Heather Tingle (She/Her) (00:00.942)
Hello, untanglers, and welcome back to another episode of Decluttering Untangled with me, your host, Heather Tingle. Today's episode, I want to talk to you about time blindness because it causes so many issues in our lives, but also with decluttering and organizing. And I think it's really helpful to understand it a little bit more so that we can come up with some plans to kind of work with it rather than pretending it doesn't exist. And also to understand just how it impacts us because...I am impacted by it and I think it's one of the things that I see with clients frequently, but I do need to say, obviously, I'm not a psychologist or a psychiatrist. I don't even know the difference between the two. This is just me and my lived experience and the things I see with clients and just my point of view. So there you go. So if you've been following me on Facebook or on Instagram stories, you might know that I am currently taking ADHD medication. Now, one of the things I have noticed is just how time is so different. And it's really hard to explain for anybody who doesn't understand time in the way that we do. Like taking this medication has meant that time is kind of uniform. Like it's like just a straight line going at the same pace all the time. It doesn't go massively quick and it doesn't go massively slow. It just is. And I find that so weird.
I'm not used to this and it's really, I wanna say discombobulating. I mean, it's wonderful, but it's reliable and I'm not used to that. Now, obviously these days I've decluttered and I've organized and I'm genuinely rarely late. Like I'm only really late where something awful has happened in traffic, for example. But in the past, my friends would tell me to get there like an hour before they needed me.
because like with the stress of finding clothes to wear, trying to find my keys, trying to just get my stuff together, I would already be late before I'd even set off. And then added on top of that would be the thing I still struggle with now, which is thinking of getting to my friends takes 10 minutes when actually in reality it takes more like 25 because even when I tie myself from like the door to inside my car, I just go like that's two minutes.
Heather Tingle (She/Her) (02:22.35)
It's gonna be only eight minutes to get to my friends. That is not, I mean, I know logically that's not possible, but if my friend was saying, can you be there for three o'clock? I'd set off at 10 to three where reality is it's 25 minutes away. Like it's not as close as you think it is just because you know that route really well. But even though we've got like sat navs and Google maps, it tells us how long a journey might take. And I'm organized now with clothes and I know where my stuff is and know where my keys are.
Time is still so variable and well it was until recently for me anyway. So time being variable might sound a bit strange but if you've ever just like said, well just tied it aside for a few minutes at 11 o'clock and then you look up and it's half past one in the afternoon and the kitchen looks worse than when you started. Like there's a pile on the table that wasn't there before, three cupboards a half empty and you genuinely can't tell where the last two hours went.
That's not like a one-off. And if you've got ADHD, like that's just basically life. That's what happens. Time is weird. It's bendy. So I want to talk a little bit about that. And I want to know really like what we can do about it because losing track of time, now I'm medicated, I kind of have actual proof that this is a real problem. This wasn't me being lazy or being unorganized. This isn't about
caring less than someone with a tidy home who values their friendship more. It's not that and it's not like discipline. It's a real thing and it's time blindness. And time blindness is a genuine documented part of ADHD brains and how they work. So it means that your internal sense of time, how much has passed, how much is left, how long something will actually take, it's just not reliable. And it's not that you're bad at managing time.
It's just you don't feel it in the same way that other people seem to. Like I have never known looking at my watch less than since I've been medicated. Like I am not looking at it all the time before going somewhere. And it was almost like I had to keep looking at it to be aware so that I wouldn't be late. Whereas now I glance at it and I roughly know how long time is and I glance at it again and it's where I think it is. It's so strange.
Heather Tingle (She/Her) (04:50.978)
But it is so different and where people I think get it wrong is it's different from time management. Like you can own every planner, every app, every color coded calendar in the world and I know you all have and you can still lose two hours to tidying the side because the problem wasn't that you didn't have like a proper system for it. The problem is your innate sense of time inside yourself, it's just unreliable and
That's why like productivity advice, like the pomodoro technique, that just irritates me because I just get started and I'd have to stop for a break and I don't want a break. Like the stuff that works for other people probably hasn't worked for you because it's not solving that internal problem of time because in all honesty, that's not really something you can fix. And it's definitely not something that you have a lot of control over because if you had control over it, wow, we'd be like in the matrix or something.
but it's definitely something you can understand better and then learn how to work with. So today isn't about how we train our brain to be better with time at all. It's about, it's not even about becoming like more disciplined with it. It's about understanding it so that you can be a bit more kind to yourself really, but also you can understand the ways it shows up when you're trying to declutter and organize your home. Because once you can see it, you can kind of like build structures around it instead of just being annoyed at yourself every time it happens.
