“This is hard to admit because it’s so vulnerable but recently I’ve discovered that I’ve been suffering from time blindness my whole life.”

Today I saw Rose share this on Bluesky and my first thought was, “Whoa! What a cool thing for somebody to share!” Rose is a super successful person in an operational role at the C-suite level in one of the world’s coolest tech companies and she also experiences a difference in executive functioning?? I feel seen. I feel inspired.

It was only after I sent a personal reply and got deep into my yoga class when it crossed my mind: maybe that post was meant to be sarcastic? I don’t know Rose personally! Tone is difficult to interpret online. Maybe she was kidding??

For people who don’t experience time blindness, the concept may seem ludicrous enough that it could be the butt of a joke. What do you mean you can’t just notice when time is passing? Get a watch. Use your calendar. Set an alarm!

In the professional women’s Slack group where I find a lot of camaraderie, there are often posts—sometimes anonymous, sometimes not—where people complain about relationships with people who struggle with time management.

If you are consistently late, it signals you don’t respect my time.

If you can’t accurately estimate how long the work takes and get it done on time, I can’t count on you. This affects everyone else on the team.

Other types of impairments like face blindness or color blindness may limit the kind of work you can do or affect how you’re perceived in social environments, but time blindness feels particularly unforgivable because it bumps up against the expectations of our industrial work standards. In a world that worships productivity, time is money and time is power. Time is valuable. We bill hours of work and we literally sell software products based on projected time savings.

Being blind to time passing isn’t a cute personality quirk. It’s your responsibility to manage it.

What does it feel like to experience time blindness?

For me, time blindness manifests in a few distinct ways:

• Time optimism: A failure to properly estimate time where you think you can get more done in a time slot than reality allows.
• Hyperfocus: A failure to recognize the passing of time when you’re in an intense flow state or deeply engrossed in an enjoyable activity.
• Unreliable reactions to alarms: When an alarm goes off, your ears hear the sound of the alarm but your brain doesn’t immediately take action to transition based on the sound.

Everybody has hiccups with their calendar from time-to-time. But when you experience problems with time estimation constantly it causes a lot of distress. In addition to losing out on meaningful relationships and work opportunities, you may also end up wasting a ton of your time. For example, I have spent hours waiting in an airport terminal before the gate was even open because I didn’t want to miss a flight. Or, I have squandered time early in the day because I was afraid of getting sucked into a fun project and missing an important appointment in the afternoon.

So, if you’re an ambitious person who wants to work around this problem, what can you do?

Here are the tools and systems that are working for me right now:

Tools for managing and mitigating time blindness

Reverse calendaring

Any time I complete a task that I anticipate I’ll also need to do again in the future, I will go back and log on my calendar the real amount of time that task took to complete. A trip to the grocery store. The time it took to put together a competitive brief for a client.

How this helps: Next time I need to estimate a block of time for this type of task, I don’t have to guess. I know it takes exactly 15 minutes to walk from my house to the yoga studio and I should allow 20 in case there’s a train or I want to stop and chat with a neighbor.

Kitchen timer

One of my favorite tools is this little frog timer that I keep next to me while I work during the day. When I spin it, it makes a loud ticking sound every second and the alarm is a particularly obnoxious buzzing BRINNNNGGGGG. I use my frog timer anytime I need to “eat the frog” (aka do a task that my brain thinks is boring or difficult) because I can do anything for 15 minutes.

How this helps: Compared to a digital clock, this alarm is easier to set and more difficult to ignore. It’s playful and makes timeboxing more fun.

AI for time estimates and workback plans

I used to get overwhelmed building out workback plans in tools like Asana because I could not accurately estimate time requirements or reasonable due dates. Every single task felt like a fresh guess and I was afraid to over- or under-estimate. Now I use AI as a partner to estimate time and dependencies like making sure there’s enough time for an executive review cycle. Some tools like Linear have built-in AI agents that will create logical workback plans with points and time estimates for you.

How this helps: Any time estimate is better than no plan. Once AI has created the scaffolding it’s easier for me to adjust and tinker vs. starting from scratch.

These are just the tools I rely on the most. I have friends who like things like:

• Music and playlists for time blocks and transitions, e.g. a playlist that’s exactly one hour long so you know when to switch to a different task
• Smart speakers that can speak back phrases like, “It’s time to drive to the gym”
• Lights on timers that dim up or down to signal transitions in the day
• Two-alarm systems, like one alarm to transition and another for the actual event time

We can try new things

Working around time blindness requires a lot of effort and experimentation. The tool that works for you today might not be effective tomorrow.

And if you’re the kind person who enjoys an intense creative flow state, there can be a bit of grief giving up the luxury of that experience. I would much rather sit down and write 4,000 words all at once vs. breaking the writing up into small chunks over a week.

As much as I’d love to keep winking, “Time isn’t real,” that joke won’t hold water for long.

Now the church bells are ringing and the clock strikes three. What a marvelous thing.