“Just leave five minutes earlier.”
“You need to manage your time better.”
“Everyone has the same twenty-four hours in a day.”
Most of us have heard these phrases. Many of us have said them. Yet for some people, they simply don’t seem to help.
That may be because we have misunderstood the problem.
When someone struggles with time, we often assume they lack organisation, motivation or self-discipline. However, research suggests something more nuanced: the way we perceive, estimate and experience time may differ between individuals and across neurotypes.
In other words, before we talk about time management, we may need to talk about time perception.
We Assume Time Is Objective
A clock is objective.
A minute contains sixty seconds.
An hour contains sixty minutes.
But our experience of time is anything but objective.
Most of us have experienced moments where time seemed to disappear while doing something enjoyable, or dragged painfully when waiting for something important. Time is measured consistently, but it is not always experienced consistently.
Droit-Volet’s neurodevelopmental review suggests that children have an early, primitive sense of time, but that more accurate time judgement develops gradually through childhood and is influenced by cognitive development, attention, memory and wider brain maturation (Droit-Volet, 2013).
Time is not simply something we read from a clock.
It is something we construct.
Time Perception Develops
Research into child development suggests that accurate time judgement develops gradually throughout childhood.
Young children often struggle to understand how long something will take, how much time has passed or what a future period of time might feel like. Over time, these skills become more sophisticated as cognitive development progresses (Droit-Volet, 2013).
This may seem obvious, but it has important implications.
Before a child can manage their time effectively, they need to be able to perceive it, estimate it and make sense of it.
We sometimes expect children to demonstrate time-management skills before the underlying abilities have fully developed.
Time Difficulties Are Not Limited to ADHD
The phrase “time blindness” is most commonly associated with ADHD.
Many people with ADHD describe difficulty estimating how long tasks will take, losing track of time when engaged in something interesting, struggling to start tasks until deadlines become urgent or finding it difficult to connect with their future selves.
A review of research into adult ADHD and time perception found that time difficulties may involve several different processes, including time estimation, time reproduction, time production, duration discrimination and time management (Mette, 2023).
That matters because “time blindness” is not one single thing.
Perhaps more importantly, ADHD is not the only neurotype associated with differences in timing.
Recent research into developmental dyscalculia found evidence of auditory time perception impairments in children with dyscalculia across both sub-second and supra-second timing ranges (Castaldi et al., 2024). This suggests that timing differences may also be relevant to mathematical cognition and not simply explained by attention alone.
So, while ADHD may have given us the most familiar language for “time blindness”, the research points towards a broader neurodevelopmental picture.
Time Is Not One Thing
One of the biggest mistakes we make is treating “time skills” as though they are a single ability.
In reality, several different skills sit beneath our everyday experience of time.
Someone might struggle to:
- Estimate how long something will take.
- Feel the passage of time.
- Wait for a future event.
- Sequence events in order.
- Switch between activities.
- Understand timetables and schedules.
- Read analogue clocks.
- Plan ahead.
- Prioritise tasks over time.
- Connect today’s actions with future outcomes.
Two people may both say, “I struggle with time,” while experiencing completely different difficulties.
This matters because different difficulties require different supports.
Is It Time Management or Time Perception?
When somebody repeatedly misses deadlines, arrives late or appears disorganised, we often focus on improving their planning.
Sometimes that is helpful.
But what if the difficulty lies further upstream?
What if the person genuinely experiences time differently?
Research into adult ADHD suggests that time difficulties are complex and may involve perception, attention, executive functioning and memory interacting together (Mette, 2023). Research into developmental dyscalculia adds another layer, suggesting that time processing may also be connected to wider developmental differences in how children process magnitude, quantity and sequence (Castaldi et al., 2024).
This raises an important possibility.
For some people, the challenge may not simply be paying attention to time.
It may involve processing time itself.
A Neurodiversity-Affirming Perspective
A neurodiversity-affirming approach does not assume that everyone experiences the world in the same way.
Instead of asking:
“Why can’t they manage their time?”
we might ask:
“How do they experience time?”
That question shifts us away from blame and towards understanding.
For some people, visual schedules may help.
For others, timers, countdowns, external reminders or body-based routines may be more effective.
Some people may benefit from seeing time.
Others may need to hear it, feel it or connect it to meaningful activities.
The goal is not to force everyone into the same relationship with time.
The goal is to understand the relationship they already have.
Final Thoughts
Clocks measure time.
People experience it.
And those experiences are not always the same.
As research develops, we are learning that difficulties with time are not simply about laziness, carelessness or poor organisation. They may reflect genuine differences in the way people perceive, estimate and process time.
Perhaps the next time someone appears to be struggling with time, we should be a little slower to judge and a little quicker to wonder.
Because before we ask someone to manage time, we may first need to understand how they experience it.
References
Castaldi, E., Tinelli, F., & colleagues. (2024). Auditory time perception impairment in children with developmental dyscalculia. Research in Developmental Disabilities, 149, 104733.
Droit-Volet, S. (2013). Time perception in children: A neurodevelopmental approach. Neuropsychologia, 51(2), 220–234.
Mette, C. (2023). Time perception in adult ADHD: Findings from a decade — A review. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 20(4), 3098.