which isn't gonna be helpful, let's face it. So there's three things that I see every day with clients and in my own house as well, if I'm being honest. So the first one is just like a little something, like what we've already talked about. So you start something small, there's no sense of time passing while you're like in the zone and you either kind of like surface three hours later with no idea where the time went or you get interrupted and run out of steam and then there's like a half-decuttered pile which
usually looks messier than the bit that you started off with but because you just decided to give you got you know you got full on hyper focusing excited didn't you and you just went all in on it there was no urgency there was no deadline you just thought I'm gonna do this so because there's no urgency you've got no awareness of time while you're in it you're kind of like falling into the Bermuda triangle of time like that's the pattern that's what happens so
Heather Tingle (She/Her) (07:14.732)
That in itself is an issue because you probably wasted a lot of time, effort and energy on something and not really gotten anywhere. And then the second one is like the flip side of that. And I think this is much more common and it is in the clients I work with. Something like putting laundry away feels like it's gonna take 30 minutes or an hour. Like you've got no idea how long it's gonna take but you know it's gonna take ages. So you put it off. But the thing is it's not gonna take 30 minutes or ages, it's gonna take eight minutes. you know.
every single time, you might go to yourself, that didn't take as long as I thought it did, but you still don't know how long it took because you're still in that weird new, new, new, new part of time. So that doesn't help you because you just put more and more things off because you just don't have the time. It's not a priority. There's no deadline. There's no urgency. And in all honesty, just haven't got the spoons for it. So you don't do it. But your brain doesn't know it's going to take eight minutes. So the task just
sits there on the chair, on the bed, wherever, like, because you don't have that length of time. You're convinced you don't have 30 minutes. And then the clutter that creates isn't like the nightmare scenario from like the first example, but it's that stuff that just never gets done. It's the always delayed, always waiting for a better moment to do it. And that really
is the bit that grinds you down a lot. Like it makes you feel rubbish because it's always there. And then the third one, and I'm laughing because I feel this to my core and I see this in my family so often. I see this and I'm getting better at it. But the third one is waiting mode because it just doesn't feel like a problem. It feels like you're being responsible. So like, say you've got an appointment two o'clock
Somewhere along the way of your life you learned that the way to not be late is to just not do anything From 10 o'clock onwards because you know Just before you're about to go you decide to do a little something and that you lose time and you get late So, you know that you do nothing from 10 o'clock. You just sit all you do is like ruminate you think about the appointment You don't start anything because you know if you start something you will lose track of time and you will be late and you'll miss your appointment
Heather Tingle (She/Her) (09:44.569)
Hopefully not an ADHD assessment, but it works. Like you're not late, well, generally. I mean, you might be a bit late because you couldn't find your keys and your coat and all the things that you needed, but hey, like you're not massively late. But you've just like lost four hours that could have gone towards literally anything, including quick, easy wins on that pile by the door or the laundry that was only gonna take eight minutes. But it doesn't register as procrastination. It doesn't...
It's not about being lazy, you're being efficient because it genuinely feels like you're being careful and you are, but it's costing you so much in terms of time and also anxiety if it's something that you're not looking forward to where you can just sit and worry about it until it happens. You don't get any relief from it because you're so rigid in it. And maybe that's my autistic brain being like the rigid sticking to it. But I think that's really important to be aware that
that's a really good strategy, but it has its downside and it costs you so much. Now, I'm not gonna give you like a generic time management tip. I am not that person, like use a calendar. never thought of that one before. These are just maybe some specific things to consider if you've never done this before. So this starting a small job that you just think, I'll just spend 20 minutes on this. Use.
a timer, and I don't mean on your phone because you can just snooze your phone, you can ignore it, and while it's going down, you've got no like real input from it. So if you use a visual timer out on the side and not your phone because your phone will just disappear into like the background or you'll lose it exactly when you need the mouse.
Like you need something physical, like on the counter in front of you where you're literally still doing, where you can see it and you're set it for say 20 minutes. And then when it goes off, you're gonna stop, like no exceptions, no, just five more minutes because we know five more minutes is gonna be three hours. So stopping is the whole point of it. But having that defined time means it gives you that boundary back that your brain needs, that deadline, that urgency to get the thing done that you needed to get done. So you're not.
Heather Tingle (She/Her) (11:59.375)
pinballing all over the place, doing all the little bits. For the overestimation trap where you think it's gonna take ages, but it doesn't, this one's so simple, like time yourself once, actually put the laundry away with a stopwatch running so you know it's eight minutes, not 30, that that specific task stops being something you avoid. Now, it's not gonna fix everything. You're not gonna like totally not avoid that task. There's still gonna be days where you're like, this is so hard.
