> We can't do that when we're awake

I started using a timer about ten years ago for mundane tasks (getting done a chunk of unpleasant work, or for cooking) and these days I'll get up from my desk to go check on the oven right before the timer rings.

It works regardless of the length of the timer, and even when I don't know exactly how many minutes it is (twisty analog oven dial).

I don't consciously know how much time is left, but somehow I do know when "it's time."

Haven't tested this on longer timescales (hours) though, but I did meet a guy who said he always knew what time it was because he used to work for a TV station doing the countdown til they go on air.

I have the exact opposite sense of time. I'm frequently several minutes late to meetings because I've completely lost track of time. I'm very cue-dependent, and with this everything-at-home lifestyle we've transitioned to, I often have split-second confusion that I'm just having lunch in the middle of the day and have to go back to work in a minute and not go take a shower like it's after dinner.

If you haven't before, consider looking into whether or not you might have ADHD.

I was diagnosed with ADD as a kid and took Ritalin for a little while, but hated it so I convinced my parents to let me stop. I haven't sought medication or treatment since then. I can manage it really well if I'm intentional about how I arrange and use my environment, and it usually seems like the bursts of intense focus and creativity compensate for the tendency to be distracted and chasing multiple concurrent threads. Granted, I need a manager and work environment that indulges my need to deep dive on something without a lot of structure occasionally. Losing those bursts and everything becoming kind of gray scale is why I hated taking the meds as a kid.

It's a long conversation and hard to have here/in-comments, but I'd encourage you to look into it again, for several reasons. I get the focus/creativity aspect for sure!

1. Medications have come a long way, and there's more than just Ritalin (or Adderall) as options. I get the grey scale concept, but I don't think it has to be that way. There are varying doses and varying medications, and you might find something that is almost all upside with (possibly) no downside.

2. You might perceive yourself to be managing / coping fine (and you might be, I don't mean that in any disrespectful way!) but there could be vast undiscovered focus abilities you could access. For me personally, the difference on and off medication is VAST.

3. You might not always have that manager/environment. Or (what happened for me) someday you might (already) have a family, and fewer options for those bursts of focus. I used to work until 3am when I was on a roll, but now I can't.

4. The distraction / multiple threads stuff can have other impacts on your own self-image. Depends on how well it's managed I guess, in the world and inside your head.

Good luck! :)

Tbh you just gotta find something you love doing and the rest will resolve itself

Don't let society dictate how your brain should function.

You are fine and valid the way you are, and don't let anyone call you a disorder.

ADHD and Autism are "spectrum" disorders. Meaning that in a sense, we ALL have them to varying degrees, on a spectrum. (For example, we can all be distractable..)

The definition of a disorder is that it's interfering with your life. So, if it's not bothering you, ALL GOOD. :) You don't have a disorder.

I appreciate that you're well-intentioned. And of course if someone is happy exactly as they are, that's awesomesauce!

But to the degree someone expresses that they struggle with something, and they might benefit from learning more or exploring options, it's not wrong to gently and respectfully encourage them to explore learning/options.

It doesn't mean someone is "calling them" something.

Yeah, that's the narrative I fed myself since I was a teenager, and I had plenty of validation for it from family members that loved me. I was just "too smart" to sit in class bored all day or whatever. I'm trying to question that narrative. The burst of focus and creativity might be great, but I wonder if the sibling commenter is right that I could be missing out on vast, untapped potential and I might not lose the upside. I don't know.

> I was just "too smart" to sit in class bored all day or whatever.

Yes, you WERE too smart to be forced to sit around and learn at a pace that was way too slow for you.

Imagine how much you could have learned if you were progressing at your own pace (let's say top 10%) rather than school curriculum pace (let's say tuned for 90% of students to keep up)

Think about how much more successful you could have been in programming if you had learned calculus by 8th grade, a task I'd say at least half our U.S population is capable of.

