5 Must-Have Tools to Help You “See” Time

Hello brains. I'm guessing at some point today you lost track of time, especially if you had ADHD. I know I have. And I also know what can help. So, this video is for people who struggle to see time, who experience what a lot of people with ADHD experience, which is time blindness. We have a hard time telling what time it is, how long things will actually take, if we actually have time to do the thing that we said that we'd totally do next week. Time management is really difficult if you are not good at seeing time. Thankfully, there are a lot of products and tools that can help us see time better. One, visual timers. Visual

timers like the time timer, which I have a million of these, are amazing because they make time visible. Time does not always feel real to people with ADHD can feel very theoretical, especially if we have a soft sense of time. So, having a visual timer where you can easily just turn the timer to how long you want to be working on something, and then it will slowly count down and you see the red disappear. I think this product was developed for kids, but it has been so helpful for me and a lot of people with ADHD. I use it a lot of the time with pomodoros if I'm doing a an in-person pomodoro or a virtual pomodoro, which if you don't know what those are, check out our video on that. Just having this where everybody can kind of see how long you have left, right? So, you set the timer in a pomodoro for what, 25 minutes usually, and then it counts down. These are great because if you have them in the background, if you're doing remote work and you have this in the background, then you can both see the timer counting down. This one's great because you can carry it around from room to room with you if you're going to be, I don't know, cleaning and you're like, I'm just going to clean for 30 minutes. I'm going to try and hit my whole house and see how quickly I can do it. But they have different variations of them. Other visual timers that are really, really cool, there are cube timers that you flip to uh one side and then it automatically starts counting down from whatever side that is. So like 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever. You just flip it to the side you want for the amount of minutes you want and it immediately starts counting down. Those are fantastic. The original I think visual timer was the hourglass. There's the traditional sand hourglass in different colors in different times. This is a set that you can buy. You can also get a digital hourglass that you can see the hourglass sand I guess falling digitally. The advantage of a digital hourglass is that you can use just one hourglass and set it to different amounts of time, whatever you need. There's this one that goes up to 30 minutes. There's also 100 minutes and is really cool, but on the pricier side. I'll link to where you can buy those in the description below. I'll put links for everything that I talk about in this video in the description below. If you don't want to spend the money or you don't have the money to spend, you can also go to a website that has a digital hourglass and have a visual timer up that way. But yeah, visual timers for

