Hi, it's Erica here. And today on the topic of planning and prioritising and managing your time, I'm going to talk about being less late for things. Now, I know it isn't an issue for everyone with ADHD, but it's an issue for a lot of people with ADHD. Because often the ADHD brain comes along with this trait of time blindness, you don't have a clock inside your brain. And so the ability to perceive the movement forward of time is very difficult. And that can often lead to being late a lot, which is sometimes annoying. You know, sometimes it's 20 minutes late for a birthday party of a friend who loves you, and not that bad. And it's sometimes disastrous sometimes means 30 minutes late for a job interview that you're not going to get because they don't want to hire somebody who arrived 30 minutes late.In fact, I had one of the worst job interviews of my life a couple decades ago, when I was living in New York, and I was 30 minutes late. And they insisted on continuing with this two hour long job interview. The entire time, I was realising that there was no way I was going to get this job. And I'm sitting there just beating myself up for the fact that I was late once again. You know, and of course, what happened was a typical story with other ADHDers who don't seem to have a real clock in their head. I didn't have everything ready by the door, so when it came time to leave, I actually had to spend another few minutes running around and getting all the things I wanted to bring. And then of course, I was riding the subway, but I had thought about the very fastest amount of time the subway could take, because I wasn't thinking about the subway during rush hour. And then I hadn't really calculated the amount of time I was gonna need to figure out which skyscraper it was in, nor the amount of time I was going to have to spend doing the security, even the elevator ride I hadn't thought about. So no surprise, I did not get the job. Looking back, it's kind of a relief, I don't think I would have liked the job. But it would have been nice to know how to be on time for things at that point in my life. I tell the story, even though I'm embarrassed about it, because I think it's a good summary of all the common things that can go wrong when an ADHDer is trying, with best intentions, to get somewhere on time.First of all, there's this issue of getting your stuff ready so that you can leave with everything you need. I mean, almost everybody runs into the house, at some point because they forget something almost every ADHDer I know rots in a comical number of times, you know, like, "oh, I need this", "oh, I forgot this". And sometimes when you start running late, everything gets worse, you know, you get stressed like, "I'm not leaving the house on time", and then suddenly, your short term memory, because of the stress is so reduced, you can't find your keys, you can't find this. It's totally unpleasant. So one thing that's been really helpful for a lot of my clients and for me is to have this strategy of getting your bag ready, by the door, way far in advance. Meaning the night before or meaning hours before, like, for example, let's say you have to get to a doctor's appointment, you've got some stuff to do, but you have, you know, an hour earlier in the day. Well, imagine the difference between getting everything ready and finding your keys and your notebook you need to bring in everything and putting it in a bag when you calmly have time versus, what I generally experience, which is a frantic last minute stressed out "I'm so stressed that my short term memory capacity has been reduced now I can find the notebook did I put the notebook in the bag?" And just getting all that done in advance is a huge help. In fact, many of my clients have found it life changing to have a set of "go" bags that are ready for the different things that they do often. So I have a client who's on a tennis team and she's just done with forgetting something every single time she goes. So it's a matter of just having the tennis bag totally packed, it's got everything that she needs. It's got an extra water bottle, it's got the sunscreen, it's got everything she needs for tennis. Similarly, having a "go" bag for the gym, a "go" bag for going to the beach, whatever you want. I think that can be hugely helpful because this whole process of grabbing what you need leads to so many challenging things, right. It's sort of like a recipe for distraction when you're walking around the house and seeing all this stuff.I know as a parent, one of the comical situations that I had to deal with was having great athletic kids who needed to bring just an absurd amount of equipment to every single practice. And I was just pretty much unable to know exactly all the 17 things they need to show up at baseball practice with or, you know, whatever it was and so, because they were kids, it was a little easier to do this, we just had a list. It had a little laminated list on the bag that listed everything that you need to have in your baseball bag, and it worked for them to start going through it but I found that I even sometimes use systems like that for myself, because it's hard to even remember what you need to bring to different situations.The other thing that's a lesson learned from this experience is, when you think about how long it actually takes physically to get from one place to another. And this seems so obvious, but most ADHDers I know don't do this. Add in all the transition points. Actually, how long does it take to lock the door to the apartment, walk down the stairs, walk over to the subway station? How long does it take to wait for the train? What if the trains running late? Then the ride? Then how long does it take when you're in a new neighbourhood to figure out the address and actually walk over to the building? Go through security? Get up the elevator? All these things end up taking a lot of time and we sort of forget about them. One strategy that can be really helpful, especially if there's any kind of unpredictable traffic or you have to go a long distance, have something that you need to do that you could do anywhere - read an article, phone call, you have to make - and plan your day so that you get physically into the neighbourhood where you need to be, you're at the coffee shop that's next door to the doctor, and that's where you're going to read that report you have to read or you're gonna walk around there and make your phone call. So you're still getting your stuff done, but rather than doing it at home in the morning, and then leaving frantically in a rush to get to the doctor, just get yourself there so at least you've minimised this risk of running into some massive traffic jam or something like that. And you know, sometimes what happens is the fact that you say you're going to read the articles and you're going to get to the coffee shop in advance actually ends up just getting you there on time, but holding a bunch of articles that, if you had gotten there early, you could have read.I hope you've enjoyed some of these stories of my own flailings and I hope that some of these little tacks and responses might be things that you could use. Signing off for the day, till next time.