95. Why You Always Think Tasks Will Take You Less Time Than They Do: Time Estimation Tips (ADHD Friendly)
Episode 95
The ability to accurately predict how long tasks will take to complete is called time estimation, and it’s a core skill related to time management.
Interestingly, many people who want to improve their time management skills (yes!) fail to think of time estimations, and then get bummed out when their overall time management doesn’t improve.
In this episode of the Learn and Work Smarter podcast, I teach you everything you need to know about the skill of estimating time so that you can finally get your things done when you say you’re going to do them.
What You Learn:
What time estimation means and how it’s the key skill behind many other executive functions
What bad time estimation skills look like in school, work, and personal lives (common signs)
The consequences of bad time estimation skills (and the benefits of good ones!)
How ADHD and time blindness impact your ability to accurately estimate how long tasks take to complete
Practical strategies to improve your time estimation skills in school and work (which will improve your time management skills)
Time estimation tips for people with ADHD
Episodes and Resources Mentioned:
⭐SchoolHabits University (Parents, go here)
⭐SchoolHabits University (Students, go here)
⭐The College Note-Taking Power System (Brand New Program!)
Episode 7 – How to Learn Things
Episode 31 – How to Take Notes at Meetings
Episode 55 - How to Use Body Doubling to Improve Focus
Episode 77 – How to Use Time Blocking
Episode 79 — Time Missing Piece in ADHD Productivity Advice — with Lindsay Roberts
Episode 91 - Working Memory Strategies and Tips
Never stop learning.
❤️ Connect:
-
The following transcript was autogenerated and may contain some interesting and silly errors. But in the name of efficiency and productivity, I choose not to spend my time fixing them 😉
Why You Always Think Things Will Take Less Time Than They Do: Time Estimation Tips (ADHD Friendly)
===
[00:00:00] Well, hello and welcome to the Learn and Work Smarter podcast. I'm Katie, and this is episode 95. It is kind of wild saying that, considering that we're only five episodes away from episode 100. And I've been trying to think of something cool to do with episode 100. I do have a few ideas and I haven't settled on any yet.
So if you have any thoughts or something that I can do to celebrate our 100th episode, let me know at katie@schoolhabits.com or just feel free to send me a DM on Instagram. [00:00:30] You can find me at School Habits. I love getting feedback and input from you guys. Uh, so let me know what your thoughts are for sure, because I wouldn't have this show if it weren't for you, the listeners.
Now today's show is kind of cool. We're gonna be talking about something that impacts both professionals and students like many of our episodes do. And this one in particular is relevant for my listeners with A DHD or executive function deficits. If that doesn't describe you, trust me.
What we are talking about today on this show is still gonna help you too, [00:01:00] because what helps people with ADHD helps people without ADHD. All right. It's not always the other way around. You know what I'm saying? So today we are talking about time estimation. This is a little bit different than something you may have heard of called Time Blindness.
If you have ADHD, you know what time blindness is. I'll talk a little bit about that, um, in a little bit because it's hard to talk about time estimation without talking about time blindness. So let's start with definitions, Time estimation is. Exactly what it sounds like, the ability [00:01:30] to estimate how long tasks will take, and you might wonder why that's important or why I'm gonna spend, I don't know, half an hour talking about that today.
But if you think about it, estimating how long tasks take to complete, underpins many of the executive functions or skills that we need to succeed in school and in our job, and even in our home lives. Skills like planning, prioritization, time management, scheduling, task management, focus, organization.
Honestly, I could just literally continue to name [00:02:00] every single skill that we need to be moderately functioning adults, and time estimation is connected to that skill. So in today's episode, we're gonna dive deep into the psychology of time estimation, why we tend to be so bad at it, how and why it affects people with ADHD even more.
How incorrectly or inaccurately estimating the time it takes to complete tasks can mess with our productivity and our role as professionals and students, as well as how dialing in our time estimation skills can make your life [00:02:30] easier. And then of course, like in every episode I'll share some strategies for how to get better at time estimation so that you can experience the benefits, the good time estimation promises, and there are a lot of benefits.
