. They said a software program was created for this project by the first author. So Barclay created a software program for this project. And it made me chuckle because I was thinking about how many people I know who have created software programs in an afternoon now, thanks to AI. For Barclay, this would have been a reasonably large undertaking to make a software program specifically for this. They did make sure that people understood what was going on, they did a bunch of practice sessions, but essentially the software had this big word that showed up, which just said watch very ominously above it, above a sample light bulb. The light bulb was then illuminated for a particular duration of time, so 6, 24, you know, all of those different seconds that we'll talk about. And then a second light bulb would appear on the right hand side of the screen for the participant to use, and they had to hold down the spacebar to reproduce the interval. So they had to hold down the space bar for how long they thought that time that the original light bulb had been lit for was. Side note, not relevant, but kind of funny. They put a big plastic cover over the keyboard so no other keys could be pressed. Just a space bar.

SPEAKER_02 13:07

Okay, fair enough. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess it'd be a bummer if a portion of your 71. Yeah, these are well like pushed the wrong button, pushed enter, didn't get data for them. Now now they're re now they're having like a second go at it. You've sort of invalidated the data or you've introduced another limitation.

SPEAKER_01 13:23

So they made sure that didn't happen. Then they tested for, you know, anxiety and depression, executive functioning in daily life. They did a whole bunch of tests, including our old favorites. The Tower of London test was there. I think the Stroop test was in there somewhere as well, and a couple of others. So yeah, Stroop colour test was in there, the Tower of London test. So they were looking generally at executive functioning as well. So what did they find?

SPEAKER_02 13:49

Yeah, I think the key finding, the durations they were testing for was six, eleven, eighteen, twenty-seven, and thirty-four seconds. And the ADHD adults made timing errors that were 2.5 times larger than the controls as a proportion of the duration.

SPEAKER_01 14:04

Yeah. So essentially, people who were diagnosed with ADHD were way more likely to estimate time. Was it less or more?

SPEAKER_02 14:15

Consistently underestimating how long it was. Yeah. Yeah. So their clock ran slower, I guess. I don't know if that's how I would describe it.

SPEAKER_01 14:23

Yeah, I wouldn't describe it as that. Because I would think if they're underestimating.

SPEAKER_02 14:27

I mean, they consistently held the key for less time than the interval was shown.

SPEAKER_01 14:30

That's interesting. So they're kind of like, come on, come on, come on. It must it must have just been that long. It can't have been longer than that.

SPEAKER_02 14:36

Yeah, yeah. Although I think we'll find later that it wasn't a sort of impatient inattention that was causing it. Yeah, yeah, which I think is interesting. Yeah, the the finding is more that it's actually sort of a broken internal clock, or broken's probably too harsh of a word there.

SPEAKER_00 14:52

Adjusted.

SPEAKER_02 14:53

Yeah. A fast, I suppose. Slow or fast. I would say fast. It's running fast. It thinks it's gotten to the time sooner.

SPEAKER_01 15:00

Yeah, I think so too. So yeah, so they found, like you said, it was this different time propensity to underreproduce the the durations of time. They said it signifies a subjective sense of time that is progressing more slowly than is the case in real time, but I don't think I would agree with that based on the results.

SPEAKER_02 15:18

The effect is it's 40% inaccurate.

SPEAKER_01 15:21

Yeah, yeah, which is a which is a lot. 40% inaccurate is is like weeks.

SPEAKER_02 15:26

It's 40% inaccurate relative to the control. So relative to normal. The neurotypicals were off by about 6%. And the ADHD participants were off by 15%. 40% sounds really bad, but it's it's a 15% inaccuracy, actually. It's not a 40% over like underestimation. So I think I think if you apply the 15% to like a three-week project, you're gonna be more off by more than two days, is probably the best way of thinking about it. It's not catastrophic, but it is not helping, especially when we're stacking it with all the other things we've talked about.

SPEAKER_01 15:56

It's not catastrophic, but I have clients who work in construction. You know, that's two days of a construction site in your property versus actually getting out and done. That makes a big difference.

SPEAKER_02 16:06

Yeah, I will say as well, one of the key findings of this is it's worth mentioning here actually when we are trying to apply this, because it's a very small time period. It's this is a lab finding, and trying to apply it in to in terms of like a several days, several weeks project is obviously a bit of a guessing game. We can go off that like 15% error rate relative to the 6% controls, but I think it's also important to note here that the error rate grew with the duration, so it scales with the size of the duration. So probably when we get out to several weeks, I mean you'd have to do a study, but we could be looking at significantly more under a year.

