Everybody always shares the same old advice for time management. The three big ones are: Plan on more time than you think you need (approximately 1.5–2 times as much time as you think you need) to do a task, aim to be 15–30 minutes early for everything, and use timers/alarms/planners. You’d think after years of people saying these things that everyone would be so much better at time management, but they are not.

At the 2018 International Conference on ADHD in November, I won a Revibe Connect device. A Revibe Connect is like a fitness tracker, but this device is for your focus. You wear a watch-like device and every so often it prompts you tap on it to let it know if you are focused on what you should be or not. I was excited to try it. Unfortunately, I was less enthusiastic about it after I started using it.

In the 1993 movie Groundhog Day, Phil Connors (Bill Murray) is stuck reliving the same day over and over again. This movie is hilarious, and I highly recommend it. However, it might cause some uneasy comparisons for some of us with ADHD. Sometimes, we can get stuck in a negative cycle of the same patterns or behaviors that do not serve us.

Who wants to go through life with every day being a grind? No one! Who wants any part of life to be a grind? No one! So, why, then, do we do things we find to be a grind? Because we let the things we do become a grind. Everyone has things in their life that are a grind. However, we do not simply have to accept these things as a grind. We can find a way to gamify these tasks and make them fun.

The other day, I attended a dinner party and stayed later than I had intended. This led to me being tired the next day. I have been trying to get more sleep, so not only was I tired, but I was also disappointed in myself for staying out so late. This is a problem, and I’m sure I’m not the only ADHDer who struggles with this.

Every year, millions of people stay up until midnight on the night of December 31 to ring in the new year. I have never understood this. I find this quite arbitrary. Prior to midnight, we write "2018" on our checks, and after midnight, we write "2019." If we are celebrating the changing of one element on our calendars, then why are we not doing this every month or every day? One could argue that we celebrate because we only change the year once every 365 days, but if we are simply celebrating the novelty of the changing of the date, it would make more sense to celebrate a new decade.

A common suggestion for productivity assistance for ADHDers is using a timer. This is often suggested for time management purposes, but I see two different ways this could help the productivity of an ADHDer. The first is the aforementioned most common explanation given for suggesting the use a timer, and the other one is a way it has been used in my own life. These two methods use opposite functions of a timer, counting down and counting up.