As always. The transcript and links to anything I mention today will be at learnandworksmarter.com/podcast/95. All you really have to do whenever I like throw out a link like that is just remember, learnandworksmarter.com and you can search all of my episodes, either by number or title, [00:03:00] or keywords on that website.
Okay? So it really is easy. There's also a transcript there if you're driving and you're not able to take notes today, or maybe you're listening on a walk and you hear something today that you wanna come back to, you could always take a screenshot of the screen so you know around what minute marker that you wanna come back to for that little tidbit that you found important. That's actually what I do regardless. I mention this because it is one thing to listen to strategies and it is a whole other thing to put them into action. And as you know, one of the best ways to take [00:03:30] action on something that we're learning is to take notes on it. So notes or screenshot up to you.
Either way, we are ready to dive in and begin this show.
[00:04:00] All right, so I already share the definition of time estimation, but just in case you fast forwarded through my intro, I'm gonna repeat it. Time estimation is the skill of being able to accurately predict how long certain tasks will take you to complete. So in a very basic sense, I know that when I go grocery shopping and I'm gonna go to Whole Foods, it's probably gonna take me about an hour and a half to get there, do my shopping, and get back.
Now I know that because I've [00:04:30] done my grocery shopping at Whole Foods many, many times, and on average that is what the data tells me. How do I know? The data tells me that because I have paid attention to the time I leave my house and I have taken note of the time that I get home and after doing my grocery shopping at Whole Foods for years and years and years, I know to budget about 90 minutes if I'm going just to Whole Foods.
Hold on. There is a reason why I'm talking about grocery shopping. Let me continue with this example, this analogy for a minute. 'cause it's gonna make everything else [00:05:00] land. Okay? Now, sometimes I need to go to Whole Foods and to a different grocery store, market Basket. 'cause you know, you get certain things from certain stores and certain things from other stores, you know what I mean?
And I don't always need to go to both grocery stores, but sometimes I do. And I know that on a day where I'm gonna hit up Whole Foods and then Market basket too. I need to plan for about two hours and 15 minutes. That includes driving from Whole Foods when I'm done there to Market Basket, and even though I'm only at Market Basket to grab a few things, it's usually packed and the lines are [00:05:30] long, the prices are worth it, and in general, the whole thing together takes about two hours and 15 minutes.
Again, I know this because I have done this task, I don't know, for 20 years, and that is how long it takes. Now, why does knowing this matter? Well, it matters because let's say it's a Saturday and I have a million things to do and I need to go grocery shopping and it's 12 o'clock and I need to be somewhere at two o'clock.
I know that I can't hit up both grocery stores. There is just not enough time. And if I didn't know that hitting up both grocery stores took two hours and [00:06:00] 15 minutes, and I might attempt to cram that task into a time slot in my day that is not two hours and 15 minutes long and I would end up stressed out late to the next thing I was supposed to be at, rushed at the grocery store, probably, you know, have to leave the grocery store in the middle of it without getting all the things I needed and an essentially unsuccessful at the task that I set out to do.
Now I use grocery shopping as an example because there's not a lot of emotions attached to grocery shopping. It's a relatable example, right? But sometimes we have emotions [00:06:30] attached to our schoolwork or our work work, which can complicate or cloud our ability to estimate how long our tasks take.
And we're gonna talk about that. But I wanted to give a relatable example of how we use time estimation in our everyday lives and what happens if we don't. So, lemme give you a few other examples real fast. Some other everyday activities that time estimation matters in, or things like getting ready to leave the house.
So knowing you have to be somewhere at a certain time and that means you need to leave the house, you know, at a certain time to allow time to get there. And that means you need to [00:07:00] think about how long it's gonna take you to get ready, shower, pack your bag, all the things. And some of us do this every single day.
