Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Your sense of time
For a lot of people with ADHD there are only two times: now, and not now. A deadline on Thursday and one six months out sit in the same box until the day they suddenly become today.
This is worth knowing because it explains why being told the date again does nothing. You knew the date. What was missing was the sense of it coming closer, which most people get for free. So the work is not more reminding but building something outside your head that visibly moves: a countdown, a wall calendar you cross off, one look each week at what is coming. That is a practical repair, not a character repair.
Qur’an and Sunnah
We stayed a day or a part of a day, but ask those who keep count (Quran 23:113). Even there the honest move is to admit that felt time is unreliable and to ask something that counts.
قَالُواْ لَبِثۡنَا يَوۡمًا أَوۡ بَعۡضَ يَوۡمࣲ فَسۡـَٔلِ ٱلۡعَآدِّينَ
and they will reply, ‘We stayed a day or a part of a day, but ask those who keep count.’
Qur’an 23:113read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A systematic review of quantitative studies confirmed that procrastination turns up alongside ADHD symptoms again and again, while being clear that how consistent the link is and what drives it remain unsettled. The association is well documented and the mechanism is not. Treat the account above as a working explanation that fits the experience rather than something the evidence has pinned down.
Suriano R. (2026). A systematic review on the association between ADHD and procrastination.. Research in developmental disabilities doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
If your sense of nearness only has two settings, nothing can feel gradually more urgent.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
In the famous test a child is left alone with one sweet and told that waiting will earn them two. Some reach for it almost before the grown up has finished speaking. They understood the offer perfectly. The second sweet simply was not real to them.
A small job due tomorrow feels heavier than a big one due next week. Everyone works this way. It is simply stronger with ADHD, and it quietly wrecks any list ordered by importance.
If reading has always been slow and effortful, that is worth looking at in its own right. Dyslexia and ADHD turn up together far more often than chance would give, and they need different help.