Do you suffer from 'time blindness'? Experts: Frequent delays may also have a genetic basis

"Time blindness" has become a widely used term in recent years, often as an explanation for people who are constantly late.

Almost everyone knows someone who never arrives on time. For some people, friends are even forced to “adjust” the schedule: telling them the reservation is at 7:00 PM, when it’s actually 8:00 PM, just so everyone arrives at the same time.

But while some people are simply poor at planning, experts say others may be biologically predisposed to have a more fuzzy perception of time.

The term was first used by clinical psychologist Russell Barkley in 1997 and refers to "the serious problem that people with ADHD have in managing their behavior in relation to time intervals and the passage of time in general."

This phenomenon has also been linked to anxiety and autism.

So while some social media users argue that people who are consistently 30 minutes late to every social gathering but arrive on time for work are simply careless, experts say that in some cases it's not just a matter of disrespect or poor time management.

What is "time blindness"?

According to experts, time blindness is the difficulty in understanding how long a task will take, or how much time has actually passed.

This is related to the executive functions of the brain, which are developed primarily in the frontal lobe. Executive function is the ability to manage and organize daily tasks. It includes planning, setting priorities, breaking down large projects into smaller steps, and performing several tasks simultaneously.

People who have difficulty with this are more likely to experience time blindness. They may have trouble starting tasks, completing commitments, controlling impulses, or not being easily distracted. These are also some of the traits often associated with attention deficit disorder, ADHD.

However, this does not mean that every person who is consistently late has ADHD, or that they automatically have a ready-made excuse.

Could it be genetic?

A study in the US has suggested that time blindness may also have a genetic basis.

In this study, participants were asked to complete a task by a certain deadline. Those who were chronically late were much less likely to naturally check the clock, compared to people who considered themselves punctual. As a result, they often went overtime without realizing it.

In recent years, researchers have begun to find evidence that time blindness is more than just a lack of organization.

A large 2022 meta-analysis, published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, analyzed 55 studies that compared people with ADHD with people without the condition.

Researchers found that individuals with ADHD consistently performed worse on various time-related tasks, including estimating time intervals, reproducing them, and distinguishing between different durations.

They concluded that there is evidence for a “wide range of deficits in time perception” associated with ADHD.

The study also found that people with ADHD made larger errors when trying to estimate how much time had passed and had more instability in judging intervals lasting several seconds or minutes.

"The future doesn't seem real until it becomes an emergency"

Dr. Russell Barkley, one of the world's most renowned ADHD researchers, has previously argued that ADHD is essentially a disorder of self-regulation over time.

He said that many people with ADHD live in a world where deadlines and future consequences do not have enough influence on their current behavior, until they become immediate and urgent.

"The most devastating deficit that ADHD produces in adult life is the breakdown of the structure of time. The future doesn't seem real until it turns into an emergency," he said.

This could explain a very familiar situation: someone looks at the clock, sees that they have 20 minutes left before they leave, starts a quick task, and suddenly realizes that an hour has passed.

According to psychologists, this often reflects a real difficulty in monitoring the passage of time when attention is focused elsewhere, and not necessarily a conscious decision to procrastinate.

Explanation, but not justification

For experts, the main difference is between explaining behavior and justifying it.

Researchers say people with time blindness are not necessarily rude or intentionally careless.

However, specialists emphasize that accepting the neurological basis of this difficulty does not remove personal responsibility.

On the contrary, according to them, this indicates the need for practical coping strategies, such as the use of alarms, calendars, visible timers, and other external reminders, to compensate for the internal difficulty in keeping track of time.

In other words, time blindness may explain why some people are consistently late, but understanding the problem is only the first step.

ADHD experts say that recognizing this challenge should encourage people to create systems that reduce its impact on work, relationships, and daily life.