people with ADC. takes something that can feel really abstract to us like time and makes it visual. You can visually see how much time is left which makes it more concrete and can be really helpful for our brains. Two, calendars. Calendars are really important for us because they make future time visible just like visual timers can make current time visible to us as it's passing. Calendars can make next week time feel real or the week after that that. Putting things on our calendar is a way to reserve space for things that are important to us. And it doesn't mean we have to stick to it. We don't necessarily have to do exactly what's on our calendar, but by putting it on our calendar, we are reserving that time. We are making that time feel real. Just like I don't know, organizational systems in our house make it so that we have space for our stuff. Calendars are making it so we have space for our tasks. I guess the question is what type of calendar? So that is a really personal choice. There are analog calendars like a wall calendar. This can be really helpful for a lot of people with ADHD to have something on the wall that they can go and look at and write out what they've got going on because visual, right? Like you go, you see the calendar, you see that you've got things booked and you realize like, oh, I don't have as much free time next week or next month as I thought. While calendars are also really helpful for if you live with another human and you've got things on the calendar like, I'm hosting a dinner party this night. Well, cool. Now, whoever else lives with you can see that that's what's planned for that day. If you don't live with anybody, if you don't need the calendar to be visible to anybody but yourself, bullet journals or this is called the legend planner are a really great way to do calendars just for yourself personally so you can keep track of what you've got going on. There are also pocket calendars that are pretty small that you can just tuck in your pocket so you can easily take it with you and if somebody's like, hey, you know, do you have time to do this next Tuesday? You can easily open it up, flip through, see yes or no. So analog calendars have advantages. One advantage is because you're actually having to write things out, our memory works a little bit better. So, we're more likely to remember that we had a commitment if we wrote it out physically in a calendar. And then, yeah, a wall calendar that other people can see has the advantage of it, too. The disadvantage is it's very hard to sync a physical calendar. Digital calendars, it's a lot easier to move things around. So, if you decide, I don't want to do this on Tuesday, I'm going to move it to Thursday, it's really easy to just like click and drag. You don't have to like bother with white out, I guess, or a pencil eraser, I guess, is what you would do. It's really a personal preference. I know people who like digital. analog. I know people who want to use a combination of both. And for a while, that's what I did. I used Google calendar and I had my bullet journal. But the important thing is if you are using a calendar that you sync your calendars for that, I use Skylight. I like Skylight a lot because it gives me the advantage of a wall calendar, but the versatility of using a digital calendar. Skylight actually syncs with pretty much whatever calendar you're using, but I use Google Calendar and Skylight has a two-way sync with Google Calendar, which is great. So, I can actually walk over to my Skylight, add it to the physical Skylight, and then that will show up on my Google calendar. So, when I get to work, I will see that is on my calendar. That automatic syncing is invaluable for me because, as much as I would like to pretend that I'm the kind of person that can sit down and sync calendars every day, I'm just not. It's just kind of the best of both worlds for me. I love the Skylight for the calendar aspect alone, but it is way more than just a calendar. It is a full family operating system. It's like a family hub. You can manage household chores. Um, I really like adding chores. You can do recurring chores so that they pop up and everybody knows what they're responsible for doing what day, which I feel like is going to be really helpful as my daughter gets older. You can create custom lists for to-dos, groceries, etc. There are also some optional plus features, one of which I'm slightly obsessed with right now, which is meals. There's a full weekly meal planning tab with recipe storage, so it's really quick and easy to say, "Hey, yeah, Tuesday is tacos, Wednesday is spaghetti or whatever, and store your recipe. " Anything that makes it easier for us to get things on our calendar and make sure that we're all on the same page with what's happening when is really, really helpful for people with ADHD. If you'd like to try Skylight, you can save $30 on the 15-in Skylight calendar with my code Jessica M30, and it's available globally. So, a lot of people with ADHD struggle with calendars. I actually have an episode about my own struggle using a calendar way back when. You can check that out here. One is remembering to put things on the calendar, right? It's not just syncing your analog and digital calendars that you have to worry about. It's also getting things out of your brain onto the calendar, and that's an extra step that we don't always do. But another big issue is that we will put things on our calendar not realizing how long things actually take. So not realizing that we need some time to transition between this activity on our calendar and or saying that we're going to be writing for 2 hours and it turns out that the essay that we're working on is actually going to take three or four. So, if we're not great at estimating how long things actually take, which those of us with ADHD tend to struggle with, any sort of schedule that we put together for ourselves and that we put on the calendar, it might be a lot of work to get it onto our calendar and then it immediately falls apart because that's just not how time works. It's how we would like time to work, but it's not how time works. So, the next tool is something that can help us learn how time actually works. Three, count up

timers. Countdown timers can be great if you want to create a sense of urgency or have a visual representation of how much time is left to work on a task or before you need to transition or whatever. Count up timers are great for learning how long things actually take. So, a great time management strategy that I learned really early on is to write down how long you think a task is going to take you and then start a count up timer, do the task, and then write down how long it actually took. This is really useful for tasks that you're going to do a lot, like walk the dog, take a shower, make breakfast, eat breakfast. Getting a sense of how long these things actually take you is going to make it a lot easier to plan your time in the future because you know how long things actually take. These are countup timers. One of the cool things about these counts is that you just hit start and it will automatically start counting up. So, this is a really simple one. It's battery operated. It has magnets. Uh, comes in a six-pack. So, you can see how long does it take me to make breakfast? take a shower? This is a little fancier, but what I like about it is it has a way to recharge it, so you don't have to have batteries. And look how pretty it is. You can switch between colors. Ah, ooh, fancy. You can adjust the brightness. Honestly, things that make our tools more pleasant to use, I think, is really valuable because if you don't use the tool, it's not going to help. also just like a runner stopwatch, an Apple Watch on your phone. Like there's a lot of different ways to do this, but I really like the idea of having physical ones because a I won't get distracted by what's on my phone, but b I will remember to use the strategy because I'm looking at a countup timer. You know, out of sight, out of mind when you have ADC, now they're insight in mind. Speaking of phones being distracting, four, a way to

