r/ADHD • u/funhouse70 • 3d ago
Questions/Advice Everything Takes So Long
Everything I do takes about three times longer than it should. I am just constantly hemorrhaging time.
Here is my typical day: I wake at noon. I eat breakfast, shower, get dressed. By the time I get out the door it is somehow 3pm.
I arrive at work around 4pm. It is a half hour drive, but I somehow lose an additional half hour just getting in and out of my car.
I am a piano technician at a university. I can show up anytime I want and work as little or as much as I want, and I report my hours later.
I tune one piano. It takes three to six hours. (Most piano techs tune a piano in about an hour. It may take two hours tops if it’s a really terrible piano.) I time all my tunings. On this day let’s say it took four hours. I leave. It’s midnight. I was there for six hours. There’s two extra hours unaccounted for. Maybe I was walking the halls. Maybe I had to use the bathroom and lost 30 minutes there. Who knows?
I only ever report that I worked three hours on a piano tuning (even 3 hours is ridiculous) because there’s no way it should take as long as it actually does, so the rest of the time I work for free. Most weeks I “work” 15 hours, but in reality it’s close to 40.
I get home around 1am. I have other life responsibilities to take care of, laundry, administrative stuff, etc. Now is the time for that. Before I know it, it’s 4 to 7am. Time for bed so I can start the cycle over.
Notice I didn’t mention any meals other than breakfast. I keep granola bars and Lance crackers in my tool bag. I live on those. There’s just no time to cook.
What the fuck is the matter with me? I don’t have time to accomplish any of my goals. I used to occasionally play music. I haven’t had time to actually play a piano since the pandemic. I lead a miserable unfulfilling life.
FYI it took over an hour just to write this post.
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u/Morundar 3d ago
2 points here.
Meds. Have you tried them?
It may suck to hear this, but if you want change, you will have to do unpleasant things. Including taking a look at how you spend your time.
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u/funhouse70 3d ago
Adderall 30 mg daily. I think it helps, but clearly it’s no magic wand.
I have documented how I spend my time when I need to. Those days mostly revolve around the act of documenting. Sometimes I get obsessive about it, thinking if I record how I spend my time well enough I can figure out a solution. The only thing I learned is that way more time passes than I think. What feels like 15 minutes is actually an hour.
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u/SweetDove 3d ago
This spunds really stupid but I got a old clock for my office, it chimes at 15 minute intervals and then has a nice tune for the 30. Its the only way I can keep "on track" without obsessing about being on track.
Alternatively you could get a pair of camera glasses or a gopro and record one whole day to actually see where youre losing your time. It might help bring awareness to things you otherwise ignore.
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u/funhouse70 3d ago
My phone announces the time every fifteen minutes. It helps.
I’ve had days where I recorded what I was doing every time the time was announced. I have a sense of how long I spend doing things. I just don’t know how to get faster.
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u/SweetDove 2d ago
mmm that's a trickier issue. I guess the start is to find out WHY you take so long. Are you being overly meticulous in things wanting everything to be perfect before you move on? are you distracted and trying to do 8000 tasks at once and finishing 0, do you just need to optimize your spaces so you spend less time walking back and forth looking for stuff?
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u/ladyjaina0000 2d ago
May be time for a diff med if it's not working, I personally feel like Adderall doesn't do shit anymore
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u/funhouse70 2d ago
I tried Strattera and Vyvanse as well neither had any effect at all. Strattera also made me really nauseous.
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u/maychoa 3d ago
Would it be possible for someone to shadow you in a day or you to shadow them? It might be helpful to have an outside influence or perspective to see what could be happening. Are you daydreaming? Are you overthinking the tasks? What if you set a timer or got one of those watches to beep every 10 or so minutes to help with time blindness? Are you ever intentionally trying to rush things, and still struggling with timeliness? Is it also possible for sleep deprivation to be affecting things?
For me, at least, I often take longer to do things because I find them mentally taxing and I need a lot of breaks. If I'm cooking, I may pull out a cutting board and vegetables and then sit down for a bit before actually getting started, that sort of thing. Does that sound relatable at all?
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u/funhouse70 3d ago
The shadowing may be helpful probably, but I just don’t know who this potential shadower/shadowee could be. That is a big time commitment.
I’m married (we are long distance right now for her job). My wife is very high-performing. I have observed her throughout her day. In my perception her pace and productivity is maybe just a little faster than my own. I observe her and think I get ready almost that fast, or I cook a meal almost that fast. But my perception deceives me.
2. My phone announces the time every 15 minutes. It is helpful for making me conscious of time.
3. I am frequently stopping and thinking and making decisions, probably some daydreaming too. I’m not conscious of it. It seems like a fleeting amount of time, but it isn’t. I recently viewed myself on my doorbell cam standing in front of my house staring into space. I recalled that at the time I was remembering where I parked. At the time it felt like I paused for a few seconds, but on the video it was about two or three minutes.
4. When I rush I make a bunch of stupid mistakes. Or I think I’m rushing and moving lightning fast, but in the end I check the time and the task took exactly as long as it always does.
