Everyone has the intention of being on time, but some of us consistently struggle to make it happen. There’s nothing more frustrating as someone who struggles with ADHD-related time blindness than knowing that you had plenty of time to prepare, but somehow manage to be late anyway.
Planning Before Doing
I built Reverse Scheduler around a simple philosophy.
It doesn’t matter if you use this tool or another one. What’s important is the exercise of planning before doing. It’s the planning step that gives you time to think about what really needs to be done and make real decisions about how long it will actually take.
Without planning, we rely on our intuition… but our intuition is a terrible judge of time.
What Intuition Misses
You might be getting ready for a party that’s 30 minutes away. So your intuition says:
- Shower – 10 mins
- Dress – 10 mins
- Drive – 30 mins
- Total time: 50 mins
But when you give yourself a moment to actually commit a plan to paper, you have the time to think about all the little details that aren’t part of your intuition.
You’ll think of things like:
- Shower: “OK, maybe it’s 10 minutes to shower, but realistically I need at least another 10 minutes to dry off and get my hair right, so I should give myself 20 mins.”
- Dress: “This is a party, so I’m not just throwing on the nearest outfit. I might need to try a few options and pull things out of the other closet, so I should give myself 15 mins.”
- Dog: “The dog needs to be let out before I leave, which will take at least 5 mins.”
- Wine: “I just remembered I’m supposed to bring a bottle of wine, so I need to stop on my way. That’ll take at least 15 mins.”
- Travel time: “The event is 30 minutes away, but traffic could add 10 minutes this time of day, so I should give myself 40 mins.”
- Total time: 1h 35 mins
In this example, five minutes of planning helped recognize the difference between an intuitive 50 minutes of preparation and travel versus a realistic 1 hour and 35 minutes. Your intuition wasn’t just a little bit off, it was way off. This is time blindness in a nutshell.
A Plan You Can Follow
Reverse Scheduler is designed to make this planning step easy. Just choose the time of your Primary Event, then write down all the tasks that need to happen before it. You can easily rearrange the order of the tasks, estimate how long they will take, and see exactly when you should start each one.
You can take a screenshot of your finished timeline for reference, or, with alpha access, save all the tasks into Google Calendar with the push of a button. Using the Day view in your calendar app, you can see exactly where you are on the timeline.
Sometimes you’ll fall a bit behind, but now you have a clear signal to know that it’s time to pick up the pace. Or maybe one of the tasks took less time than you thought; that’s when I recommend taking a breath and enjoying not being stressed about being late!