SPEAKER_01 16:43

Yeah, and I think that's true because when I talk to people, I often ask them to imagine three months out versus six months out, and then imagine two days out versus two weeks out. And it's easier for people to imagine two days versus two weeks than it is for them to imagine three months versus six months, just as a mental image exercise. That span, once you get to a certain size, it's hard to even estimate with ADHD.

SPEAKER_02 17:09

Well, yeah, and and obviously to go back to the previous episodes, we're also gonna you're going to want to add in the compounding variable. So we're trying to separate all these concepts, but these are all related to project planning. If you have left out a chunk of the details, uh a bunch of the subtasks, a bunch of the complexity is sort of hidden from you, and then you're also underestimating the times here, and then you are then also not really having trouble starting on things until they're feeling really urgent and up against the deadline. Those three things are all going to compound.

SPEAKER_01 17:38

A hundred percent. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:39

Yeah, in terms of the error growing with duration, there was no significant difference between the groups at six seconds. So at the lowest duration measured, and then it was growing, it grew with each iteration up. Where I think 27 and 34 seconds were the in fact, I think my quote here says no significant significant main effects for group at the four, eleven, and eighteen durations. However, they were significant at the twenty-seven and thirty-four.

SPEAKER_01 18:02

But I it will it is obviously, you know, twenty-four seconds and six seconds. We're talking about seconds here, but yeah.

SPEAKER_02 18:08

Yeah, that's one one of the findings is it grew with the incre increasing duration. And the purpose of our the next paper we look at will be to sort of show that this is having an effect in the workplace.

SPEAKER_01 18:18

It is worth also mentioning that this deficit persisted regardless of a formal diagnosis, because that is really interesting, given, and it kind of comes down to this idea of ADHD, do you grow out of it, do you not? You know, they were looking at people who had, according to the tests, grown out of it as they got older, and they found that people who had that experience, they were still meeting the thresholds for struggling with this time-blindness.

SPEAKER_02 18:46

Yeah, I think it it opens some interesting questions around underlying symptoms versus diagnosable, I think diagnosable symptoms.

SPEAKER_01 18:55

So I would almost call them neurological pathways. I think they're, you know, they're systematic differences.

SPEAKER_02 19:02

The underlying system deficits are still present. Yeah. But yeah, it sort of raises this question of how much not being diagnosed as an adult is just developing the coping strategies required or finding an environment or a job where they are less of an impediment.

SPEAKER_01 19:19

I think so. I think I I've always felt that because when I think that's one of the reasons why women have now started to receive a diagnosis and in the past they didn't, was because they just were better for whatever reason at finding alternatives, finding ways around it, getting into the right environment. I think they just didn't, you know, experience it in that way, or maybe I don't know. I mean, I think it's interesting that they they found that this deficit was not the result of anxiety or depression because they did measure those.

SPEAKER_02 19:51

Yeah, losing the formal diagnosis did not eliminate the timing deficit. I like that's like a practical implic implication. You cannot wait for someone to grow out of this. It's like, oh, I don't think anyone with ADHD was waiting to grow out of it.

SPEAKER_01 20:01

Well, I think they were. They used to be said that that was a thing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:05

I suppose the the people around them would have been like, don't worry, it's sort of you'll grow out of it was sort of an idea.

SPEAKER_01 20:12

There are things you have as a child that you grow out of, and for a long time it was considered that ADHD would be one of them.

SPEAKER_02 20:17

Yeah, and this sort of I think is one piece indicating that that might not be true. Yeah. So I th I think they were tying it to non-verbal working memory, um, the system that holds sequential information in mind. Um, and yeah, I believe they were testing for depression and anxiety in particular because it's uh comorbidity with ADHD.

SPEAKER_01 20:37

Yeah, they basically were able to say that when they looked at people who experienced those kinds of things, it didn't seem that depression and anxiety was a factor. Because there was a sense that maybe people just, you know, were feeling anxious or nervous and that was affecting their ability to do this.

SPEAKER_02 20:56

Yeah, nerves or like disengagement, sort of an attention issue could have been the reason why you weren't you were having the timing issue, but like no, it's a separate the clock's genuinely well, we'll go with broken.

SPEAKER_01 21:06

Yeah, it's a complicated thing to to measure, but yeah, the clock is definitely wound differently. I think that I think that's a good way to find it.

