🚨 Time Blindness & The Alarmy Chronicles 🚨

(aka: the things I’ll do to pretend I’m a functioning adult)

So, I had this talk with family yesterday, you know, one of those “we love you but we’re worried you’re going to oversleep until 2030” kind of conversations.

See, I’ve tried it all. Setting multiple alarms. Putting my phone across the room. Even making myself crawl out of bed like I’m auditioning for a zombie movie.
And yet…somehow, I always end up back in bed like nothing happened.

So, the family says, “Hey, there’s this app called Alarmy…it makes you do tasks before it shuts off.”
Perfect. Torture disguised as productivity. My kind of chaos.

Fast-forward to this morning:
7:00 a.m.
The alarm starts off soft, innocent…like it’s whispering, “Hey, sunshine, time to conquer the day.”
And then it escalates…
“SCAN THIS BARCODE. DO SOME MATH. TAKE A PICTURE OF YOUR SINK.”

Now I’m half-asleep, giggling, standing in my kitchen like a drunk raccoon trying to scan a barcode. But it worked. I was up. I did my little routine. I even got some homework done.

Fast-forward again, about 11 a.m., and I hear it.
That same cheerful voice:
“Today is November whatever, the weather is clear…”

And I lose it.
Because it’s not my alarm this time.
It’s my son’s.
Apparently, in his noble attempt to “test the app,” he accidentally set a full routine alarm for himself.
So now he’s stumbling out of his room with bed hair and a barcode, and I’m crying laughing because this is our life now.

Here’s the thing though, behind the laughter, there’s truth.
These “life hacks” we make fun of?
They’re not cute productivity trends.
They’re survival systems.
For people with ADHD, time blindness isn’t laziness, it’s a literal disconnect between knowing you should do something and your brain letting you start doing it.
So, we trick ourselves.
We set alarms that yell.
We make games out of the mundane.
We life hack our way into functioning because sometimes, that’s the only way we can.

And if laughing at myself in the kitchen with a barcode scanner helps me face another day?
Then that’s my kind of therapy.