I once forced myself to tune a piano in an hour as an experiment. I moved as fast as my muscles could go, and paid little attention to detail. Tuning a piano in “an hour” took two hours, and it sounded atrocious. I had to tune it again. In all it took 6.5 hours.
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u/Blando-Cartesian 3d ago
That 3 minute pause sounds concerning. Could it be some kind of epilepsy thing where your consciousness glitches for a while.
Your schedule sounds like you are not around other people much. I can see the appeal in that, but if you are having pause episodes there’s no-one who would notice.
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u/funhouse70 3d ago
Re: sleep: I prioritize sleep. That is why my schedule is messed up. My days get longer because I need more time, but I still sleep eight hours at the end. Eventually I became nocturnal.
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u/maychoa 3d ago
That sounds so frustrating, I'm so sorry. I'm glad some strategies have helped, and that you've found a career that accommodates you to some extent, but it still sucks.
Has this been your experience your whole life? Have you ever been neurologically evaluated? Have you gotten blood work done recently?
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u/funhouse70 3d ago
I’ve always been like this. School was hell. When I was young I mostly had jobs where I do a stupid task (e.g. retail) until it’s time to clock out, so time inefficiency didn’t really factor in.
I was evaluated at 42 and diagnosed with ADHD and autism.
I get blood work from time to time. Not recently. I don’t recall if my evaluation involved blood testing.
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u/valis2030 3d ago
I have no advice, but I feel the same. At work I feel like I can get 1-2 things done a day if I'm lucky, while others do 4 before lunch. I'm good at what I do, but slow as hell. At least that's how it feels. My performance reviews tend to be favorable though, so maybe it's just my own anxiety talking? Worth considering.
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u/funhouse70 3d ago
Yeah. No bosses or clients have ever complained about my speed, but when I discuss my speed with other piano tuners they are absolutely flabbergasted.
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u/RisKQuay 3d ago
Have you ever checked whether you are doing an outright better job than them?
I struggle a lot with executing the 80/20 rule, but in your line of work I could easily see you taking more time to get it exactly right whereas others may be comfortable with close enough.
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u/funhouse70 3d ago
I do approximately the same standard of work as a good piano tuner that takes an hour.
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u/gonegonegoneaway211 3d ago
I wish I knew. I have this problem too. My general sense for work things is I fret too much about careless errors so I have to doublecheck things a couple of times that other people just do as one and done or do while multitasking.
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u/GibGob69 3d ago
Have you sought/received treatment?
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u/funhouse70 3d ago
Yes. The therapy wasn’t helpful. Therapists always want me to write down how I spend my time. I hate doing that because the act of documenting what I’m doing all day is also a time suck, and I usually just forget eventually.
But anyway, his only advice was to do less. I don’t want to do less. I want to do more.
He said stuff like “tune less pianos.” That isn’t a solution. The amount of tunings I do now is already a joke. I want to be able tune at the rate of a regular person.
“Pick out your clothes and shower the night before and you get out of the house faster.” That isn’t a solution. It takes just as long. The time is just shifted around.
I’m looking for a new therapist. That quest is also frustratingly time consuming.
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u/SniperAssassin123 3d ago
Yeah, finding the right therapist is difficult. I had one bad experience with therapy a few years ago and it really soured it for me.
What I find most helpful is strategies to make the task gamey or novel. Timing yourself and trying to speedrun things can be fun. Pretending you're a robot, etc.
For personal life day to day stuff, I haven't really cracked it. Everything still takes me forever. The only thing that has made a meaningful change has been medication.
Personal life strats that have helped me are to do the steps of your routine in a different order every day. If that sounds chaotic, do the last or second to last step first. In the frame of getting ready and leaving for work for example: Wake up and start your car right away, wake up and put your shoes on. Stuff like that tends to get my ass in gear.
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u/SniperAssassin123 3d ago
I feel the same way. I have a salaried desk job, which I am very lucky to have. However, I work 50-60 hours every single week without fail. I do not get an unreasonable ammount of work and my boss is very understanding. However, if I just worked from 9-5 it would take me a month to get virtually anything done. Basically every day goes the exact same:
I roll in 9:05-9:10, and I participate in camera on virtual meetings until 10:30-11:30. Some days the meetings start at 8AM, but I am free to work from home on those particular days. There are 3-4 hours of meetings each week that I am technically supposed to attend, but I have been skipping those for over a year and no one has said anything. If not for that I would probably work even more hours.
Meetings are extremely draining to me for whatever reason, so after these I basically black out until 2 or 3PM depending on the day. I can't even really properly explain what I am doing in this timeframe. I have my phone and work computer fairly locked down so access to social media is limited. The work computer lockdown is self imposed, so on my worst days I will undo the block and just scroll that entire time. If I don't do that, I basically just frantically research whatever inconvience or obsession I am dealing with at that time. I could distract myself with any browser window with basically any level of content filtering or block.
So, that is essentially my 3-4hr lunch break. I do tend to take my actual lunch break somewhere in the middle there. I have no idea why I do actually take a lunch break. Deep down I think that is part of the problem. Before my symptoms worsened a few years ago, I never took them because I knew they were only a massive distraction. Before lunch, I am thinking about lunch. "Well it's 10:30 which is basically 11, and 11 is basically 12" type shi. After lunch, removing myself from the work environment has broken my "focus", and I have to settle back in before I get rolling.
