The dentist is at 3 pm, so the day is gone.
It is 9:15 in the morning. You have six hours, and you will spend them checking the clock, not starting anything, because the appointment is coming and it has to be held. At 2:20 you leave forty minutes early and sit in the car park. If you have ADHD you know this day, and the internet calls it waiting mode.
Waiting mode is a community word
Nobody measured waiting mode, and we will not pretend anyone did.
The term comes from people with ADHD describing their own days on forums and in comment threads. There is no paper with the phrase in its title and no number for how many people have it. So this page does something narrower. It takes the day apart and names the three pieces with sources behind them, so you can see the mechanism, and then it says what to do with the six hours.
A community word is still a real day. You lost this morning to a 3 pm dentist. The question is what, exactly, took it.
Time is felt differently, so 3 pm is not six hours away
The first piece is time itself.
A 2019 review in Medical Science Monitor gathered the research on how people with ADHD perceive time, and its finding in plain words is this: time is perceived differently with ADHD (Ptacek and colleagues, 2019). The community word for it is time blindness. It is a review, not a trial, so we say it at that size. The whole picture of time blindness is here.
Here is what it does to a Tuesday. Six hours is not a felt quantity for you. There is now, and there is the appointment, and the space between them has no shape. You cannot see three usable hours in it because you cannot see hours in it at all. So the appointment feels like the next thing, and nothing else is allowed to be next.
The appointment has to live in your head, so nothing else can
The second piece is where the appointment is stored.
With ADHD, it is hard to keep a list in your head. A 2013 meta-analysis of 38 studies found adults with ADHD score lower on working memory, the short store for a thought while you use it (Alderson and colleagues, 2013). This one is well supported. The store is small and it leaks, so anything it must not drop gets held with both hands.
The dentist must not leak. Missing it costs money and a month's wait. So from 9:15 the appointment sits in working memory, held on purpose, and the small store is full with one thing. Every other task you try to pick up has to fit in the space around it, and there is no space around it. You are not procrastinating. You are carrying something, and your hands are full.
Far-away things count for little, until they are close
The third piece is why the morning felt safe to waste and the afternoon did not.
A 2016 meta-analysis of 21 studies and 3,913 people found people with ADHD discount a delayed reward more steeply than other people, a medium effect; the tasks used money, not dentists (Jackson and MacKillop, 2016). Far-away things count for little until they are close. At 9:15 the small tasks of the day, the email and the two calls, are far away and weigh nothing. At 2:20 the dentist is close and weighs everything, and now there is no time for the calls anyway.
So the day has one heavy thing and five weightless ones, and the heavy one is not startable, because it is at 3 pm. Nothing on the list has enough weight to move you. This is the same shape as every deadline you have beaten by an hour.
What to do with the six hours
Put the appointment somewhere outside your head, then make the morning small.
- Write the appointment down with its time, where you will see it. Not a calendar entry you have to open. A row on today's list, at eye level. The point is not remembering it; you were never going to forget. The point is giving your working memory permission to put it down.
- Set one alarm for leaving, not for the appointment. "Leave at 2:35" is the moment you need, and once it is set the clock-checking has no job.
- Make the morning ten minutes long. Pick the smallest open tasks, three or four of them, and run them against a ten-minute clock. Small tasks are the only ones with room next to a held appointment, and starting one is the win.
- Do not plan anything big before 3. A big task on the same day as an appointment is a task you will feel bad about at 2:20. Move it to tomorrow, on purpose, in the morning.
You were never lazy. You were holding a dentist for six hours.
How Kaapi does it
In Kaapi the appointment is a task with a time, and the app holds it so your head does not have to.
Write "dentist 3pm" in the dump and it becomes a task with a badge: "3h left" at noon, then "1h 20m left" under three hours, filling and darkening in the last two. Instead of asking how far away 3 pm is, you read it. From 9 in the morning Timi speaks the deadline once, "Dentist" is due at 3:00 PM., and in the last two hours once more, "Dentist" has 1h 20m left. Start now?, at most one deadline line every ten minutes. Never a banner. The appointment now lives on the screen, with its time, and says its own name at its minute.
For the six hours, turn on "Make it a game" and Timi may offer the dash: 4 quick ones are open. Ten-minute dash? Ten minutes on the small ones, then the end card: You started. That was the hard part. If you clear three, it says so, and nothing is counted back at you. Why the game has no score is here. Everything you write stays on your Mac; $9.99 a month or $99 a year, plus tax, and you try the whole loop first.
Frequently asked questions
What is ADHD waiting mode?
Waiting mode is the community name for a day where one appointment stops everything before it. It is not a clinical term and no study measures it. The pieces do have sources: time is perceived differently with ADHD, a list is hard to hold in the head, and far-away tasks count for little until they are close.
Why does one appointment ruin my whole day with ADHD?
Three things stack. Six hours has no felt shape, so the appointment feels next. Working memory is small, so holding the appointment fills it and nothing else fits. And the day's other tasks are far enough away to weigh nothing. The morning is spent carrying the 3 pm, not avoiding work.
How do I stop waiting mode?
Move the appointment out of your head. Put it on today's list with its time, at eye level, and set one alarm for leaving. Then make the morning small: three or four tiny tasks against a ten-minute clock, nothing big before the appointment. Starting one small thing is the win.
Is waiting mode the same as time blindness?
No, but time blindness is part of it. Time blindness is the community word for perceiving time differently, and a 2019 review found the difference holds up with ADHD. Waiting mode is what a day looks like when that meets a held appointment and a list weighing nothing until it is close.
Sources
- Ptacek, R., Weissenberger, S., Braaten, E., Klicperova-Baker, M., Goetz, M., Raboch, J., Vnukova, M., and Stefano, G. B. (2019). Clinical implications of the perception of time in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): A review. Medical Science Monitor, 25, 3918–3924. doi.org/10.12659/MSM.914225. A review, not a trial.
- Alderson, R. M., Kasper, L. J., Hudec, K. L., and Patros, C. H. G. (2013). Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and working memory in adults: A meta-analytic review. Neuropsychology, 27(3), 287–302. doi.org/10.1037/a0032371. A meta-analysis of 38 studies; well supported.
- Jackson, J. N. S., and MacKillop, J. (2016). Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and monetary delay discounting: A meta-analysis of case-control studies. Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, 1(4), 316–325. doi.org/10.1016/j.bpsc.2016.01.007. 21 studies, 3,913 people, d = 0.43; the tasks used money, not work.