SPEAKER_02 21:13

I mean it is objectively worse though.

SPEAKER_01 21:15

Well, yeah, okay, but you know what? We'll get we'll talk about it in practical strategies. So let's get into Barclay and Murphy. So just for those of you who are interested, this is a very Barclay-centric episode because both of these papers are from his sort of research. But this paper is actually back in 2010. It's called Impairment in Occupational Functioning in Adult ADHD: The predictive utility of executive functioning ratings versus executive functioning tests. What we're interested in is the way that time blindness was identified specifically by employees. So this was a really interesting paper. This one goes all the way back to 2010, and the purpose of this paper was. To argue that executive functioning deficits were a part of an ADHD diagnosis. Like that was the purpose of this paper, which I really appreciated because it's sort of a bit of a history, because you know, now, at least for many people, the idea that executive functioning deficits wouldn't be a part of ADHD is kind of like, what, that doesn't make any sense. But but back then it was a real conversation. So that was the purpose of this paper as a whole. And you know, they talked about one of the reasons why this was difficult to include in an ADHD diagnosis is that the definition of executive functioning is quite ambiguous. So that kind of connects to what we talked about in the past, Robbie, that this is an ambiguous thing. Because you remember you asked me what is executive functioning, and I was like, I can't tell you.

SPEAKER_02 22:49

Yeah, I wanted a clear hierarchy of concepts and like your definition, and you're like, Yeah, well, good luck with that.

SPEAKER_01 22:54

Yeah, I was like, So, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:56

Yeah, so this will be, you know, we'll circle back in a year's time and sort of update everything.

SPEAKER_01 23:00

But yeah, so so this was this is what they said as well. And what they ended up doing, they did a whole variety of tests.

SPEAKER_02 23:08

I was gonna say, just to be clear as well, the the purpose of us looking at this paper is to link that sort of very granular, I suppose, lab test to an actual workplace.

SPEAKER_01 23:18

Exactly, exactly. So what they did was, you know, they had three groups of participants, 146 clinically diagnosed with ADHD adults. They had a clinical control group and then 97 adults evaluated. So the clinical control group was people evaluated at the same clinic but not diagnosed with ADHD. And then they also had a community control group, which were just volunteers from the local community. And they say these samples have been described in considerably greater detail elsewhere. They reference another paper. But basically, this was the paper that they were looking at people who had ADHD or who had another disorder. So that other disorder could be anxiety, drug use, mood, learning, a bunch of different disorders, or just the community who I guess don't have disorders. And they and they said, you know, people who didn't have disorders and people who were below the threshold of ADHD.

SPEAKER_02 24:15

And they were looking at real-world outcomes, so like missed deadlines, poor time management, standard, substandard work, and this was rated by actual employers.

SPEAKER_01 24:23

Yeah, so they had a couple of different measures. So they had your basic ADHD symptoms scale, they had a whole bunch of other other tests as well, social and functional assessment. And then, yeah, the biggest one, the one we want to identify here is their employer rating scale, who didn't know if the person that they were rating had a diagnosis of ADHD or not. They were just answering questions about ADHD and other things with their employers in general.

SPEAKER_02 24:50

Yeah, so we removed that bias.

SPEAKER_01 24:52

Yeah, and it's worth mentioning this wasn't to say that the you sometimes people would do like teachers or employees, and that would be how they would test if someone had ADHD. That wasn't what this was. They knew they had ADHD based on the clinical clinical diagnostic.

SPEAKER_02 25:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:07

This was more what the people that were their employers thought about them.

SPEAKER_02 25:12

I assume even in cases where studies do use sort of teacher assessment as the placeholder for an ADHD diagnosis, they would still ask those questions afterwards to avoid sort of predisposing them to thinking of them in those terms. Definitely nice anyway to not be relying on that at all.

SPEAKER_01 25:29

Exactly. So let's go into what they did. So what they found was that there were some things that were predicted, significantly predicted, by struggling with self-management to time. When they looked at this and they had a few different ratings, what they found was that some of the things that they rated were significantly predicted by their struggles with time. So one of them was the employment rating for impairment. So the employment's rating of their impairment was connected to self-management to time, but that was not significant.

SPEAKER_02 26:09

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the employers who were blind to diagnosis, they rated the ADHD adults as significantly more impaired in terms of punctuality, meeting deadlines, completing assigned work, and managing daily responsibilities.