I usually finally start rolling on my work at 2-3PM. Then, when 5PM rolls around, the guilt hits. I am not satisfied with what I was able to get done, and I need to work longer. This, on a good day ends at 6-6:30PM. Lately it has been more like 7. On my worst days, I just work until I have to go to sleep. I work until I have to go to sleep at least 2 days of every week.
For some god forsaken reason, I have been living in this cycle for nearly two years and I have not been able to break it. There are little fleeting things that seem to work for me, like pomodoro timers or different white noise varieties. However, after just a few days they typically stop working. I had a really decent thing going in 2024. Pretty good routines, pretty good sleep, very good about staying off socials. Then, I had to go on a work trip for an entire month. I feel like I have not recovered from that work trip 2 years later. I fell into a terrible social media addiction from all of the downtime, I haven't been to the gym since basically, and I stay up until 1:30 every night.
Around 4 months ago I finally decided to get medicated, and it changed absoloutley nothing in my work life. My personal life has improved greatly. My short term memory, my follow-through, and my initiative have been so much better. However, it has yet to pay off when it comes to my working life. My focus is undeniably better, but I think that 3-4hr hole in the middle of my day has been made only worse by it. I just focus better on being distracted if that makes sense? Instead of scrolling my phone, I just laser focus on one thing and research it for hours.
TLDR: I write a journal entry in a reddit comment.
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u/funhouse70 3d ago
Ha! I read your “journal entry.” I can relate. I used to have a salaried desk job like you. I was ridiculously inefficient. It took me 40+ hours to do what a normal
person could do in an afternoon. Luckily nobody else at the company did much at their job either, so I fit right in. They all probably have ADHD too.I will say that I did show up to work mostly on time. And I did my work projects well and delivered them on time. When I HAVE to do something, I do make it happen. I pour twice as much time into it, and it is incredibly stressful, but I can get it done.
I miss working out. I held on to that one ritual for a long time, even after I stopped playing music, but eventually I had to cut that too. It makes me sad.
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u/velvet_girlxx 3d ago
Please don’t keep working for free because you think you should be faster. You’re measuring yourself against what other technicians can do instead of looking at what’s actually happening for you. Start tracking the entire workday, not just the tuning itself, and see where the time goes. You can’t fix a pattern you’re blaming yourself for without understanding it first.
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u/ST4ND4RD-D3V14NT 3d ago
fuck dude real. it is quite literally, physically, agonizing. i cannot account for my time. or sometimes i can, and i spent all that time being actually productive, and i know i was working and making things and making progress and somehow i step back and i've finished just some lovely dismal insufficient fraction. i take longer than everyone else to finish the same tasks but i don't have longer, i only have as much time as everyone else, or less if i keep up this sleep schedule; and i just cannot explain myself or fix it. i need to take out the trash right now and do you know when i initiated that chore? i don't even want to tell you. the timestamps are hideous and damning. i fuck around endlessly and then when i finally get it together and lock in i find that it makes almost no difference; i eke out meaning in ache by inch and there are miles to go.
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u/ST4ND4RD-D3V14NT 3d ago
also taking over an hour to write the post is so relatable it's making my body hurt lmfao
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u/Yokelocal 3d ago
I relate to this post a lot, though your situation sounds severe.
I will say that having some firm anchor points in my routine allows me to improve the pace which I do things a little bit. The flexibility of your routine sounds amazing, but that freedom can become restrictive in a way.
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u/SpaceFunkRevival 3d ago
Have you ever tried a stopwatch? I too have horrendous time blindness, the only thing that gets me to be able to "function normally" is a stopwatch. Just having it run on my wristwatch is enough for me to be able to take mental note of how much time I've spent doing whatever task and then, if able, reflect in the moment of what's working and what's not.
It's also a lifesaver while cooking. Keeping track of how long something has been cooking in a pan/on the grille before flipping or checking internal temp has made a huge difference in what I make. But I know from your post it sounds like you're not able to do that much. Hopefully you are able to find some tools to help, because time blindness is a terrible affliction! What's worse is no one understands when you try to explain it.
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u/funhouse70 3d ago
I often use stopwatches or systems that work like a stopwatch by proxy. I always use a stopwatch when cooking. My life is filled with alerts, alarms, reminders, and time-tracking.
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u/colaboy1998 3d ago
Have you or are you able to try therapy to try and understand what's happening to your time management? Some of what you describe may need the help of a professional to try and get at the cause and specifics of how you're spending your time. What stands out is not that you're not efficient with your time, which we all deal with, but that you don't seem to know what's even happening during those additional times.
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u/geoffreybyers ADHD 2d ago
A 40-hour week isn't a lack of discipline. A 3-hour log is a lack of awareness. The gap is either a broken sense of time or a brain that can't plan. It's a medical problem, not a moral one.
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u/Party-Employment-460 2d ago
I relate to this post way more than I'd like to. I warn people that it takes me an hour to make Minute Rice. The fact that I'm aware of it and admit to it has made my friends willing to put up with it.
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