So if you have to be at work, let's say at nine, right? And you've done that long enough to know that if you have to be at work by nine and there are certain things you have to do in the morning shower or whatever, and traffic is just what it is on most days, you might have to wake up at seven. So that's what you do every day.
You've estimated that your morning things take two hours, and that way you always arrive to work on time. At nine. If [00:07:30] you are a student, same thing, but you're arriving to your first class in the morning. Chances are you set your alarm for the same time every day because chances are you know what time to set your alarm for, depending on when your first class of the day starts.
So a lot of us are already doing time estimation in our days, but for some reason it is really hard to translate that skill to work tasks or school tasks like writing a paper or things like that. Why are we so bad at estimating tasks? We're gonna get into the A DHD angle in a little bit, but generally speaking, [00:08:00] whether you have a DHD or not.
Many of us struggle with time estimations because of certain cognitive biases. We've talked about cognitive biases on the show before. cognitive biases. They're kind of like psychological phenomena that influence the way we think about or perceive our world. And they're not necessarily true.
In fact, they're usually not, and that's where we get ourselves into trouble. Every single one of us is affected by cognitive biases, like nobody is immune. Knowing about them doesn't make you immune, [00:08:30] but there is a cognitive bias called the optimism bias, which means that sometimes our brains have a tendency to naturally go to the best-case scenario.
So it sounds like this is a nice way to view the world, right? Like isn't it good to be optimistic rose colored glasses? Yes, but not when it contradicts reality and not when it contradicts the very real math that's involved with estimating time. So let's take that grocery store example that I gave at the top of this episode, and let's just say that I know that going to Whole Foods to that one grocery store [00:09:00] takes 90 minutes.
Okay? We're not doing a markup basket day, it's just Whole Foods. And the math says that, and the reality says that in 20 years of historical data tells me it takes 90 minutes, but one. I need groceries and I look at the clock and I realize that I have 70 minutes. Seven zero. Falling for the optimism bias means that I somehow convinced myself that this time I can do my grocery shopping trip in 70 minutes, even though I know it always takes 90.
I start thinking, well, if I get a really good parking [00:09:30] spot and if I skip these few aisles, and maybe it's not that busy that day, and if I go really fast and traffic's really light, and if I don't take forever picking out a papaya like I always do, then yeah, I can do it in 70 minutes. All right. That is a lot of mental gymnastics and best case scenario thinking to convince myself that I can do a 90 minute task in 70 minutes, even though I have no data to prove that I can do. So that is the optimism bias. The stories we tell ourselves like, yeah, I can sit down and do that in half an hour.
Yeah, I can read that textbook [00:10:00] chapter in 20 minutes. Yeah. I can bang out that presentation in an hour, even though it usually takes seven. Yeah, I can do this big thing in a small amount of time, even though I never have. Right, so sometimes that's what we're up against when we try to estimate tasks, the optimism bias.
Now optimism bias ties into the planning fallacy. That's another cognitive bias, which means that even in the face of facts, we overestimate the benefits of doing something or the benefits of a future decision and underestimate the risks involved. [00:10:30] Having an optimism bias contributes to the planning fallacy.
Fallacy meaning false idea, right? And again, both of these biases mean that we're going through these really wild internal justifications about how just this one time, even though I never have before, okay, I can do it. Or it's saying, yes, I'm gonna make this decision because. The nearly impossible chance that it works out is more appealing to me than the reality that it likely won't. Now people with a DHD struggle even more with these cognitive biases because they often lack the [00:11:00] historical data required to counter something like the optimism bias.
For example, someone with A DHD might not yet be in the practice of noting what time they leave their house to get to the grocery store, and they might not be in the practice yet of noting how long they spend in the grocery store and how long it takes them to get home and unload the groceries. Due to something called Time Blindness, I mentioned this already at the top of the episode. People with A DHD will literally lose track of time in the grocery store and not have any clue whether they spent 15 minutes [00:11:30] there or two hours there. They may leave their house and then arrive in the parking lot of the grocery store with no recollection of the car ride there or how long it took.
