Is this time blindness? I keep acting like tasks will magically take less time than they always do.

[u/overthinkingdentist]

28 years old with ADHD, finally diagnosed last year. I know what I need to do each day and I often plan it out with timestamps, timers, alarms, reminders, & even buffers for any potential unpredictable scenario that might pop up & take my time.

I live by myself & work my own hours.

The problem: even when I have clear undeniable evidence that something takes hours, my brain acts like I can somehow do it in minutes.

1- Morning routine (beard, shower, breakfast etc. I've written down each individual task as bullets in my phone so i don't even have to think about what comes next) takes at least 1 hour (after I finally do get up to start the routine), but I keep delaying because even though the active thinking logical part of my brain is screaming that I'm gonna get late as i watch the time on my phone & my alarms keep going off, some wierd ghost or something in the back of my mind will keep me from moving & make me believe that today is gonna be the day when I'll defy the laws of physics, bend space-time itself & somehow get the whole morning routine done within 10 minutes instead of 1 hour.

2- Let's say later that day, I’ll know I have a 3 PM appointment that is a 40-minutes drive away, and it’s already 2 PM, but I’ll still think I can stop at Costco or squeeze in a workout (that i have timed myself multiple times & it always takes 45 minutes). I'll genuinely have a tough time persuading myself to do basic maths to figure out that i will miss the appointment. Trust me, i lose this debate more times than I win.

3- Similar stuff at night when it's time to go to bed. For example, it's past 3 AM here right now & I am still up writing this even though I know that i ideally need 7 hours of sleep, that I have a commitment with a friend in the morning at 9 AM, & that I didn't sleep at all last night so I should sleep decently tonight. Yet here we are.

Is this what people mean by time blindness, or is there a better term for it?

What finally helped you fix this?

[u/jmwy86]

Sounds like time blindness to me (or as someone else suggested, "time optimism"). 

[u/Informal-Storage6694]

When you search for time blindess on the internet, what does it tell you?