Instead, you are forced to put up with the same spoonfeeding as everyone else, and if you don't like it, you have a disorder?

You were rightfully frustrated and upset at this waste of your time. Not to mention how unnatural and unhealthy it is to sit in place for hours at a time.

It's not a disorder, it's a natural response to reality.

> if you had learned calculus by 8th grade

Joke's on you. I still haven't learned calculus.

I have a very similar experience of time, and have only now late life gotten some insight in to my past struggles with a ADHD diagnosis.

Worth looking in to foooor sure.

I'd love to hear more. I've definitely lived with the downsides, but my experience with medicating for it as pre-teen was so negative that I have been extremely reticent to seek treatment since.

First off I’d say that medicating as an adult is an entirely different experience than as a child (I have children, but was not medicated as a child, so YMMV) mainly because you can almost immediately tell the difference and you have the language necessary to properly discuss pros/cons/adjustments with your doctor.

As well, we now know that like hormonal birth control there’s no one pill that’s right for everyone so it’s awesome to have people be open to the adjustment process.

From a life perspective, even without medication it’s been extremely helpful for me to see (for example) my lateness for what it mostly is: my brain is driven by the desire to be fully engaged. In the past I have been late not only because I forgot (which is easy(ish) to deal with by sticking to the calendar), but because in the “dead” time before a timed event I am driven to fill it with things I used to deem “worthwhile”, and would focus intently to turn up the engagement (obviously) thus lose track of time and suddenly find myself in a time crunch. Anything from “just a quick level” of a fast-paced fps, fast racing game, or sparkly new mobile game to picking up a sidelined woodworking project or (more often honestly) grabbing a work-task off the todo list.

And, I will say that it feels great to be fully engaged and “firing on all cylinders” (I’m really enjoying Space Pirate Trainer on quest this month), but in the past where I would say subconsciously to myself “This is what I’m made for!” and push other things aside, now I can recognize the drive to what’s unique or engaging as being just about those two things, and I can properly choose what my priorities are.

There's more to treatment than just medication. A good therapist specializing in ADHD will help you figure out how to build habits and processes to cope.

Also an interesting point: I’m also very cue-dependant. I’ve spent most of my life structuring my tasks and habits around cues. It is tricky as heck as I’m sure you know. This too can be an indication of ADHD as the ADHD brain is more likely to be really good with connections between things.

Yeah, I find myself encouraging others to explore this stuff until it's fully resolved in your mind, because of the difference it's made in my life and in others I've seen personally.

I've had both of the experiences described in this thread, and I believe the key is whether you genuinely want to do the thing at the time.

If you actually want to wake up at the prescribed time, you can do it. If you think you SHOULD wake up at the time, no dice.

If you have 27 minutes of working on something you want to work on before a time limit for something else you want to do, you'll know. If you have a time limit before something you "should" do? no dice.

There is quite a bit of stuff in life that works this way, and it was shocking to me how often I've confused what I "should" want with what I actually want.

If someone asks me the time I'll often respond without looking "about 2.30". Then after digging out my phone check and see it's actually "2.35".

Your perception of time is off, you are perceiving time to be passing slower than it actually is. Right now it only seems like 5 minutes, but over time these error minutes will accumulate and you will feel like you have lived less life than you actually have lived in real time.

If you did not know how old you were, one day you might be asked to guess, and think you are 63, but then be told the truth and come to the chilling realization you are actually 82 and near death. That is the danger of lagging time perception.

What form of satire could this be?

Why is this down voted? It's obviously a joke (and reasonably funny too)...

Around here words must not be structured in such a way that it might elicit some residual feelings of joy. When detected they must be thoroughly eradicated.

Still, some individuals endure the risk of ostracization by carefully camouflaging such payloads to avoid detection. Often they still fail, as the detection systems become more fit through continuous training data and unsupervised learning.

People here take this website Very Seriously ™

Is this Poe's Law?

