On November 1st most of America will “fall behind” and set our clocks back an hour. For a few days millions of people will feel slightly unmoored, showing up too early or too late, being hungry at the wrong time, and wondering where the day went at its end.
For “normal” Farmer-type people that disorientation will last about a week; for us Hunters, though, it’s a pretty good description of every week of our lives.
Hyperfocus — when we’re excited and “on the hunt” — can wipe out an entire afternoon, while “waiting mode” for an appointment can feel painful. In several of my books on ADHD I’ve written about this phenomenon: Hunters live in an “eternal now” and so struggle with planning and organizing time.
While “normal” people have past, present, and future, we have “Now” and “Not Now.” My old nemesis Russell Barkley, who’s spent a good part of his career trashing my Hunter/Farmer framework, got this one right. He’s said that ADHD is, at its heart, a nearsightedness to the future, and he coined the phrase “time blindness” to describe it.
The research backs him up. A meta-analysis of 55 studies found that people with ADHD consistently make more errors estimating, producing, and reproducing intervals of time than people without it. The authors described what we Hunters all know; when we’re bored, time runs slow but when we’re on the hunt it flies by.
Where Barkley and I part ways is on the word “blindness.” Blindness is a defect. What I see in the research is an evolutionary leftover from the time before the agricultural revolution.
Consider what time actually means to an aboriginal Hunter, a person living the