Not in an unsafe blackout kind of way, but in a way that suggests time blindness could prevail over their sense of passing time. Because with people with A DHD passing time or the, you know, the very actual sense of time passing is sometimes imperceptible. They literally do not perceive it. And we're gonna talk more about how to combat this when we get to the strategy section, but [00:12:00] I'm bringing it up now because a DHD time blindness is very real and it needs to be addressed head on when you're trying to get better at estimating time.
And if you're listening to this with a DH, adhd, I don't want you to think, oh, well my time blindness means that I'm screwed here. No. It means that you more than anyone else, just need to use the strategies that work for you. Now, I touched on this a little bit, but let's talk about what happens when we are bad at estimating time.
I'm gonna cover some scenarios for the career space and then the school space, and then the personal space [00:12:30] as well. Okay? And I'm sure that at least some of these scenarios will resonate with those of you who are listening or watching on YouTube. Did you know that if you're not watching this on YouTube and you're listening, you can watch this show?
You just watch my talking head on the Learn and Work Smarter YouTube channel. And if you're over there or if you're already here watching it, I would love if you subscribed those gestures really help me grow my channel. Anyways, if any of these scenarios do resonate with you, then I'm asking you to consider if time estimation might be your problem [00:13:00] instead of categorically telling yourself that I'm bad at time management period.
Because sometimes when time estimation is the root issue, it just looks like bad time management in general. But if you fix the time estimation problem, then you're fixing most of the time management problem. You get better at managing time because you can accurate, accurately predict how long things take you to complete anyway.
Let's talk about some of the negative effects of bad time estimation in the workplace. This might look like logging into a Zoom [00:13:30] meeting at the last minute or even a few minutes late. Because you didn't account for the fact that your computer sometimes needs an update overnight, and now your computer is doing its update thing when you're supposed to be logged into the meeting.
So it means that you're relying on that optimism bias and neglecting to think about the reality that it does usually take you about 10 minutes to get set up in Zoom.
It could look like walking into an in-person meeting late 'cause you underestimated how long it would take you to shut down the project you were working on, grab your notebook, run to the bathroom, fill your water bottle, and get down to the meeting room on time. It looks [00:14:00] like constantly needing extensions on your work projects or promising you'll get something to a colleague or superior in the morning, but never getting to it until the end of the day. It looks like doing really hasty work because you didn't give yourself enough time to create the presentation. It even means arriving to your job late, or maybe if your job is to go offsite somewhere, like meeting clients or something, it's arriving at those places late because the optimism bias clouded your judgment.
It means arriving to school late a lot of the time. It means having a tendency of night before the test [00:14:30] crammed study sessions instead of using spaced repetition, which I teach you about in episode seven, how to learn things. If you don't have good time estimation skills, then trust me, studying is really, really hard.
It means turning in late assignments or regularly asking for extensions. It means realizing that you're not gonna have something completed in time so you stay home from school so that you have an excuse to not turn it in that day. It means not having enough time to complete your readings. In our personal lives, it looks like showing up late to places, paying bills late, [00:15:00] even frantically scrambling around the holidays to complete holiday related things.
You know, I'll give you an example. Um, I celebrate Christmas and I like to send out Christmas cards. Most years I know that it takes me a certain amount of time to pick out the picture, create the design online, and then place the order, wait for the delivery, and then hand address all the envelopes and ship them out.
And it wasn't until just a few years ago until I realized like, heck, I need to start this process November 1st. So I'm not turning my Christmas cards into New Year's Eve cards, which ended [00:15:30] up happening for years and then then across all three contexts, so career, academic, and our personal lives, not being able to accurately estimate time leads to anxiety and stress and bad confidence in ourselves and other people losing confidence in us.
