How Students With ADHD Manage Time, in Their Own Words

What the students described

One student left the laundry hamper where it would be visible, and the open windows of unfinished work on the computer screen, and the work itself out on the desk. Written notes had proved useless. “Leaving notes I can’t, I won’t read them, but if I visually see what’s going on, I can remember faster,” the student said. The account appears in a 2019 paper in the journal Children, written by Consuelo Kreider, Sharon Medina and Mackenzi Slamka of the Department of Occupational Therapy at the University of Florida.

Fifty-two undergraduates took part, all at that one American university, all registered with the campus disability office, and all studying science, technology, engineering or mathematics. Their average age was 21. Twenty-two reported a learning disability, eighteen reported ADHD, and twelve reported both; twenty reported an additional mental health condition, including four with autism. Asked to rate their own difficulties from 0 to 100, they placed staying focused at a median of 75 and managing time at 65.

The material was transcripts, drawn from fifteen individual interviews and thirty monthly group discussions collected over four years and analysed afterwards for what students said they did. Qualitative work of this kind cannot show how common any strategy is, or whether it works; what it establishes is what a group of people describe and how they account for it.

Some of what they described was the ordinary machinery of planning, held to with unusual determination. One participant woke between four and five each morning to finish the laundry, prepare meals and exercise before her first class, so that the rest of the day belonged to coursework. Several referred to “double dipping,” a term of their own, meaning studying alongside friends so that one block of the evening served the coursework and the friendship at once.

Other strategies addressed a specific symptom. Students described planned breaks, activity switching, which meant bouncing between two lists so that a stall on one became progress on the other, and the Pomodoro technique, a method of working in timed intervals. “Four blocks of 25 min, and then in between, each one is a five-minute break,” one explained, adding that the aim was eleven or twelve blocks in a day.

A group of students reported using procrastination on purpose. They delayed in order to manufacture a small amount of pressure, which they found supplied the concentration that an open afternoon did not. “One hour left and that’s it,” one said of the pressure the delay produced.

Words for what is already happening

The usefulness of this paper to a parent is the vocabulary. Behaviour that reads at home as disorganisation has been named, deliberately, by the people who use it.

Activity switching describes the child who abandons the essay for the dishwasher and returns twenty minutes later. Environmental cues describe the folder left open on the desk and the bag set down by the door, positioned so that the eye finds them. The students who left an assignment until the final hour described engineering that hour on purpose.

The researchers grouped a further set of strategies under reframing, meaning the work of arriving at an account of one’s own difficulties clear enough to give to somebody else. Students who had done it reported speaking to instructors more effectively about what helped, asking for material to be left on the board longer or for slower delivery during lectures. One noted that the request served others in the room as well: “that’s not just for myself, but for other students I know who also complain about the same issue.”

They were also clear about the costs, and named those too. Students who relied on manufactured pressure spoke of misjudging it, of an anxiousness that prevented them from thinking clearly, and of the balance they had to keep against mental fatigue and school burnout. Some who checked each course website repeatedly through the day, opening one after another to find the next task, recognised in group discussion that the method was wasting their time.

What the study can support is narrow. These were adults, several years older than a school-age child, who had volunteered for a support programme and were receiving mentorship and facilitated monthly meetings while they described their methods; the authors note that the data were gathered for a different purpose and yield only initial understanding. Nothing in the paper shows that any strategy caused a student to succeed, and nothing in it establishes what a twelve-year-old should do.

What it does show is that the young people living with these conditions had language for their own workarounds, and used it precisely. Some of that language will describe things happening in your house already, including the hamper left where somebody will see it.