I’ve recently been working with a coach, Steve August, to help me with my advisory work. Steve spent years in the industry as a successful entrepreneur. But one of the most interesting things about him, one that has now become the centerpiece of his coaching, was his diagnosis last year—at the tender age of 54—with ADHD. As he’s found strategies to address its impact on him, he’s refocused his coaching practice to help founders work with greater clarity and focus.
I mention this because, a few weeks ago, he wrote about time blindness, the tendency for people with ADHD to struggle with estimating, managing, and prioritizing time effectively.
Reading this piece, it struck me that organizations regularly suffer from a sort of aggregated version of time blindness. They don’t always recognize it or want to admit it, since it is a reflection of leadership qualities. I have found that helping organizations with “time” is a central element of my own advisory work, even though it is rarely the primary reason they have engaged me. The parallels aren’t perfect, but they’re revealing.
Time Blindness – the basics
People with ADHD have specific challenges with time that manifest themselves in the following ways:
- Now vs. Not Now thinking: The tendency to focus on whatever is urgent or stimulating, while long-term tasks fade into the background.
- Hyperfocus: The ability to get deeply engrossed in a task to the point where hours pass without awareness of time or deadlines.
- Procrastination & avoidance: Struggling to start tasks, especially when they feel overwhelming, uncertain, or lack clear next steps.
- Constant reactivity: Operating in a state of urgency, where attention jumps rapidly between competing demands, making it difficult to sustain focus on priorities.
Sound familiar? While I don’t mean to diminish the ADHD diagnosis, I have met and worked with many people who struggle with different aspects of time blindness—and that includes me.
Not surprisingly then, these challenges show up at an organizational level too, just in different ways.
Organizational Time Blindness
While companies don’t “think” like people, they do exhibit collective behaviors that mirror time blindness.
1. Short-term thinking (“Now vs. Not Now”)
Companies regularly over-prioritize immediate fires and short-term wins while neglecting foundational, long-term investments. In my experience, the inverse is very rare. Strategic initiatives get deprioritized, and structural issues remain unaddressed. Fast-growing businesses face this problem in spades.
2. Hyperfocus
Organizations become fixated on certain priorities while ignoring the reality of time constraints. This manifests itself in projects dragging on indefinitely, perhaps because teams become fixated on perfecting details.
3. Procrastination & avoidance
In large and small companies, I regularly see decisions being delayed, especially when uncertainty is high or accountability is unclear. The symptoms are often endless meetings or “analysis paralysis,” where talk never translates into action.
4. Constant reactivity
Similar to short term thinking, this is where companies operate in a state of constant reactive urgency and priorities shift erratically, which means teams never get sustained focus on execution.
Leadership required
Companies that operate with one or more manifestations of time blindness won’t get out of it without leaders who force change. There are some easy questions to ask if you suspect your company (or individual teams) are not managing time effectively:
- Are our strategic priorities keep slipping away because we are focused on immediate wins?
- Are we spending time on what actually moves the business forward, or just what’s comfortable or in front of us?
- Are there teams that seem to be constantly busy without producing desired outcomes?
Leaders need to also be aware that how they view time will be different from how their employees view it. To see this, you need only to ask these same questions to different people in the organization. I guarantee you will find differences in perspective that directly reveal a key problem to resolve.
Ultimately the way you address time blindness is by creating forcing functions to ensure that the organization is structuring time intentionally. That means:
- Dedicating time to prioritize: Whether it is a three-year plan, annual goal setting, quarterly reviews, or weekly team meetings, you need to set aside time to zoom out and think.
- Mandating trade-offs: If something is a priority, what isn’t?
- Setting time-bound constraints: Perfection is the enemy of progress. Define what “good enough” looks like and execute.
- Creating feedback loops: Are we on track? What’s slipping? Where is time slipping away without impact?
The goal here is not for leaders to reclaim work or autonomy from their teams, but to create visibility of consequences and force choices that give people clarity and allow them to create momentum that leads to progress. Because as each of us has surely experienced, time has a funny way of slipping away.