It is Wednesday. Farid has to fill in last week's hours; the system is showing red. He is sure he worked on the client project on Monday. Was that three hours or five? And Tuesday, was that the day of the long meeting, or was that Thursday? He enters something that looks plausible. Meanwhile there is a quote that has to go out in two weeks. Two weeks feels like another planet. He starts on it the evening before the deadline, at eleven, and at half past three in the morning submits something he is actually quite pleased with.
Farid does not have a bad attitude to work. He has a brain that registers time differently, and a fair amount of research has been done on that.
What has been measured
Russell Barkley, one of the most cited ADHD researchers, together with Kevin Murphy and Tracie Bush, had 104 adults with ADHD and 64 adults without it estimate and reproduce time intervals in a 2001 study. In the reproduction task you hear, say, a tone lasting 45 seconds and then have to indicate yourself when 45 seconds have passed. The participants with ADHD consistently stopped too early and were further off. That difference held after the researchers corrected for intelligence, anxiety, depression and behavioural problems. The sense of time itself is different, separate from the rest.
In 2013 Valdas Noreika, Christine Falter and Katya Rubia reviewed all the studies on this. Their conclusion: people with ADHD consistently have difficulty with timing on three fronts. Motor timing (keeping a beat), perceptual timing (how long did that take?) and looking ahead (how long will this take, and how much is a reward in three weeks worth right now?). These problems show up on timescales from milliseconds to years, and they remain when you correct for working memory and attention. Brain scans show that the networks that process time, in the frontal lobe, the basal ganglia and the cerebellum, work differently in ADHD. Methylphenidate, the most widely used ADHD medication, reduces most of these timing problems.
Barkley built a larger theory around this back in the 1990s. In his model, ADHD is at its core a problem of self-regulation across time: the ability to link something you do now to something that comes later. He calls it 'time blindness' or 'temporal myopia', short-sightedness for time. What is close, you see sharply. What lies further away is a blur.
Now and not now
In ADHD circles this is often summed up in a phrase that is not a scientific term but hits exactly the right spot: there are only two times, now and not now. A deadline in two weeks is 'not now'. A deadline tomorrow is 'now', and then everything comes loose. A meeting in an hour is 'not now', until someone calls to ask where you are.
That explains a whole series of things that come across as sloppiness at work. Arriving late even though you got up on time, because leaving was still 'not now' when you started reading that one email. A monthly timesheet that is never right, because estimating afterwards how long something took is precisely the skill that is off. Big projects that only happen in the last 48 hours. A long-term plan that looks fine on paper and does nothing in practice, because a plan in your head or in a document is just as 'not now' as the deadline itself.
The annoying thing is that this often ends well. Farid's quote was fine. The problem is what it costs: nights, stress, colleagues who do not know where they stand, and the risk that one day it really goes wrong.
Getting time out of your head
Barkley's advice follows directly from his theory. If the brain does not feel time well on the inside, you have to make time visible on the outside. And if the brain does not take distant things into account, you have to shrink the distance: bring the moment of doing, the moment of result and the moment of consequence as close together as you can.
In practice these are not complicated things. An analogue clock or a timer where you literally see the time shrink, instead of a digital clock that only gives a number. A deadline in two weeks cut into four small deadlines, each with a moment when someone asks about it. A calendar that beeps fifteen minutes before you have to leave, and not only at the moment of the appointment. Filling in hours at the end of each day, while the day is still 'now'.