It leads to poor sleep and less sleep and bad quality work and low motivation. And honestly, these are some really big consequences. So it's not just like, whoops, like I missed an assignment. But chronically not being able to estimate time and not doing anything to get better at the skill can really [00:16:00] affect your whole life.
Okay, so that got pretty heavy, but obviously today's episode does not end here. And now we're gonna get into some strategies to help you get better at time estimation, because there is good news here. The good news is that we can get better at estimating how long things take us to complete. This is a skill, just like everything we talk about on this show is a skill, time management, task management, note taking, annotating, studying, organization, self-advocacy.
All of these things are skills. And what's the thing about skills we can get better at them? [00:16:30] These things are not character traits, they're not personality quirks. They are skills. And you either have 'em or you don't. And if you don't, then you can get them. And that's freaking amazing. Don't you think?
That's why I've devoted 20 years of my career to teaching skills. 'cause I am continuously, continuously blown away and full of awe every single time I work with someone who doesn't have a skill and then they learn the skill and then their entire life changes. And that is what I want for every single one of you.
So anyways, what can we do to [00:17:00] get better at time estimation? Well, do you remember at the top of this episode, I gave you my grocery shopping example? Of course, we're gonna return to that for a minute. Um, I'm not sure if you recall the particulars, but I said that a trip to Whole Foods takes me 90 minutes total from the time I leave my house to do the shopping, to loading my car, to putting the carriage back in, the carriage collector thing, and then driving home.
That's 90 minutes. How do I know that's 90 minutes? Well, I also snuck this in at the top of the episode too but I know that because I collected data on that. There was a time, probably several times where I looked at my [00:17:30] clock when I left the house and I went about my normal pace of grocery shopping on a normal traffic day, and I looked at my clock when I pulled into the driveway.
Sometimes I'm sure it was 80 minutes, and sometimes it might have been a hundred minutes, but on average 90 minutes. So I collected data. There is no time estimation without data collection. I need to make that very clear. We can't tell ourselves, Hey, I listen to a podcast about estimating time and now I'm gonna get better at estimating time without following that up with, okay, well let me collect some data about how long these things take.
So that's the first step. I [00:18:00] want you to pick a task then you do pretty regularly and I want you to time how long it takes you for to do that on average. Now, the nature of averages is that you're gonna collect this data a few separate times and then you know, find the average amount of time. Let me give you an example in a work scenario and then a school scenario.
So at work, let's say that you regularly have to provide the minute notes after a meeting to everyone who was at the meeting. For some reason, you were designated the perpetual meeting note taker. Okay? If you're curious about how the heck one would go about doing that, go [00:18:30] listen to episode 31 about how to take notes at meetings.
But anyway, let's say that. Processing and distributing them. Meeting notes is something that you like to do the day of the meeting. That's a good professional practice. So what do you do to collect the data? Well, you would time yourself from the moment you sit down at your desk to the moment you hit send, to distribute those meeting notes via email.
And you would do this several times and you would find the average. Now, let's say that these steps involve you coming back to your desk after a meeting, uh, reviewing your notes that you took, cleaning them up, processing them, and then making them shareworthy. [00:19:00] All right? And let's say that takes you 20 minutes.
And let's say that another part of this process takes about 10 minutes, and that is formatting the notes in a way that's easy for other people to read. And every adding everybody's name to an email and composing the email and hitting sent, and maybe that 10-minute task you have to do later in the day if you got interrupted.
Or maybe it's all in one sitting. I don't know. Regardless, the total amount of time it took you to process your notes is 30 minutes. All right? And you would do this data collection several times, and maybe one day it took you 25 minutes. Another day it takes [00:19:30] you 36 minutes. But whatever, on average, you can get it done in 30.
So that's the data. And we do not ignore the data. So the next time you have the designated scribe for a meeting you are gonna give yourself 30 minutes to complete this task, and you're gonna ignore the optimism bias when it creeps in. And it will trust me. It will.
