How a senior developer manages her ADHD with Timeular

Rachel is a senior developer at a business intelligence firm.

The challenge: overcoming ADHD procrastination

“I tried everything and nothing worked. I even tried making my own terminal utilities.”

Rachel needed a way to overcome ADHD procrastination and improve her planning skills. She was on the lookout for a tool that helped her accurately track time and help her improve her time management. And it needed to be easy to remember to use.

The solution: remembering to track time for better control

“If I don’t have what I need in front of me, I’ll literally lose hours because I’ll struggle through without realising it. If I don’t have a bottle in front of me, I’ll forget to drink.”

What Rachael’s describing is object permanence – what isn’t seen isn’t remembered. Quite literally, when she was in deep work, if the software was hiding away in the background, she’d forget to track. And it was this need for a physical prompt to help her track time to hit her goals that led Rachael to discover Timeular and has led to minute-accurate time data that she habitually tracks each day.

Rachel started using Timeular to meet her clear goals: to make sure she hit work deadlines, stayed focused on impactful work and keep on track with writing her book about how she’s applying stoicism and taoism to better herself.

Rachael’s day starts with a reflection of the previous day. She looks back at how many gray (assigned to ‘deep work’) and yellow (assigned to ‘distractions’) blocks there are in her calendar. She then looks at the day ahead and asks herself: “how do I feel and what am I expecting from today?”

It’s the discrepancy between perceived productivity and actual productivity that Rachael is able to analyse in Timeular and, with the addition of other factors like sleep or nutrition, she can then work out what needs doing to stay on track to meet her goals.

On a really good day she can achieve five hours straight of deep work, a stark contrast to the 15 minutes or less that she can achieve on a really bad day. As is important with ADHD, Rachael is careful to not get too ingrained in a hyper-focused state and setting up notifications helps her with this.

The outcome: alignment between estimated and actual

Rachael now has much better control over her time and there is less of a discrepancy between her estimated and actual productivity.

If you too are struggling with object permanence, Rachael has another great tip – this time for getting things out of her head for later so she’s not distracted by them. “I have a ‘distraction inbox’. When a thought crosses my mind, I write it down on a bit of paper and throw it into the inbox to look at later”.