Wandering Minds often blame themselves when struggling with time.

Instead of painting "time blindness" as a personal flaw, what if our struggles are a natural response to a world obsessed with rigidly measured seconds—rather than meaningful rhythms?

There is more to time than simply the clock. We have our own internal time. Rather than force our own natural time into something it is not, how could we instead find a synchronized, harmonic approach, where have our own while still meeting the world where it is?

Listeners will learn:

• Why the traditional clock can feel like a hostile force—and how to find harmony within its structure
• How connecting with nature’s own cycles can restore a sense of attunement and ease
• The Lighthouse Technique: a practical method for making transitions and cultivating agency, using moments of decision instead of alarms that startle and shame

Takeaways

• Reframe time struggles as differences in rhythm, not deficits
• Use “lighthouse” reminders to gently guide transitions, supporting agency and minimizing stress
• Anchor productivity in meaningful decisions, not force or alarms—tuning in to the natural waves of focus

This episode features an original piano composition, "Aging" in C minor, which musically explores the unfolding of time and its emotional textures. Subscribe and sail with us at rhythmsoffocus.com to nurture your agency and find your rhythm amidst the waves.

Keywords

#ADHD #WanderingMinds #Agency #MindfulProductivity #TimeBlindness #LighthouseTechnique #CreativeFocus #Neurodivergent #RhythmsOfFocus #PersonalGrowth

Transcript

"Time Blindness" as Symptom

I got a thing today at 3pm. I can't do anything until then.

Wandering minds such as those with ADHD, often struggle with the clock. So many of our troubles seem to deal with time. Hyper-focused due dates, procrastination, scheduling, dealing with a schedule when life hits and things go awry. Hyper-focused time sink, if not wormhole, fearing that time sink, but then it turns out to be something small.

All of these have something to do with time.

It'd be easy to point at these difficulties and then call them "symptoms," the word synonymous with "something wrong with you." But what if it's not about being wrong so much as it is about being out of sync with this increasingly artificial structure of time that surrounds us.

What even is a "second"?

 Let's consider a central unit of a clock for a moment. This idea of time being so important to our lives. The second.

The second was first considered as this thing, this entity by a Persian scholar, Al Biruni, around the year 1000, as some fraction of the lunar cycle. It's since been defined and refined to further experientially distant concepts, things further away from us.

Somehow in our scientific pursuits, we finally landed on something in 1967. The second was defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the Cesium-133 atom. And somehow this fundamental unit of time is how we're supposed to relate to each other.

Time is a Matter of Nature

Wandering minds often do better when in nature. The woods, the beach, the sun, the intense, the calm, all seem to work better within our rhythms there. Nature seems to ease concerns, scatter feelings of being inept, all being replaced with this attunement to the now. This depth of reality, relaxation into being.

What's strangely not obvious is that time itself is a matter of nature. It's experienced. Without consciousness, there is no time. Without time, there's no consciousness.

Clocks are Human Constructions

Our culture has adapted, churned, and twisted time to suit itself, much like the rest of nature. We look at seconds, minutes, hours, as if they had substance and they don't.

They're a human construct. Representations hollow in and of themselves. As humans, we're much more attuned to those things with which we have some direct experience. The breath, the day, the seasons of the morning, afternoon, evening, the wee hours of the night. Each of these have a much deeper experiential meaning than the seconds of a watch.

Our natural waves of focus and emotions crest into consciousness in their own time, swelling, and fading by their own existence.

The artificial hands of a clock and the demands they represent often strike through the moment, often creating the very turbulence that we then accuse ourselves of being "symptomatic."

Clock Divisions as Buoys in the Water

Certainly the clock has its advantages. it helps us to synchronize as a society. I'd hardly be able to maintain my psychiatric practice, for example, without a clear idea of when I'd meet my next client.

We must still interact with this world carved as it is into these odd divisions, but I won't call them correct.

They're buoys floating in the waters. These divisions are entities with which I can have a relationship.

Beyond time, there's money, there's people, there's the world that surrounds us. We're still responsible for living in it, for finding where we can have a symbiotic, harmonic relationship where we can care and play, and the world would hopefully, willingly support us in turn. No easy feat.

But we don't have to say that one measurement is correct while others are not. Rather than accuse ourselves of deficit, we can then wonder how might my rhythms work with those around me? Where can I find some port to meet the world in some time that harmonizes synchronizes with that around me?