So when your inner voice says, you know what, I can really get to that spin class after work. 'cause I'm sure I could do my notes in 20 minutes. Or like, yeah, I can take that phone call at this time because I'm sure I can spend less time formatting my notes and get it all done in 20 minutes, you're gonna ignore [00:20:00] that voice and you're gonna give yourself 30 minutes to do the task that you know takes you 30 minutes to do.
And how are you gonna do this? How are you gonna make sure that you have 30 minutes to do a 30 minute task? You know, I'm gonna tell you to do time blocking. That's episode 77. If you're new to this and you wanna know how it works, time blocking doesn't work for every single person for every single day, and that's never the advice I give.
But for busy days, when you have a lot of work to do or you're new to learning about time estimation, and you wanna get better at it, use a time blocking system.
That means [00:20:30] that if you work a standard nine-to-five job, you're gonna give every minute of your day a task. And so if your meeting is at two o'clock and it ends at two 30, you're gonna give yourself from 2 35 to 3 0 5 to do your meeting notes, and you're gonna mark that in your time block agenda, or even if in Google Calendar, if you're using Google Calendar to time block your days.
Now, this is an activity that you can do for any recurring task that you are responsible for. I would say at least once a month. I would call that a frequent enough task. So if you're a student, you might have an essay once a month. Well, you probably have more than that, but [00:21:00] let's say for your literature class, you tend to have an essay once a month.
Well, instead of blindly telling yourself that, you know, you write your essay on Thursday night, when it's due on Friday, and then freaking out on Thursday night because your essay took you longer than you thought, and now you're in a panic situation, your essay is junk and you have no time. Instead of doing that, what we're gonna do is we're gonna collect some data about how long it takes you to usually write an essay.
Yeah, and that might mean for the first two essay assignments, you are taking note of what time you sit down to work on your essay and what time you stop [00:21:30] for every single work session that you give to your essay. So let's say that you work on it for an hour, right? Five days in a row, okay? That means that you need, on average, five hours to write your essays, and that's assuming that you already did your research and collected your quotes and all that kind of thing.
All right, well, the next time you're assigned an essay due on Friday, and you're tempted to not start it until after practice on Thursday night, which ends at seven, you're gonna listen to the data and not to that very wrong and sneaky voice in the, in your head that says, nah, I can bang this out in one [00:22:00] hour.
No, you can't. You never have. And you're not gonna do that now. Now, another student example would be reading. Let's say that you regularly get an assignment, um, of reading a textbook and taking notes on that chapter. Okay, well, how long does that take you? Start a timer, do the work, end the timer, and take note of that data.
That's how long it takes you. And this isn't wishful thinking or hoping, or you know, the planning fallacy or the optimum optimism bias. This is real actual factual data. And the next time you're assigned to read a chapter and take [00:22:30] notes on it, you will know exactly how much time you need to get that done.
And hopefully if you have a good time management system that makes time visible, I'm always saying that a good time management system has to make time visible, you will know if you have sufficient time to work on that chapter reading and note taking assignment on whatever day you plan to work on it.
Again, relying on facts and not on wishful thinking. You could do the same data collection exercise for regular reading assignments. Like how long does it actually take you to read a page of a novel? Okay, we'll collect that data with [00:23:00] a clock. And the next time you're assigned 40 pages of reading as an assignment, you need to do simple math equation 40 times however many minutes it takes you to read a page.
And that's how much time you need to give yourself to complete that assignment. Whatever your situation in your career or at home or in school, there are repeatable tasks that you do regularly, that you can now more accurately determine how long they're gonna take you to complete, collect the data, and then when you're planning your day, make sure you truly have that time in your day.
Now another strategy or maybe [00:23:30] kind of like a pro tip for the one that I'm currently on, I guess, is to keep this information somewhere. If you do all the work of collecting the data to see how long it takes you to process and distribute meeting notes, or to read a textbook or read a novel, or create your Excel spreadsheet for your finance job or whatever it is, if you go through all of that work and then not remember what your time estimations were, well,
that's just silly. So store this information somewhere like in an Apple note, in a notebook, in a Google Doc. And as you know from episode 91 about working memory, this is not information that [00:24:00] our brains were designed to store indefinitely. Okay, let's talk about some tasks that are more challenging to estimate.
