The ADHD temporal dead zone

Yesterday, I wrote about why standups suck if you have ADHD.

One of the problems with all meetings, not just standups, is that they create temporal dead zones.

What’s that, you ask? That period of time after you finish a task but have a meeting coming up some time shortly, so you can’t do any more work or start anything.

If you start working again, one of two things will happen…

1. Just as you start to get back into hyperfocus, you’ll have to interrupt yourself for the meeting.
2. You’ll get into hyperfocus before then, and forget the meeting altogether.

So instead, you waste time on social media and lose valuable working time.

For me, the temporal deadzone is usually when a meeting is 30 minutes or less from now, but it could be upwards of an hour. It varies a bit from person-to-person.

But this is why meetings are such a scourge for folks with ADHD.

Because it takes us a bit of time to get started with work, they create huge gaps of unproductivity throughout the day. If you have several meetings with 30 minute gaps between them, you’re getting nothing done that day.