Time

Manage time at the macro level with calendars, at the micro level with timers.

Macro: Calendars

Used very lightly — mostly for social things (don’t forget events, don’t double-book) and scheduling gym sessions (which have complex temporal constraints).

The calendar is useful as a self-binding device. If you keep dragging a project along because you “haven’t made time” for it: make a time block and stick to it. Creating a calendar event is literally making time — it’s like calling malloc_time().

Downsides of calendars as todo lists: Too time-bound. If you make a block and don’t do it, the calendar doesn’t know — it just sits there forgotten in the past. In a todo list, everything gets dragged along until explicitly completed. Calendars are also bad for collecting vague ideas and future plans.

Micro: Timers / Pomodoro

Todo lists are timeless — no sense of urgency. You need a way to manufacture urgency.

The Pomodoro method, as typically framed, is very neurotypical: scaffolding around doing, but ADHD people have problems with the doing itself. However, it works well in three contexts:

Overcoming Aversion

When you have many microtasks (each taking seconds to minutes) but the number of them makes the sum seem huge. Example: replying to ten different people. You’re basically trading up to 25 minutes of pain for an entire day’s peace and quiet.

Starting

You have something you want to want to do but don’t want to do. You’re not committing to finishing — you’re committing to a half hour. 30 minutes a day over a month is 15 hours of work. And often you start a 30-minute timer and end up working four hours.

Stopping

If you hyperfocus on one project, it eats the time allocated for others. Stopping when the timer goes off prevents excessive single-mindedness. The five-minute break is also a time to unround your shoulders and practice mindfulness.