Like you might get curve balls or unpredictable events might happen in the middle of the task. For some people, this is more like really creative work. Like you might not know how long it takes you to create a blueprint for that new building. Or you might not know how long it's gonna take you to produce that sketch for your drawing class, or you might not have an idea of how long it's gonna take you to brainstorm a new idea out of nothing for [00:24:30] work.
All right? Fair enough. The strategy here then is to give yourself time and a half. That means take your best estimation and then give yourself time and a half. And that's conservative because deep down I really wanna tell you all to give yourself double the time. 'cause I think that's gonna put you in a much better situation.
But I also worry that some of you might hear me say, oh, just double the time. And you might think that's unrealistic. Like I don't even have double the time and then you might not even do the strategy at all. And so I'm trying to be more moderate in saying give [00:25:00] yourself time and a half just so you're not scared to try this strategy.
If I'm being fully transparent, time and a half is your better bet. At least since you get better at this. But what does this look like? Well, let's say that it's the first essay you've ever had for a particular class, and you don't know how long it's gonna take you, and you have no historical data. Okay?
Start with an estimate. Start with something. Let's say that you think it's gonna take you two hours. Okay, well then you would budget for three. Let's say that designing a PowerPoint presentation for your team you're hoping takes you four hours. Well, okay. Well then [00:25:30] give yourself.
Six. And then when it's all said and done, then you calculate how much time it really took, and that's the data that you store. So time and a half is really good tool for estimating tasks that are a little bit more creative or that run the risk of having other factors interrupt our working or for tasks that we've never done before, so we don't even have any clue, any baseline. It could also include, you know, tasks that we're working on with the team, right? Or we're collaborating. 'cause that means that we sometimes are waiting on other people. But again, over [00:26:00] time you will collect data on this type of task. And you will store it wherever you stored your previous time estimations for your more predictable, repeatable tasks.
Now, I've mentioned ADHD a few times already in this episode, particularly this concept of time blindness. I'm gonna bring it up here again because it's something we can't ignore. Time blindness is real. Many people with ADHD report having absolute no sense of time passing when they're involved in a task, and therefore time estimation can be a mega challenge because people [00:26:30] with ADHD are often working with absolutely no data points whatsoever. So for some of my private clients, I might ask them, okay, well how long did that assignment take you? And they don't know whether to say it took five minutes or five hours.
So if you're listening to this and you have ADHD, all that means is that you have to set yourself up with some kind of external guardrails when you're collecting your data and when you're actually working on the task. Your internal timing mechanisms can't be fully relied on here. So you need to rely on something [00:27:00] else, something external.
And of course, just like people without ADHD, you're gonna set a timer when you start a task and then stop the timer when you complete the task. But what I would also do is I suggest working in intervals. Let me explain. Most people with ADHD are gonna struggle to sit down, initiate a task, and do the thing from start to finish with like no distractions and then have a neat measurement of how long that thing took. Usually it doesn't happen that way.
Usually people with ADHD have a lot of starts and stop stops, [00:27:30] starts and stops, unless of course you're entering into a hyper-focused state. I'll talk about that in a minute. But in order to get an accurate measure of how much time you're spending on the task and not spent on doing other things like opening your phone or opening another tab or getting sidetracked, doing something else, I suggest you work in intervals.
A dependable interval is the Pomodoro technique, which is working for 25 minutes and then taking a break for five, working for 25 minutes, then taking a break for five, and you keep going until the task is done. And at the end you can say to yourself, well, that took me [00:28:00] four Pomodoros. Okay, cool. Well, then it took, what's the math?