Aim for Decision, Not Time

So what do we do? As many of you know, by now, I like to work by this unit of a visit where possible. Check out episode four for details, but the thumbnail is, it's a unit of work where we show up to something, standing at that edge of action where it's as easy to step away as it is to step forward. And we stay there for the single deep breath.

At that point, we now have full freedom to reflect and decide about what is in front of us and what it means to us. Whether we decide to set it aside, nudge it forward, or dive in. As the mind flows with a natural rhythm, a wave that cannot be turned on or off with a switch, we might then fear,

Hey, there's that thing at three.

How could we ever start knowing we might get caught in the rapids? Losing all awareness of other important matters. Alarms start to blare uselessly, as our eardrums seem to have signed off.

Many of us use timers, understandably so. In fact, rightfully so. But the fact that we often need to keep turning up the volume on them might say that we're not using them quite right.

Where we often fail is that we aim for a time rather than decision.

We aim for a time to pull ourselves away, to use some force based method rather than supporting ourselves in our agency.

The Lighthouse Technique

A method I like to use here is what I call a lighthouse technique. At its simplest, it means focusing on a meaningful moment of decision. As an example, let's say you have an hour until the next thing, whatever the next thing is, rather than set the alert for an hour from now, let's say you knocked off roughly 25% of the time.

There's a lot more calculations and thinking through as you could go if you wanted to, but I find that to be a good rough number. The idea is that we can acknowledge the transition and more importantly, that decision as to whether we want to make that transition or not.

When we've set it up such that we have time, our own time to gradually wind down our thoughts, our feelings, our ideas, the emotions of the work of the now, allow them to rest where they be ready for you to launch easily next time, maybe even consolidate our thoughts for the now, maybe even have time to make it to the next thing and do so smoothly. Well, wouldn't that be nice? Wouldn't that smooth the waters? Wouldn't that allow you to have a more meaningful connection?

But further is again, that time for decision because now not only can we do all of those things. We can decide, you know what? I'm in a flow and I like where I am. The next thing maybe isn't quite so important. I can call them, I can email them, I can text them. I can let them know, "Hey, I'm on a roll right now. This doesn't work." Or we can acknowledge it to ourselves.

 We could decide, you know what? I'm gonna hold off. Instead of transitioning smoothly right now, I'm gonna transition roughly later. every moment trading an increasing amount of chaos for the time of the Now.

We have that decision now in front of us. We no longer lose that decision.

The alert now has meaning it's no longer this hollow clock, and the fact that it connects with something important within ourselves now means that we're much more likely to actually hear it. Whatever we decide to do, even if the default is to simply continue forward.

When we respect agency, this central unit, this idea of decision within ourselves, this ability to decide non-reactivity, we start to figure out ways where we can better communicate between our internal time and the one that surrounds us. 

Music, Time, and "Aging"

Music has an interesting way of dealing with time. It's very medium, is that of time. Listen to what's called a drop in electronic music, dance music in particular, and you'll hear this build this tension that then crashes to this return of the regular rhythm. What created that tension? It's more than just a pitch, although that can often be in it.

But the shortening of a beat creates this transition of the nature of time within us. We feel time shift. There's a series of quarter notes that go to eighth notes to 16th, 30 seconds, 64th, bam. Sometimes there's a twist of silence, a funny noise, a something to disrupt the pattern, but these are just teases to this process.

The same thing happens everywhere in music. A four measure phrase becomes long only in the context of another phrase that's shorter, and it becomes short in the context of another phrase that's longer. While we can play with a metronome, we don't even have to do that.

Chopin's "rubatto" playing expands and shrinks the underlying nature of this sort of grid of time to convey its own emotions.

The following piece. Does what many if not all of music does, it plays with time. In repeating the first phrase that establishes one length, but a melody then shows up to say, Hey, what if we went longer while the first phrase continues underneath?

And so there's this new world that's created.

On the one hand, we have this world where there's one time and that contrasts with another world that has two times, and those times are in contrast with each other. The piece is called aging. It's written in C minor, and I hope you enjoy it.  

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The Weekly Wind Down is an exploration of wandering minds, task and time management, and more importantly, how we find calmer focus and meaningful work.