Hey everyone, its Erica here. So in this chat, I'm going to talk about having fun with clocks and alarms. And if you happen to be one of those people with ADHD who doesn't have a very good internal sense of time, and you have not yet realised what wonderful friends timers and clocks and alarms can be, then I'm here to enlighten you. And as I've said before, it's very hard if you don't have a good internal sense of time to make your way in this really clock driven world. And so we have to find ways to externalise that sense of time.So starting with the basics, if you are challenged by keeping track of time and you don't already wear a watch, you might consider getting one. And if you're somebody who has a watch, but you keep losing your watch, you might consider getting a whole bunch of inexpensive backup watches. Because I know a lot of people these days use their phone to keep track of time but it does take a moment to go find your phone to pull it out to pull it out in the middle of conversation and having something that is easy to access, that you can check often, can do so much for helping you know just what time it is. And there's some pretty cool features with some watches, especially a vibrating alarms. Now, long ago, this used to be a very rare thing that you could purchase a watch with a vibrating alarm, they'd sell it in ADHD magazines but now it's actually fairly common. And I know a lot of people really love it because, for example, I know a number of people who are working on just breaking their day into 30 minute chunks. And essentially, they set a vibrating alarm, so that it goes off as if it were like a grandfather clock going off every half hour, but on their wrist. And so it's helping you to get a sense of moving through the day what time it is, so that you get that sort of passage of time. You know, if you're somebody who wants to use alarms and timers a lot to help you keep on track, it can be nice, because it's subtle, you know, it's not necessarily having everyone else around, you have to hear the alarm but you hear the alarm.And on the topic of alarms, I'll share some other tips that have worked for a lot of my clients. First of all, I know a lot of people who have started to go get an alarm clock. Like a classic old alarm clock that is not your phone. And that's because a lot of folks that I know with ADHD, a lot of folks in general, end up having these night owl tendencies. The phone is just this distraction and temptation machine that if you have a right near your bed, you might decide you want to check on something before you go to sleep and the next thing you know, it's half an hour later and the blue lights keeping you out, etc. So I do know a lot of people who have found it really happy really successful medium of just charging the phone in the other room and having a regular old alarm clock that wakes them up. I also know quite a lot of people who have ADHD and find it really hard to get up in the morning, so they go superpower on the alarm. By that I mean tricks like having an alarm that is across the room so that, in addition to the one that's right next to you, you have another one that, if you haven't gotten up, you actually have to get out of bed, walk across the room and turn it off, which by the time you're out of that it usually helps you to get up. I know other people who have their medications, if you take stimulant medications, right by their bed. So the second they wake up even sort of before they're really awake, they take it and then that helps them to actually get up and be really alert at an earlier point in the day. And I also know a lot of people like these sunrise alarm clocks, it actually shines light in your face as if it's the sunrise coming on. And there are fancy ones, but there are also people I know who just rig up a little clock thing that you can get at the hardware store that essentially is like a dimmer light that comes on. And that works similarly, so your lights just come on.And it can be fun experimenting with trying out having alarms for a whole lot of things not just waking up. I know for example, in my working life as a coach and a consultant, one of my habits in the morning is, I look at my schedule for the day and then I set an alarm to go off five minutes before every time I have an appointment. And for me it it takes the stress out of the day because I feel like I always have this sort of backup way to make sure that I'm not going to be late for something that's important to me and it relieves me of a feeling like I have to be constantly, constantly checking my watch all through lunch or something like that. And you can figure out lots of different things to set alarms for. And we talked a bit about leaving the house and that's a great hack that a lot of people that I know use. I know some people who've evolved from like one alarm to two alarms to three alarms. And what I mean by that is getting real about the fact that okay, there's something you need to leave for and you want to be on time for it right like say it's picking up your kids from school. And you set an alarm first for the moment when you're gonna have to start wrapping up whatever it is that you're doing. Because, now inevitably, you need 10, 15, 20, half an hour, whatever you need, to be able to wrap up what you're doing. So an alarm that says, "hey, time to time to start wrapping up" another alarm that says, "you should be really focused on getting ready to go right now" and then a last alarm, that's a message is kind of like "if you are not walking out of the door in the next minute or two, you are definitely going to be late". These kind of triple alarm systems can be really helpful.Also, a lot of people really find that it's helpful to plan the following day. Many of my clients are working on a habit of having an alarm that goes off, say, at five o'clock each day, and that's the reminder to them to do the planning for the next day to figure out what are the top three things that I really want to do tomorrow. And he talked more about that planning process in another one of these chats. So in closing, I want to go back to the topic of clocks. And the question I have for you is, how many clocks can you have in your house without it getting absurd? I was inspired recently by one of my clients to go on a block shopping extravaganza. She had found that hanging up a very simple, easy to read digital clock in all the spots in her home where she frequently lost track of time or got distracted, kept her on track. So a clock in the bathroom, a clock in her closet, a clock everywhere where she tends to lose track of time. One if my biggest ones from this one was buying the largest wall hanging digital clock I could find and hanging it right next to the TV where my kids play video games, so that it would completely eradicate any chance that they could tell me they got sucked into video games, and didn't stop at six o'clock as I had told them to because they just didn't know what time it was. In the end I hope that some of these little life hacks related to clocks and alarms and watches can help you and, as always, it's a matter of figuring out what might work for you. And that's it for today.