Hey everyone, its Erica here. Today I'm going to chat a bit about using timers to help you manage if you don't have a lot of natural time awareness. And I'm excited to chat about this because for a lot of my clients using timers has been one of the most helpful things that they have started doing as they manage ADHD. So there are so many different ways that you can use timers. And it's a fun thing to watch people experiment with, because honestly, this is one of these grey areas where I'm so inspired and interested in the different ways that my clients find to use timers for all kinds of things. Because essentially, you can use timers to help you be intentional about how much time you spend on certain things and other things. You can use timers to help you get started on things that you're avoiding and persist with some focus on doing those important but not so interesting things. And you can use them counting backwards to make sure that you leave the house on time. And you can also use them as a backstop to make sure that you don't fall into some kind of crazy, unhelpful hyperfocus wandering through the internet for three hours. So I'll give you a summary of some of the most interesting techniques I've seen and heard about using timers and, I hope, you might get inspired and find something that could work for you.I'm gonna start off with one that has become really popular with medical school students and ADHDers. It's called the Pomodoro Technique. And it's a method of using timers that was developed by an Italian man named Francesco Cerrillo. And the way it works is that you segment your work or the things that you have to do into 25 minute chunks. And so he named it Pomodoro, which is Italian for tomato, because he started doing this with one of those tomato timers that you have in your kitchen, and would set it for 25 minutes with the idea that for those 25 minutes, he was going to focus completely on the 25 minute project at hand. And then after those 25 minutes, take a five minute break and set a timer to have that break. Get up, do whatever you need to do shake it out, and then begin again with another 25 minute focus batch. And I know there are some people who use this as a method for their entire workday, you know, break the workday into a chunk of 30 minute segments and, of course, take a longer break at some point to eat or whatever, but you can use it in a lot of different ways. And I think especially with ADHDers, it's fun to think about tweaking this into something that can work really well for you. So I'll share some of the tweaks that I think are helpful, especially for folks with ADHD.The first tweak is to set yourself free from a rigid attachment to 25 minutes. Because one of the classic characteristics of ADHD is that you have a variable attention span. So it may be that for this particular task, and for this particular day and for your brain, 15 minutes is a pretty good amount of time that you can trust that you can focus or maybe it's longer, but adjust the timing so that it works for you. So it's so it's not a struggle, and so that you are able to confidently sit down and say "yes, I'm going to do this and only this for that time". I also encourage ADHDers to use a particular kind of timer. They are visual timers, one company that sells these is called Time Timer, but you can also find video ones on YouTube. And so what it is, is you have a timer, but it's actually showing you a visual of how the time is passing. So within a 25 minute period, you could look up and it will show you that you're halfway through. And I find this is useful because oftentimes folks I know with ADHD will set a timer and then all of a sudden it goes off and it just feels like "wait, what?", but if you can see the time visually as it's passing, it can motivate you and give you a better sense of where you are in that timeframe.It kicks off something that I learned about in reading one of Dan Pink's books, which is called "When", and I call it the magic of the midpoint. I can't remember what he calls it. But essentially, it's this idea that, you know, often we have this habit, say we give somebody an amount of time, we'll tell them okay, one minute left, here's your wrap up. But actually a more effective thing is to tell people when it's the halfway point. And I have discovered this when I facilitate and teach workshops, because if I have a small group working on something, and I tell them to wrap up, they have a similar shock to what I'm talking about with ADHDers and alarms going off. Whereas if you hit the midpoint and realise, "oh, I've only got half the time left", generally you really kick into gear and most people I think tend to do more focussed, more productive work in that second half of a bit of time. And so knowing that midpoint can be very motivating.And the last ADHD tweak on the Pomodoro Technique can be to add in a body double. So you can have a virtual body double or a live body double. And what this means is having somebody else that is working next to you, so that it can help you to just stay on task. So for example, with some of the projects that I need to do that are unappealing to me, I'll have a colleague who actually lives in another state, but we'll decide to have a quick phone call with each other, check in, tell each other what we're going to work on for half an hour and then say, "okay, let's call her to the back in half an hour". And knowing that I'm going to have to call her and tell her how far I got really motivates me and also, if I end up just having a terrible focus session, and it doesn't go well, it helps me from getting into a frustrating spin because I know I'm going to talk to her and I'm going to be able to gripe about what happened or say, "Oh, I just, I need some support here".And my next two timer hacks bring it up a notch. The first one is to use a meditation-style alarm, that is giving you fairly consistent rings or bells that you can use as a prompt to bring you back to the present moment or to bring you back to the task at hand. There are lots of different apps and things for this one, for example, is Insight Timer. So you can go on and, and set a series of timers that you know, one might use for meditating where there's a gong or a bell and then you set it to go off every couple of minutes. And, of course, when you're meditating, you might use that gong as a prompt to bring yourself back to your breath or back to your present moment, but you can also use it when you're trying to do something productively at your desk, if you have the kind of brain that wanders and daydreams and that might get off task. Or you're doing a kind of thing like cleaning out the office where you might find some interesting piece of paper and suddenly realise that you've been doing something with it for 30 minutes. So you can set this kind of timer and then as soon as the gong goes off every couple of minutes, ask yourself if you're on task and on focus, and if not, just bring yourself back to it. I know people who have a habit of going through a set of quick tasks in the morning or purging their email box using this kind of thing where they have a gong that goes off every two minutes and the discipline is to just make sure that with those level of tasks, you're moving to a new one at least every two minutes, so that you're not falling into one of those crazy hyperfocus holes that doesn't actually serve you on something where you don't have the intention of spending that much time on it.And in closing, I'll share my very last timer-related life hack that is also something that you can use to stop yourself from falling into a crazy hyperfocus distraction hole. I've learned that you can buy plugs that go into your socket and that have a timer on them that you can use it with video games or watching TV breaks where your intention is just to take a break for about 30 minutes, your attention is not to look up five hours later. So in these instances, what you can do is you have the plug that actually goes into the wall has a timer on it so the TV will literally shut off. And of course you could hop up and set it again. It's a pretty strong pattern interrupt. So I hope you found something that might be useful, or at least something that made you laugh in all of these timer stories and I look forward to the next chat.