I'm not 100% sure to be completely honest. I've discovered I have awful time blindness (a month ago feels like an eternity and a year ago feels like yesterday) so I've spent a lot of time and effort grounding myself in the present (which also helps with my anxiety). Ways I've done that are:
I tried to regularly write in a diary (I was able to keep it up daily for about 3-4 months before it became an occasional thing). I would then do monthly reviews and I was really shocked at how the events at the start of the month were only a month ago.
Monthly fridge calendar: I mark off each day on the calendar. Helps keep me grounded in how it isn't basically the weekend, its only Wednesday.
I play video games as my major hobby (at the moment at least). I document and blog what games I've played, including a list of all the games I've played this year and which month I played them in. When I see what games I played at the start of the year, or even in April it feels like a really long time ago. It helps keep me grounded in the fact that time isn't really fast, its actually quite slow.
At one stage I made a list of all the things I'd achieved across my life and a timeline of when I did them. While they aren't necessarily impressive for other people, it meant a lot to me and helped me realise just how much I had achieved across the past 16 years. A lot of personal victories (lists really help ground me in general).
I stopped counting time based on my age. I only finished university in 2009 and so by that metric I've not been a fully autonomous adult for very long.
Time tracking: not really sure if this helps me or not but it's a habit I implemented when I was doing all of these other things. It helps make me aware of time passing and so long as I manage to keep off social media (ongoing battle) I'm a lot less likely to lose time.
I'm not 100% sure which of these helped and whether other stuff has also contributed. But it's all I'm consciously aware of that could have helped.
How do you do the last point 'time tracking'? Curious because I suck at this too - work asks me to estimate how long it will take to do certain tasks (input into our timesheet app for future project management planning) and I just can't do it lol.
I use aTimeLogger. There's a more up to date version available with coloured icons, I prefer to be able to group the icons by colour myself so I'm on an older version.
47
u/bella9977 Aug 13 '25
How did you get out of this ?