Time Blindness: Why I Think Everything Will Take Ten Minutes

Some people walk into a task and actually understand what it will require. They look at a sink full of dishes and think, “That’ll be twenty minutes.” They see a home project and mentally map out days or weeks. They pace themselves like normal, reasonable adults.

And then there’s me.

My brain looks at the exact same tasks and whispers, “Ten minutes, tops.”

Every. Single. Time.

It doesn’t matter if it’s putting away laundry, reorganizing an entire closet, or building an office from the ground up. My default setting is delusional optimism. Why? Because my brain refuses to grasp the actual mechanics of time. It compresses hours into minutes, minutes into seconds, and convinces me that I can do literally anything on a whim if I just get started.

Case in point: the office.

A reasonable person would look at framing, drywall, and painting and think, “Okay, that’s a project. That’s days of labor, tools, mess, cleanup. It’s going to be exhausting, maybe even miserable.” My brain? “Couple hours, easy.”

Fast forward a day and a half later, covered in paint and drywall dust, muscles screaming, ferrets banished for their own safety, and I was still standing in the chaos muttering, “Why did this take so long?” As if reality betrayed me instead of me betraying myself.

And this isn’t a one-off. This is everything.

I’ll decide to “quickly” clean my downloads folder. Four hours later, I’m knee-deep in renaming files from 2018 and researching cloud storage like I’m prepping for a TED Talk.

I’ll tell myself I’m just going to “toss a load of laundry in.” Next thing I know, I’ve torn apart my closet, found three ferret stashes, and I’m ankle-deep in a project called “Tetris-ize this Shit” that was never on the to-do list in the first place.

I think it’s part executive dysfunction, part ADHD time warp, and part toxic optimism. My brain thrives on the idea that everything is quick, easy, doable. Because I fully BELIEVE that it is.

The cruel irony? The optimism gets me moving, but the reality leaves me wrecked. Tasks balloon until they eat the whole day, sometimes the whole week. Then I’m left wondering where the time went, why my body hurts, and why I still have a to-do list a mile long. Cue the shame spiral: I should have known better, I should have paced myself, I should have been more realistic. But of course, I won’t learn. Because tomorrow, when I look at a mountain of chaos, my brain will chirp, “Ten minutes, tops.”

There’s also this weird shame in admitting just how long things take. Society loves productivity porn —

the idea that you can whip your life into shape in a neat thirty-minute block if you just try harder. When you’re the kind of person who can't stop at "tidying the space" and instead needs to do a deep clean and rearrange, it feels like failure. It feels like everyone else got the manual for how to move through time, and I’m here trying to duct tape hours together.

But maybe the trick isn’t to fight it. Maybe the trick is to accept that my brain’s “ten minutes” is never ten minutes, and to stop punishing myself when I fall for the lie again. Maybe the truth is that time blindness isn’t laziness or incompetence. It’s just a different operating system. One that needs a lot more buffers and recovery time than I ever plan for.

So yes, I will keep walking into projects thinking they’ll be over in a flash. I will keep convincing myself that massive undertakings are “quick fixes.” I will keep lying to myself about the passage of time. And then I’ll keep laughing at myself later, shaking my head, and muttering, “Classic.”

Because honestly? If I didn’t trick myself into believing things take ten minutes, I’d probably never start at all.