SPEAKER_01 26:21

Okay, so what they found was really interesting. They did not only have the employers' review, but they also had their own assessments. So in relation to time, what they found specifically was that the employers rated them as not being as punctual, struggling with good time management, as well as just general things. So struggles with performing assigned work and managing daily responsibilities. And the members, so the people doing their own uh self-assessment also reported having more behavioral problems at work. So there was a lot of struggles with work in general, but the time was there. Like there was struggles specifically referenced as time management and being punctual.

SPEAKER_02 27:09

Yeah. So that's our link from a very, very limited duration lab test to sort of just demonstrating, we don't want to extrapolate just from a measured in seconds lab test. This is sort of the indication or the demonstrating that it is a real issue that takes place in the workplace as well.

SPEAKER_01 27:29

Exactly. Because, you know, one of the things that everyone talks about is that idea of like, we need more experimentation because it's too in-per, you know, like it's too natural. We need more experiment, it's too much experiment, we need more natural. So in this case, we're seeing that there is issues with time in both settings. So when you do a specific experiment, you're seeing issues with time. And when you're doing another, you know, more in-place assessment, you are also seeing issues with real workplace time management and time estimation issues are present. It also shows that way back, you know, in 2010, when we were talking about should executive functioning be an element of an ADHD diagnosis, time blindness was part of that conversation.

SPEAKER_02 28:18

And I was gonna say just an interesting note on time blindness, because we were discussing it last week. And yes, blindness would imp imply like a complete loss or a near loss, but that's why Barclay has the term temporal myopia.

SPEAKER_01 28:31

Which unfortunately for him just did not take off, and we all stuck with time blindness.

SPEAKER_02 28:35

Yeah, it's definitely time-blindness is definitely the stickier, more easily understood term. So, yeah, but temporal temporal myopia, it means a distant dependent distortion of your sense of time. Could also say time near-sightedness, I think, but again, I think time blindness is just gonna be the one that we keep using and the one we keep using, at least for now.

SPEAKER_01 28:55

But very interesting then to look at those papers and get a sense of how time blindness is working because it kind of showcases what we talked about at the beginning, which is that this is not happening out of arrogance, this is not happening out of some weird sense that you know this is how things get done. When you're looking at it and you're testing it, especially in that experimental level, you're seeing that this is just how we're wired.

SPEAKER_02 29:22

It's an internal clock issue. So that's what that first paper was showing, like ADHD, measurable internal clock, underestimation, and compounding with duration. So like getting worse with duration, with with longer durations. Yeah. Second paper, that same deficit is showing up in the boss's rating sheet of your performance. And I think also your self-rating of time management skills, time estimation, etc. Just anecdotally as well. Yeah, 100%.

SPEAKER_01 29:47

Well, we've talked about that idea before, like estimating time.

SPEAKER_02 29:50

Always optimistic.

unknown 29:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:52

Always, always like I can fit it in. We could we could just do it now.

SPEAKER_01 29:55

And you know what? That might be the one thing before we get into practical strategies, which we'll talk about later this week. The benefit of this is, you know, we're optimistic. We're just optimistic people. We just think it's gonna be great, it's gonna be wonderful. You know, especially in business, people always say, if I knew how hard it was gonna be, I don't know if I would have done it. And you know, if I knew how long it was gonna take, I don't know if I would have done it. We're optimistic. We think it's not gonna take that long.

SPEAKER_02 30:20

It takes a little bit of optimism to start this.

SPEAKER_01 30:23

Yeah, maybe we should call it time optimism.

SPEAKER_02 30:25

I think the flip side of it is that negative self-talk around your failure to accomplish what you set for the day and for the week, though. So there is sort of a like uh it's not all roses. I mean, aside from the real consequences, but like just the Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:42

Time optimism leading to time beating yourself up.

SPEAKER_02 30:47

So I think just to recap the last three weeks, the brief was vague, the timeline was an underestimate, and then it all only became urgent when things were about to explode. Um, so three different mechanisms, one project deadline missed. Um telling someone to be more conservative isn't going to fix. That's like asking a broken instrument to sort of fix itself. It's not gonna work reliably. So, yeah, next episode we'll be talking about the fix being external.

SPEAKER_01 31:16

Yeah, we're gonna talk about what we can do specifically to fix it, but you'll have to tune in to find out exactly what we say.

SPEAKER_00 31:22

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the ADHD Skills Lab. If you liked it, leave us a five star review. It helps other people learn more about us. And thank you so much to our wonderful team for making us sound good, look good. We couldn't do it without you.