ADHD: Is the Future a Mushy Haze? Pretend “Then” is “Now”!

What I do is to sit down for a moment and close my eyes. Then I imagine that the “Then” is “Now.”

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

While problems with time (like future events blurring into a mushy haze, making planning difficult) isn’t an official part of the diagnostic criteria for ADHD, it’s been a very real part of my personal experience of my own ADHD and I’ve heard literally hundreds of ADHD adults tell similar stories. Dan let me know how he handles this challenge.

Dan in Little Rock tells me how he has learned how to visualize time:

I was always late for everything. My friends used to call me “The late Dan,” as if I’d died. It was a joke in college and then later at work.

Even worse than being ten minutes late for a meeting or for dinner, though, was arriving late for a meeting or presentation or business trip and discovering that I missed something important.

The problem, 1 figured out, is that I don’t have a good sense of time. There are only two times for me, as you mentioned in your book: “Now” and “Some Other Time.” And I’d learned through my life to only react to the “Now” times, figuring that I could always put off the “Some Other Time” stuff until Then became Now.

This habit had done much damage in my life. Between being late for appointments and being unprepared for things, I decided I had to break that pattern. I asked a few friends how they handled it, and one gave me a success technique, which I’ve been using for a couple of years now. It really works.

What I do is to sit down for a moment and close my eyes. Then I imagine that the “Then” is “Now.”

If I have to prepare for a meeting in two days, I imagine that it’s in five minutes from now.

“What will I need?” And then I walk through the meeting quickly in my mind. “What did I forget to bring?”

This simple strategy of pretending that Then is Now is very useful for me. Maybe everybody does it, or maybe it’s something that’s normal for normal people, but I know that most of my ADHD friends have never heard about it, and the people I’ve told about it use it and love it.