Time Management

Violet Kurtz

One of those "wonderful" struggles with ADHD is time blindness and general time management issues.

Talk to most people with ADHD and they'll tell you they experience time blindness. In other words, they don't have a properly functioning internal clock. Keeping track of how much time has passed is a nightmare at best without the aid of clocks, alarms, timers, etc.

Add on top of that the ADHD tendency to hyperfocus and you can easily imagine how impossible proper time management is. A good many people with ADHD will get into a habit of... "I have plans for later today! I can't possibly do anything before those plans even though the plans are 5 hours away!" There is considerable crossover with autistic people in this trait. I would not be surprised at all if this is a response to time blindness and time management issues. I believe Alice Averlong recently posted similar on her tumblr? Can't find it though. Buried in the timeline.

I have been struggling with this for a good long time. Not so much that I unable to survive my day-to-day, but enough that balancing my hobbies and projects is nigh impossible.

There are several strategies I've been using to help with this. Mostly, I have a lot of alarms. Every hour or so to remind me to switch tasks so I give at least a little bit of time to each project each day. This has the unfortunate downside of mental inertia making task switching hard. There's also the problem that ADHD brains *love* to filter out "noise"... like alarms.

So far I've been able to balance 2 out of 4 hobbies, with one being neglected and one just not even getting off the ground. Can it really be called a hobby at that point? But I am very sad about the slowness of progress on my game and it's in large part because I struggle so much with time management. Honestly the problem might just be that I have too many hobbies.

If anyone experiencing this has tips or tricks or strategies for managing time blindness and time management, I would love to hear it! Please reach out to me on socials. If I hear of strategies that might be useful, I'll look into collating them in a future blog post.

You should also read:

Violet Kurtz

In Stars and Time - Mental Illness, It Can Happen To You!

The following is a repost of an essay I wrote in special interest induced delirium one night while hanging at the RP bar run by one of my girlfriends in FFXIV. It was originally posted to cohost, but with the website shutting down, I wanted to be sure it was preserved.

Anyone who's been following me for a bit may have noticed that around the end of December 2023/start of January 2024, I became absolutely obsessed with an indie game called In Stars and Time. I wanted to spend a little time talking about why.

Before that, if you haven't played the game yet, I urge you to at least give it a try. There's a demo available, and you can purchase it on Steam, PS4, PS5, and Nintendo Switch.

Spoilers ahead, as well as content warnings for discussion of mental illness, trauma, self-harm, and other similar warnings. Any warnings will generally match those for In Stars and Time itself, which has a convenient Content Warning page (the website is a tad glitchy and may redirect you to the pre-release CW page - just click the "content warnings" link at the top of the page if that happens!)

Continue reading...