How a Time Audit Can Help With Your ADHD

The gist: Time tracking and time audits can help you combat the effects of ADHD's time blindness. Here's how to start your own.

Knowing, and I mean really knowing, how you spend your time is hard for everyone, regardless of neurotype.

It’s one of the many things that leads to the planning fallacy.

But when you have ADHD, or another neurodivergence that includes time blindness or time loss, it’s even harder.

This was something I’ve already struggled with.

But I do have a much better picture of where my time goes than I did, say, three years ago. And that’s because I’ve been honing my awareness of time (as much as an ADHD brain can, anyway) with time tracking through time audits.

Today I want to share three different ways (of varying simplicity) to try your own.

What is a time audit?

A time audit is when you analyze how you spend your time for different patterns, rhythms, and trends.

You can conduct one for a day, for a week, for a month, or on an ongoing basis. I usually recommend trying to audit your time for 1-3 weeks, so you get more than one data point for what any weekday looks like in your life.

(Any shorter than a week, and you won’t have enough data to draw conclusions, and any longer than that will have diminishing returns and be hard to keep up with).

A time audit starts with tracking where your time goes. 

The simple habit of pressing “start” and “stop” on a timer on its own is enough to help us ADHDers be more intentional and aware of where our time goes (I’ll get more into specific habits later).

But taking the time to review the results, find patterns, and make changes accordingly is where the real magic happens.

How time audits can help with ADHD

So, how does trying a time audit help with ADHD? Of course, I can only speak for my own experience. But it’s really helped with my time blindness and short-term memory around time.

Time blindness

First of all, time audits can help with time blindness, or the ability to sense time passing accurately. (Its technical name is temporal myopia, but I prefer calling it time loss or time distortion.)

Since beginning to track my time and do time audits regularly, it feels like “severe distortion events” (where I lose huge chunks of time) happen a lot less often.

I don’t know how to explain it, but maybe I’m better at “catching myself” sooner in the process.

I think it helps that I treat time auditing as more of a self-awareness practice than something with quotas to stick to (because of the reflection step we'll talk about later).

Short-term memory

Another benefit of tracking my time is that it helps negate the impacts of short-term memory impairment around how I’m spending my time.

ADHDers can have smaller short-term memory than neurotypical people. When you combine that with time blindness, well...

That explains the thing where you’re halfway to the kitchen and forget what you’re walking in there for.

Or when your new browser tab “magically” goes to Facebook for 10 minutes and then you can’t remember what you were supposed to be doing.

Ya know, ADHD things.

And while time audits don’t necessarily prevent that, they do impact it.

Depending on what tool you use to audit your time, you can have a visual reminder in that tool telling you what you had decided to spend your time on...before you forgot.

How to conduct your own time audit

So, how can you manage your own ADHD with a time audit?

There are a few different tactics I like most, so let’s go over the strengths and weaknesses of each so you can choose the best option for yourself.

Part 1: Time Tracking

Option 1: Practical Time Audit Exercise

Your first option is to conduct a Practical Time Audit, an exercise from Work Brighter’s Practical Productivity course. 

This is a one-time activity you can take half an hour to do in one sitting. It’s super quick, easy, and simple.

But as a trade-off, it’s also the option with the least accurate data.

For a Practical Time Audit, you don’t collect real-time data. Instead, you sit down and review your past week.

The exercise walks you through different categories of activities and for each one, you’ll estimate how much time you spent on them.

(And yes, there’s a category for “time lost to time blindness. )

Then you can reflect on the estimates the same way you would hard data, you just need to keep in mind you’re going off estimates.

Download our Practical Time Audit worksheet for free now to try this option:

Option 2: Automatic Time Tracking Software

Your second option for conducting time audits is automatic time tracking software.

You can use software like RescueTime, Timing for Mac, or iOS’s built-in Screen Time to collect data automatically for the tracking part of the audit.

I’ve used both Timing and RescueTime and highly recommend them both.

Built-in options aren’t ideal, but they're free and built in.

These tools will automatically keep track of where you’re spending your time when you’re on the computer. You can also manually add offline activities to more advanced tools like Timing.

With that done automatically, all that’s on you is categorizing and reviewing the activities.

This makes it almost as easy as the first option, but with much more accurate data.

Option 3: Manual Time Tracking Software

Finally, we have the most time consuming, but most accurate option. This is manually tracking your time.

My favorite service for this is Toggl, and I use it through the Timery client app. But you can use any time tracking app or hourly planner for this.

Obviously, this isn’t as easy as the other two options.

But if you can manage it, it’s worth it.

First of all, the manual tracking serves as a useful “starting and stopping” ritual to help you focus (similar to an implementation intention).

Plus, if you ever forget what you’re supposed to be doing, you can go to what you had entered in the tracker as a reminder.

I have the Timery menu bar show the active tracker at all times, as a reminder of what I want to be focusing on.

And finally, this is the option that should get you the most accurate tracking data for the reflection stage of the time audit.

Part 2: Reflection

Once you’ve tracked your time for a few days or weeks, you have a pretty accurate picture of how you spend your time.

But what good does that do if you don’t actually reflect on it?

So once you have your data, it’s time to look it over, summarize it, and you can even visualize it if that helps you.

You can dig into it to look for trends and patterns.

You can see where you’re spending more time than you realized to plan more realistic weeks.

If there are places where you’re spending less time than you wanted, like self-care, you can figure out a way to dedicate more time to it.

(Our Practical Productivity course inside the Work Brighter Clubhouse guides you through more in-depth prompts for a reflection.)

These may sound like simple changes, and they are!

But you won’t even know you need to make them without tracking and auditing your time. That’s why this tactic is so helpful.

Get to auditing

There’s so much you can learn about yourself from auditing your time, even if you spend one week, one time doing it.

To really level up the benefits, you can repeat the process every few months, which is why we do a group time auditing challenge in the Clubhouse twice a year.

But you can get started with your own time audit today with our free Practical Time Audit worksheet:

And if you liked this post, you'll also love:

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• The Brighter Guide to Energy Management
• Is ADHD a Superpower?
• How to Use Body Doubling as an ADHD Productivity Hack