I worked in the culinary world for a long time and we called this our “oh shit!” timer — being caught up in some task to suddenly remember to open the oven at the perfect moment before something burns.

This happens a lot in hospitality. Most chefs I know (myself included), set a timer, then go back to the job just before the timer goes off.

There is definitely something to this.

A similar phenomenon occurs on public transit-- waking up at (or just before) your stop. I found that if I've taken the trip at least once, I can wake up pretty much exactly when I need to. Nearly every other frequent commuter I've discussed this with has a similar experience.

I used to believe it was related to subtle audio/visual cues while unconscious, but it might just be a function of a sense of time.

Yeah, does seem more likely it's my brain knowing the time fairly accurately from the early morning light levels, bird song, traffic noises, temperature, smells in the air etc, and other cues I'm not consciously aware of, than that I have a timer, accurate to a few minutes over 9 or 10 hours, in my body.

Gary Halbert, one of the best copywriters of all time, uses a time method to check if his mind was sharp. He will guess at how much time has passed without looking at a clock. The closer he was to the real time the better.

That's interesting. I thought I had read that older people perceive time more slowly than younger people but I wonder if that can be overcome by keeping our sense of time-telling "calibrated" by periodically checking our accuracy.

I’ve heard that story before and it was effectively centered on the fact that each year was a proportionally smaller part of your life as you get older.

But feels like it wouldn’t be hard for that long term sense of time to be fairly disconnected with a very short term one.

I thought it was the other way around? As you get older your perceive time as moving more quickly? As you get older every hour is a smaller percentage of your total life, so that made sense to me?

I think this is a side effect of one's life becoming more routinized as they grow older, and having fewer memorable moments in each day.

Anecdotally, I had this feeling of time moving more and more quickly, and "that thing which feels just a week ago was actually a year ago" until my early 30s, when I finally decided to unsubscribe from routines.

As I gradually moved away from having a daily schedule, I had more time for unique and memorable experiences in my everyday life, and this feeling began to change.

Nowadays, it is actualy more typical for me to feel the other way, meaning something which was just a week ago feels like it was much longer.

This sounds super interesting! What do you mean by unsubscribe from routines? Could you give some examples? What effects did doing this have on your life?

My experiences with this suggest that “long” spans of time (weeks->years) follow the “smaller percentage of your life” principle. However, occasions “in the moment” get perceived according to the rules applicable for that moment:

- boring things: usually a slow dirge or filled with brief distractions

- novel things: either no sense of time passing, or a feeling of time going anywhere from slowly to “endless”

- mundane things: time passes “at a familiar rate”, but I remember fee details later

You're absolutely right. Total brain fart and it's too late for me to correct it with an edit.

For those who this does not work..

Try tapping your forehead with forefinger while counting up to the time you want to wake up just before you close your eyes to go to sleep..

eg to wake at 6am...

tap six times while saying "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6"

Repeat 2 times, (3 times in total)

There’s a term / name for this method.

Emotional freedom technique (EFT)?

I had never heard of this..

Seems it is for relieving emotional stress but i had only used it specifically to wake up at a specific time.

https://www.healthline.com/health/eft-tapping

EFT is unrelated to head tapping for setting internal wake up calls.

In EFT you're tapping on the end points of the meridian lines to send a kind of "reset pulse" to clear emotional issues. (At least that's the concept.)

To set a "wake up call" you (basicplus2) tap your head with your finger, but probably not on a meridian point, and you're not trying to clear an emotional issue. Also, some people tap their whole head on their pillow instead.

Ah right, thanks, I wasn’t sure if the two were related.

Cheers!

I noticed years ago when at a bus stop, I'd get impatient and antsy seconds before the bus arrived (on time). I figured it was my subconscious alarm clock.

When I was a kid, we used to have a radio/tape/CD player with a digital clock on it. Whenever I looked at it, as in whenever my body thought it would be a good idea to check the time, it was always something like 11:11 or 16:16.