But if you've decluttered your clothes and your clothes are easier to put away in a system that works for you, first of all, you've removed one barrier because it's not like, God, I can't do this, this is so hard, this hasn't got a home. It's easy to put away, I could just plonk it in this drawer or I can hang it up and it's easy. And I don't have to fight my wardrobe to do it. You've eliminated one problem. And then if you add into the, I know this is only gonna take me eight minutes, you're just more likely to do it.
It's going to chip away at that general, everything feels bigger than it actually is. That awful feeling that we all live with. And it just gives you like one accurate timed example at a time. So it might be washing pots or it might be, I don't know, cleaning the cat litter, right? Or it might be recording a podcast. Like anything that you think is going to take ages, actually time it, find out how long it really does take as a general average. And then you know for next time, have I got time to do this? Yes.
brilliant, I'm gonna just do it. And then for waiting mode, don't leave yourself like an open-ended window. So sometime this afternoon before two o'clock is like a vague threat that puts you like in that holding pattern. Instead, set a hard leave by time. So I've got to leave at 1.40, full stop, and then work backwards. What you need to do at each point before that start of the sequence is free time. So,
I need to leave by 1.40. I know it's going to take me 10 minutes to find my keys and my coat. Now you probably need to time these individual bits because you're probably going to underestimate how long it actually takes if anything like me. So it'd like, right, I need to start getting ready to go at one o'clock. That's going to give me ample time to leave the house and be on time. I think this is something that as neurodivergence we do automatically. I think we work backwards with time and we work it out this way. And this is the weird thing. Apparently,
Heather Tingle (She/Her) (14:19.316)
my friends at Neurotypical tell me they don't need to do this, they can just figure it out by looking at a watch and just doing, and it just kind of works out. And I have noticed that since taking ADHD meds, that that is the case and it is free, okay. But if you are not taking meds and you do need to work with it, then give yourself a hard deadline time, say one o'clock, and then treat before that as free time, enjoyment time. You can do every one, it's bonus time.
Your brain needs like an edge to work inside it, not like vague sense of looming lateness. And using somebody else that's not got time blindness to hold you accountable is really, really useful. So getting a lift from someone and they come not at the setting off time because that's disastrous, but setting, but come to you at the cutoff time for getting ready. So they get to you at one and then after wait for you to like 40 minutes of faffing around, trying to get your stuff together.
but that is more useful because then you will be on time. And the other thing that works really well, like I see in my Untangled Life membership, is body doubling because it helps across all three of those scenarios, having somebody else present, even on a video call, just anchors the sense of time passing. You're like more aware of it than being alone doesn't do for you. So if you've got a friend who will sit with you, even like virtually while you do a 20 minute session, use them, it will help.
So if you take one thing from this episode, let it be, set a visual timer before you touch anything, before you go off on one, and just be aware that time is not linear in our world. It's not just you feeling it, it is a real thing. And make sure when you're doing your timer, you set it off before you start, not thinking I will do this once I've done five minutes and I find the timer. That's not helpful.
So that one thing will hopefully help you with all those things. And let's face it, life is too short for that. And we've got too much to do, too much to achieve to let hours slip by on things that we're not gonna enjoy or aren't gonna be good for us. So go back to that kitchen from the start of this episode, same 11 o'clock start, same I'll just turn aside, but this time you're gonna have a timer on the counter, a visible timer, clocking down so you can visually see the colour go.
Heather Tingle (She/Her) (16:45.058)
and you can see how much you've got left. And then 20 minutes later, it goes off, you stop, you look around and the kitchen will look better, not worse, because you've done the same brain, the same task, one small slight tweak to it and you get a totally different outcome because you've got a deadline to hit, you know it's minimised, you can't just do an entire big thing and then get worn out halfway through. You're gonna be more likely to focus on that one task rather than like pinballing everywhere with a million different bits. So that is it for this week.
Let me know what you think. this is like quite a long podcast and there's me thinking it was only gonna be five minutes. So also if I can ask you a huge favor because this has slowed down recently and I have noticed that it's made me sad. So if you listen on like Spotify or Apple or any of the podcast places, can you leave me a review? Because I love you forever and it really helps because it means more reviews, means more listeners to help get untangled.
and it really helps me so much. thank you, a big thank you. So until next time, be kind to yourself, remember you are not alone and keep untangling.