tell time that is not your phone, like a clock. Uh especially like a non-ticking clock can be really helpful for people with ADC so we don't get distracted by the ticking. This one doesn't tick, but it's because there are no batteries in it. Because a functional clock would make it very hard to edit because you would see the hands move around all of the time. Linear clocks. This is like a super artistic clock, but it's practical in the sense that you can see time move throughout the day instead of like in a circle. It's linear, which I find a lot easier to tell like how my time is moving. Google calendar like the line goes throughout my day. Like I just think that's really cool. We actually looked for cheaper linear clocks. We couldn't find any. So, this is a pretty unique thing. If anybody knows of less expensive versions, please drop that in the comments below. I would love to know about that. We couldn't find any in our brief search. But also, just a simple watch. I have an Apple Watch. I find even my Apple Watch distracting. Phones are a time sync, right? And so, like, if you're using your phone to check the time, odds are you're going to get distracted by something that's going on your phone. You're going to pick it up and start automatically responding to that text message that just came in or opening the app that you go to all of the time. I can't do much with my watch other than tell what time it is. I will say this, some of the reason why I lose my watches is because the sensory input sometimes bothers me and I end up taking it off without realizing it and then I leave it somewhere and then I don't know where it is. So, I didn't get it in time for this video. But, I'm actually kind of excited about a watch necklace that I got. There are pocket watches. There are lots of options for like a personal time piece besides an actual watch. By the way, it's worth noting that a lot of watches, especially digital watches, have timers built in. So, you can have a watch that is also a countdown timer. countup timer. I like having my tools separate personally. This is just a watch. I can't do anything with this but tell what time it is right now. If I want a timer, I've got those, too. Finally

five, soft time indicators. Soft time indicators are great because sometimes knowing exactly what time it is can create some anxiety. It can make us perfectionistic about optimizing our day. It can also make it so we're not able to kind of lose ourselves in the task that we're doing because we keep checking the clock. A flow state kind of by definition requires that we lose track of time and that we get lost in the flow of whatever it is that we're doing. So there are times where we maybe don't want to lose track of time entirely, but we don't want to watch a clock. For those soft time indicators are really helpful, like the sun. The sun is a soft time indicator. You don't know exactly what time it is if you go outside and you look at the sun, but you have a general sense of if it's morning, if it's evening, if it's the middle of the night because the sun is not in the sky. That's a soft time indicator because most of us live and work indoors all or most of the time. We need to kind of replace that soft time indicator with other soft time indicators. A really simple way to do that is smart bulbs. You can have smart bulbs adjust throughout the day to either match the natural light, which um I have Hue light bulbs that do that and it's really cool. Or you can have the lights go on at certain times, off at certain times, fade in, fade out. There are all kinds of ways that you can use it to let your body know that time is passing without having to actually look at a clock or set an alarm, use a timer, or whatever. So, there are definitely times where soft time indicators are a preferable choice. If I want to get lost in deep work writing and I don't have meetings that day, I'm not going to wear a watch probably. check the clock. I'm not going to set timers unless I'm having trouble getting started, in which case I might do a timer just to create a sense of urgency for myself. But once I'm in flow, I want to lose track of time, but I also want to go home and sleep at some point. So, like having ways to have a general sense of what time it is without knowing exactly what time it is can be really helpful. I forgot about this uh until recently, but my grandpa had like a grandfather clock, which is kind of funny. My grandfather had a grandfather clock, but uh cuckoo clocks, grandfather clocks, things that like will chime on the hour. Some of them will just chime. like actually chime the number of hours that it is, but it's once an hour, right? So, like you can lose track of time and then be reminded that an hour has passed. There are also dynamic wallpapers. Dynamic wallpapers are really cool because they change over the course of a day. So, they might be very bright at a very bright time of day and they might dim over the course of the day as the day dims. If you have Mac, it's just a feature that is just available to you. If you have Windows, you have to use a third party, but you can still do dynamic wallpapers. If the light changes over time, it's easier to be able to tell that time has passed and how much time has passed. So, did that make any sense? I hope so. I think it's time for

me to wrap up this video. Thank you to our brain advocates and all our Patreon brains for giving me the time to work on content like this. If you have time, check out our Patreon. We're able to do the work that we do because of the support that you give us. If I missed a time tool that you love, please drop that in the comments below. I would love to know about it. Like, subscribe, click all the things, and I will see you next time. Bye, brains. Get it? time. Okay.