Maybe that's true, but when I hear people say they always look at their watches at 12:34 or such a thing, I suspect (because it never happened to me!) it's probably something akin to the Baader-Meinhof illusion, "where something that has recently come to one's attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards." There are many similar phenonema humans fall victim to, thanks to our cognitive biases - our brains not as good at certain things as we'd like to think.

You tend to only remember what seem those unusual times. And the more you freak out about it, and wonder what the hell's going on, the more you remember seeing them, and the more you look..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequ...

It happens to me pretty frequently. In truth, I know that I look at the digital clock on my microwave probably 100 times a day.

It might also be precognition?

Or 12:34 or sometimes my birthday.

It is more likely that those are the instances you remember because they stand out as compared to other uninteresting instances. So you get the impression that the former happens more often.

Yes, I too am a fan of repdigits.

I do it to when I need to wake up early so my body is not "surprised" by the low amount of sleep. Works well I think. Do you calculate how many hours you will sleep ? Maybe the brain set some kind of a timer.

Was it "The Power of Your Subconscious Mind" that you read, by any chance? I remember reading that there and applying it as well and it did kind of work. I've read that as kid as well, so maybe that has to do with something. I regard that books as a pseudoscience from today's time, but who knows.

No, it was a book for kids about time and measurement or something..in the early 80s.

Curious if you play/ed a musical instrument? I learned violin as a child and also experience the same phenomenon you describe, but I always attributed it to some neural pathway that was created during musical training (i.e. reading sheet music).

My asleep brain can do the exact same thing, even with consistent sleep deprivation (although it gets increasingly difficult beyond a sleep deficit of twelve hours per week).

On the flip side, my awake brain is completely and totally time-blind. I can go _hours_ on a subject I am obsessing over, and think it’s been just thirty minutes. Asperger’s sucks.

I heard this from someone who swore it worked for her too, but it has never worked for me. It must be a superpower! :)

It's not a superpower. For me it's a combination of two: Urgency and having had enough sleep. If I have a flight, I almost always wake up 30 minutes before my timer go off; even if I didn't get enough sleep. If I have nothing important to do the next day, my brain will usually ignore the waking up part and carries on.

One thing I noticed is that in the last year I have been waking up just a few minutes before my alarm goes off. My postulation is the iPhone alarm sound. It's bizarrely painful that I think I'm waking up just before it to avoid hearing it.

A couple of weeks ago I woke up in the middle of the night. My first thought was, it's 2:54am. I didn't have any visible clocks, so I looked at my phone, and it was 2:53am. I've had that happen multiple times. Very strange.

Is it possible you are subconsciously waking up and looking at the clock (or doing it consciously at the time but just not remembering it)? Sleep generally triggers some unique memory suppression mechanisms.

No, I've never slept with a clock in my room.

Likewise. It works for insane times too; I've woken up in as little as 3 hours when I desperately needed 8 hours. There's a bit of a computational alarm clock in our brains somehow.

Yeah I had similar experiences.

If I want to wake up really early for something I think is important, even if I stay up late, I just need to tell myself to wake up at $time and it works.

Haha, I know that's weird but actually I've noticed that myself happening a lot - thought I might be the only one! :)

Yup, have experienced it personally. I usually wake up few mins before the alarm goes off. Though not proven through science you know something is there.

Another thing I would like to add is that scientific community should be more open to test conventional wisdom.

Why do you think science has not researched this and found it largely to be true? Here's one article on the subject

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10870...

Thank you! PDF here https://www.academia.edu/download/44704857/Awakening_from_sl...

They have, and thats how its confirmed. My comment is more around the social or cultural wisdom being mocked or ignored. I understand where it started from or why it was necessary, but the pendulum has sung too far.

But the social or cultural wisdom wasn't ignored, it was tested and found to be accurate. It's not about the pendulum swinging too far, cultural wisdom is mocked because it is often nonsense people convince themselves is true.