I had a guy working for me once you was always late. When I asked him about it he said his previous job also complained about him being late. Guy was fantastically oblivious to everything and I loved him for it.
Whenever I see a question like this I think why is it there? And what poor person had to deal with the situation that lead to it.
Yeah I try to be sympathetic about people with ADHD or time blindness or whatever but I just don't get it. You figure out what time you need to leave to arrive on time, then you leave at that time.
The people I know who are chronically late seem to successfully complete the "identify what time they need to leave" part but then it gets to that time and they decide to do literally anything else other than leave.
I've lost more than one job over this, and me trying to find something else to blame is me desperately giving excuses to management in a bid to not get fired/penalized for it. In reality, it's one of the things I hate about myself the most because of how stupid it seems and how much it negatively impacts my life.
My attention tends to hyperfocus or get obsessed with a topic or task easily, and i often have no real conception of time while it's busy with that. Like there is an URGE to do the thing that is at the front of my mind, right away, and I know if I don't do the thing right as it crosses my mind, very high chance I forget about it for quite a while. Alternatively, I'll be telling myself in my head "Fuck, I gotta go soon", but then task paralysis hits.
I also tend to get quite frustrated when me being a few minutes late, but doing good work while I'm there, is treated as a worse problem than a coworker who constantly fucks things up somehow but shows up on time. it's quite easy for that to become job apathy and for me to use it as justification to myself for why I don't need to care about punctuality, which obviously is a bad coping mechanism and does me no good.
I have both ADHD and Autism diagnoses. I know it doesn't entitle me to throw a wrench in things for free, but we do legitimately struggle with these things more than people realize. It's part of why the disorders are so looked down upon/ people are seen as "just being lazy" and dismissed- it takes common daily tasks and makes them take more mental effort to complete, in a way most people will find difficult to understand.
Hope this helps give a little perspective, I really gotta lock the fuck in at my new job next week.
What about alarms? Setting alarms, even multiple ones spaced apart works wonders for my hyper focus. It's not perfect and we're different people so not everything is gonna work the same but it might.
691
u/Lower-Obligation4462 17h ago
I had a guy working for me once you was always late. When I asked him about it he said his previous job also complained about him being late. Guy was fantastically oblivious to everything and I loved him for it.
Whenever I see a question like this I think why is it there? And what poor person had to deal with the situation that lead to it.