People I work with often want to work on “time management”, believing themselves to be poor at this skill.
For neurodivergent people, our relationship with time can involve much more than the time on the clock. There is the time involved in getting started, shifting our attention from one thing to another, waiting for something that’s happening later, or becoming so absorbed in something that our awareness of clock time seems to disappear.
Thinking about time in these different ways can help us become more curious about our own experiences, rather than seeing “time management” as a singular ability that we’re either good or bad at.
Types of Time
Clock time
This is probably what most of us think of when we talk about managing time: knowing how much time has passed and estimating how long something will take.
You might sit down to do something that feels as though it has taken 20 minutes and discover an hour has passed. Or you might expect a task to take half an hour and find that it takes much longer.
But knowing what time it is, or how long something might take, is only one part of our relationship with time.
Prospective time
Then there is prospective time. This is about something in the future feeling present enough to influence what we’re doing now.
We can know that something is happening later without it necessarily having enough presence in our attention to guide what we need to do beforehand.
What helps bring something in the future into the present for you? Perhaps it’s a calendar, an alarm, something visual or another external reminder.
Attentional time
Our experience of time is also connected to where our attention is.
If we’re deeply focused on something, our awareness of everything else can change.
Ideas such as hyperfocus and monotropism can be useful here. When our attention is strongly focused, noticing the passing of clock time or moving that attention somewhere else may not be straightforward.
And that brings us to transitions.
Transition time
We can think of a transition as simply stopping one thing and starting something else, but our attention also needs to disengage from what we were doing, switch to something new and then re-engage.
That process can have a cognitive and energetic cost.
This can be particularly noticeable when we’re deeply absorbed in something, interrupted unexpectedly or moving between several different demands. The amount of clock time between two tasks might be small, but that doesn’t necessarily reflect the effort involved in making the transition.
Understanding transition time and effort can give us a different way of thinking about what might make moving between tasks easier.
Activation time
Have you ever known exactly what you need to do but still found it difficult to begin?
Knowing what needs doing and being able to enter the state where action becomes possible aren’t necessarily the same thing.
Activation time can be relevant when we think about autistic inertia and ADHD executive processes. Rather than assuming that knowing what needs to be done means we should be able to start straight away, we can become more curious about what we need to move from knowing what to do to getting started.
Waiting time
An appointment at 3 pm might only take an hour, but does it ever feel as though it takes up much more of your day?
Sometimes something we’re anticipating can occupy our attention or affect what we feel able to start beforehand.
We may technically have several hours available, but those hours don’t necessarily feel completely available to us.
Recognising waiting time as an experience in its own right can help us think differently about those periods and also help us think about when in the day we need to schedule things to reduce the amount of waiting time.
Flow time
Sometimes we become so absorbed in something that our awareness of clock time reduces. We might look up and be surprised by how much time has passed.
That deep absorption can be productive. It can be enjoyable. It can also be extremely regulating.
Rather than automatically seeing losing track of time as something negative, we can become curious about our own experience of flow and what it means for us.
If we suspect we are going to go into flow time when we don’t have the capacity to do so due to other commitments and responsibilities, it’s worth thinking about what will help pull you out of flow when you need to transition or how you will look after your own physical needs to eat, hydrate or sleep!
A different way to think about time
When we look at clock time, prospective time, attention, transitions, activation, waiting and flow together, “time management” starts to become a much broader and more interesting picture.
We might find some aspects relatively easy and others more difficult.
Understanding these different aspects of time gives us another way of thinking about our experiences, rather than simply telling ourselves we need to be “better at time management”.
We can start to become curious:
What relationship do you have with these different types of time?
What external structures or support strategies make that relationship with time easier for you to navigate?
