Time blindness has become something of a buzzword in recent years – offered as a get-out-of-jail-free-card for constantly running late.
It’s become so common that most of us can think of at least one friend whose arrival time requires careful recalibrations; Tell them the reservation is at 7pm, when it’s really at 8pm, and somehow everyone arrives together.
But while some people are simply bad planners, experts say others might be hardwired to have a loser grip on time, experts say.
Coined by clinical psychologist Russell Barkley in 1997, the term refers to ‘the serious problem people with ADHD have with governing their behaviour relative to time intervals and the passage of time more generally.’
The phenomenon has also been linked to anxiety and autism.
So while some social media users are quick to argue that people who are consistently half an hour later to just about every social engagement – but somehow manage to get to work on time – are just being inconsiderate, others say it’s not just poor time management.
According to the experts, time blindness is the inability to conceptualise how long a task will take, or how much time has passed.
This inability is related to the executive function that occurs in the frontal lobe of the brain.
While some people are simply bad planners, experts say others might be hardwired to have a loser grip on time, experts say
Executive function is the ability to manage and organise tasks on a daily basis and includes planning ahead, prioritising more important tasks and the ability to break down bigger projects into smaller tasks, as well as multitasking.
Those who struggle with this are more likely to experience time blindness and may express difficulty initiating tasks and following through on commitments. It can also include patterns such as poor impulse control, and being easily side-tracked – hallmarks commonly associated with the attention deficit disorder.
That’s not to say, however, that everyone who is notorious for being late has ADHD – or a built-in excuse. One US study has even suggested time-blindness might be genetic.
In the study, participants were asked to complete a task by a certain time. Those who were chronically late were far less likely to naturally glance at the clock, and therefore accidently run over than those who considered themselves punctual.
In recent years, researchers have begun to uncover evidence suggesting that time blindness is more than simply a lack of organisation.
A major 2022 meta-analysis published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry examined 55 studies comparing people with ADHD to those without the condition.
The researchers found individuals with ADHD consistently performed worse across a range of timing tasks, including estimating, reproducing and discriminating between time intervals. They concluded that there was evidence of a ‘broad range of timing deficits’ associated with ADHD.
The review also found people with ADHD made larger errors when estimating how much time had passed and showed greater variability in judging durations lasting several seconds or minutes.
Dr Barkley, one of the world’s foremost ADHD researchers, has previously argued that ADHD is fundamentally a disorder of self-regulation across time.
He has described many people with ADHD as living in a world where future deadlines and consequences struggle to exert enough influence on present-day behaviour until they become immediate and urgent.
‘The most devastating deficit in adult life that ADHD produces is a disruption in the fabric of time. The future doesn’t feel real until it becomes an emergency,’ he said.
That may help explain a familiar scenario: someone glances at the clock, sees they have 20 minutes before they need to leave, begins a quick task and suddenly discovers an hour has passed.
According to psychologists, this often reflects a genuine difficulty monitoring the passage of time while attention is absorbed elsewhere, rather than a conscious decision to be late.
For experts, the key distinction is between explaining behaviour and excusing it.
Researchers say people with time blindness are not necessarily being deliberately inconsiderate.
However, specialists stress that recognising the neurological basis of time blindness does not remove personal responsibility.
Instead, experts say it highlights the need for practical coping strategies, such as using visible timers, alarms, calendars and other external reminders to compensate for difficulties tracking time internally.
In other words, time blindness may help explain why some people are repeatedly late, but understanding the problem is only the first step.
ADHD specialists argue that recognising these challenges should encourage people to put systems in place that reduce the impact on their work, relationships and day-to-day lives.