An hour and 40 minutes then. Okay. Or if that's too many stops and starts, is that hour and 40 minutes… I don't know, whatever the math is. Okay. And if that's too many stops and starts, you could do a 45-minute interval with a 15 minute break. 45-minute interval, 15-minute break. And when you're done you could say, okay, well that took me two intervals.
Alright, well, that was two hours. And yes. This is only doable if you have a timer. Now, another strategy if you have ADHD is use body doubling. We talk all about body doubling in episode [00:28:30] 55. If you really wanna try to lock in and get a task done in the amount of time that you estimated you can get it done by, work in parallel with someone else who's also working on their thing. That's a different thing from what you're working on, but it's, it's their thing. Body doubling can be really, really powerful. So go listen to episode 55 if you're curious about how to maximize that strategy. And then I said I would also mention hyperfocus, so let's chat about that for a sec.
Sometimes people with ADHD can enter into a hyper-focused state that can last [00:29:00] either all day or in some cases, weeks or even longer. And then when someone's in hyperfocus, it's like they become oblivious to anything around them. It is an extreme form of time blindness because not only is there no sense of passing time, but there is literally no sense of anything.
I talk about time blindness a bit with ADHD expert Lindsey Roberts in episode 79, and so my suggestion is if you're in a state of ADHD hyperfocus for whatever reason, wait until that particular period of hyperfocus [00:29:30] is over, or at least until it's less intense before you begin data collecting, because it just won't be accurate.
And sometimes a period of hyperfocus is really tough to break with all of the clocks in the world. So sometimes you just gotta ride it out. So if for whatever reason you're in a moment or a season or an episode of hyperfocus, get through it, come up for air. Recover and then try the time estimation, data collection step again.
You'll get there. Okay, so we're wrapping up the episode, but I wanna give a quick recap so that you feel confident about what [00:30:00] you learned today and so that you feel inspired to take action on what you learned today, because inspiration is cool, but it doesn't become magic until you take action on it.
Alright, so here's our recap. We talked about why we're so bad at estimating tasks, and for most of us it has to do with cognitive biases, such as the planning fallacy and the optimism bias. And these are interesting little mental frameworks or mental games we play with ourselves that skew our reality.
We talked about the negative impact that bad time estimation can have on our lives, on our jobs, on our [00:30:30] academics, and even with ourselves.
How not being able to accurately estimate how long tasks take can lead to poor performance, bad grades, bad sleep, low to motivation, stress, a bad reputation, poor confidence, and a whole slew of negative things that nobody wants for anybody. We also talked about what having good time estimation skills can lead to, and that's less stress in your day. Well, essentially the opposite of all the negative effects, right? Higher quality output, more dependability. 'cause you get done what you said you're gonna get done a stronger sense of control in your [00:31:00] day and over yourself.
And of course if you're a student, better grades. And then we covered the first step in developing the skill of time estimation, and that is data collection. So that means picking a single task that you repeatedly do, I'd say at least once a month. And timing yourself several times, completing the task and finding the average, and then storing that average somewhere in a Google Doc, maybe an Apple note.
And then finally we talked about how people with ADHD can use specific tools like external timers, interval work sessions, and body doubling to strengthen their time [00:31:30] estimation skills. And we also talked about why hyperfocus can distort your perception of time and how important it's to gather accurate data once that hyperfocus wave has passed.
If you take away just one thing from today's episode is that time estimation isn't about guessing or hoping, or best case scenarios. It's about collecting data and using it. The more you measure it, the more you know and the less stressed you'll feel when planning your days. Because when you truly, truly know how long things take, [00:32:00] you can truly, truly learn and work smarter.
So whether you start by timing, how long it takes to write a paper, how long it takes you to get ready in the morning, or process your meeting notes or, or read a page of a book, I suggest you start collecting your own time data this week. You will be amazed by how much clarity it can bring. Keep showing up, keep doing the hard work, keep asking the hard questions, and never stop learning.[00:32:30]
