Time Management – Using a Stopwatch for Your Morning Routine

[TLDR: Use a stopwatch & write down how long it takes you to do regular tasks. This is especially useful for your “get out the door” process. If you’re wondering why you’re always late, time how long it takes you to go from first alarm to locking the door.]

Probably the best piece of advice I got in the early days of treating my ADHD was to use a stopwatch to time things. My suggestion is to buy a standard stopwatch from a sporty store and time things. Also, write them down! You’re probably going to forget otherwise.

Why a stopwatch? Because if you use the app on your phone, odds are good you’ll get distracted by other things on your phone. Or if you just try to remember that you started at 7:08am, you might forget your start time! (Writing it down might work for you. Remember that notebook I mentioned using for your ADHD stuff? This is a good use.)

Start with your morning routine. Either by checking the clock (write it down) or by starting the timer, figure out how long it takes you from waking up to walking out the door. (Literally, stop the stopwatch after you’ve walked out of your place and locked your door.)

Compare this to how long you THINK it takes you to go from waking up to getting out the door. Odds are very good that these two times are different. Maybe it’s five minutes, maybe it’s half an hour. If you are always 30 minutes late, this mismatch is probably the reason!

NOTE: you might need to add in time because of others: your partner(s), your children, your pets, your neighbors.

WARNING: You WILL be tempted to use the fastest time it takes you to get through this process. Instead, use the amount of time it took you when everything went wrong. Or time it for multiple days and use the longest one.

Also, don’t use the average! It’s tempting, but if you want to be ON TIME, you’ll need to build in enough slack into the block of time you’ve allotted such that everything can go wrong and you’ll still arrive on time. If everything goes RIGHT, you’ll arrive early.

Don’t freak out! Arriving early is not a tragedy!