Member-only story
From Now to Not-Now: ADHD and the Battle with Temporal Discounting
Finding tactics to help you thrive in a time-blurred world.
“Hang on a minute,” my coworker said through the zoom. “I need to take care of this now, or it won’t get done.”
I nodded and sat back in my office chair. “I get it. Let me know when you’re done.”
The task was small, tedious, and crucial to the success of our upcoming fundraising campaign for the rape crisis center where we work. I’d mentioned it in passing as we were covering a different topic.
Now it had interrupted the flow of the meeting, not even a third of the way down the agenda. As I doodled in my notebook, listening to the clicks of them typing through my laptop speaker, I wasn’t annoyed at all. Like me, my coworker deals with ADHD every moment of every day.
Unlike me, they’ve known about it for most of their professional life, and this was how they compensated for time blindness: when a task was essential, it took priority, because they couldn’t trust their brain to take care of it later.
That method worked for them; they are very good at their job. My own coping strategy had unconsciously developed decades ago, before I really even knew about ADHD in anyone. It takes the form of the little notebook…
