Summers are tricky bastards. As an ADHD business owner, ADHD parent and as someone with rose-tinted views of summers past, summer carries a lot of weight.
And as every parent reading this now knows – the chorus of ‘I’M BORED’ already ringing throughout your house only a few weeks into the holidays – summer holidays are a savage beast, fraught with peril and never, under any circumstances, to be looked directly in the eye.
Thinking back to those long summers that seemed to stretch out forever, it’s interesting to now look at them through the lens of an ADHD diagnosis, and the time-blindness effect that comes with it.
Of course, as a child those summers werelong. Six whole weeks of blissful, school-free existence – with the potential of an overseas trip if you were lucky. And to me, they seemed to go on forever: an almost entirely separate existence where new personalities for the upcoming school year could be road tested, tweaked and then ultimately binned when you realised that not even an imaginary personality could make you seem interesting or attractive to the opposite sex.
There would always be a lingering feeling that something – some morsel of responsibility – was gnawing at you from the back of your mind, but thinking that ‘hey, I didn’t do anything about it today and nothing bad happened, so I’ll probably do the same tomorrow…’. A strategy I would repeat until the last few hours of the school holidays before remembering the staggering amount of homework we’d been set over the summer break.
This is a strategy I’d then employ for any significant project or responsibility right up until I was diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 40.
The culprit in this instance is what ADHD Uberwizard Professor Russell Barkley calls ‘Time Blindness’. He describes ADHD as a disorder of behavioural inhibition that disrupts how the brain manages time (as well as attention).
Put simply our brains perceive two distinct time frames: the ‘Now’ and the ‘Not Now’.
Put Simplier: If we don’t want to / can’t deal with [thing] now, we put it in the ‘Fuck it bucket’ and it won’t be pulled out again until there is absolutely no other way of avoiding [thing].
Obviously a vast oversimplification of the issue, but you get my meaning.
But coming back to my current situation, that of an ADHD business owner, I have a lot of things that I have set myself up to do over the slightly quieter summer period. There’s a lot of planning, new business development and some mind-bendingly dull analysis of the first 6 months of the year to be done.
And the ghosts of all those summers spent thinking I had nothing to worry about – are currently lining up to mock me.
So what will I do about it?
🟠 Get ahead of things: creating a full brain dump of what needs to be done
This works because externalising everything that is currently pinging around my head will help me visualise the scope of what needs to be accomplished, and away from relying on my internal timing system.
🟠 Work out where my ADHD pinch points are: what or who do I have to help me?
Specifically regarding ADHD time blindness, this is where asking a friend, a coach or an AI assistant to help me figure out HOW LONG things will actually take, and help me be accountable is essential. I love co-working or body doubling sessions for this very purpose.
🟠 Work out the most pressing or urgent tasks
There’s a danger here that we might fall back on to old strategies waiting until something is actually urgent before acting on it. So there’s two things that help me: the first is in finding the interest to override the importance. This is often as simple as working out just how good it will feel to have a task done and off my mental to-do list. It’s not ‘getting [thing] done’ that I’m interested in, it’s ‘what does getting [thing] done GET ME’ (mental peace, smugness, etc) that’s interesting.
The second thing I do is to break bigger tasks down into smaller elements and then set artificial deadlines and checkpoints for myself along the way. Letting someone know – i.e. a body doubling buddy – what I plan to have done by when is how I keep myself on top of things.
🟠 Externalise the time
Not just mapping out and visualising the summer period, but the actual passing of time too. One of the issues coaching clients regularly speak of is an inability to correctly measure the passage of time. Structuring the work into chunks and marked out by having a countdown timer in your line of sight will help you make sense of how much work you’re actually able to do within a specific time frame.
🟠 Set aside some time (not too much) for procrastinating
I’m definitely going to be doing it, so why not make peace with the fact and diarise some time for it.
The Science Bit
Turns out “Fuck it bucket” is a pretty accurate summary of the clinical model too.
Russell Barkley’s theory: ADHD messes with how your brain manages time, not just attention. Your brain runs on two settings, Now and Not Now. If something isn’t Now, it doesn’t exist yet. That’s just how the wiring works.
And it’s not just theory. A 2021 meta-analysis pulling together 55 separate studies found consistent, measurable time perception deficits in ADHD brains, including something close to an accelerated internal clock. A follow-up analysis in 2024, covering everything from childhood through adulthood, confirmed the effect holds across the whole lifespan. You don’t grow out of this.
Here’s the interesting bit: some studies show people with ADHD can judge, after the fact, exactly how long something took. The problem occurs in the moment, while the clock’s still running. That’s why “just be more aware of time” has never once worked as advice.
Where This Leaves You
Time blindness isn’t a character flaw. You won’t outmuscle it with willpower. What works is structure: brain dumps, external timers, someone else holding you to a deadline you set for yourself.
That last one is most of what coaching actually is. I’m the clock you borrow until you don’t need to fake it anymore.
If summer’s currently mocking you the way it’s mocking me, a discovery call costs nothing but 30 minutes: [https://calendly.com/alan-wherefocusgoes/coaching-discovery-call? ]