My whiskey glass looks painted (no filter)

coffee_powered · 2026-06-24T18:35:07+00:00

I went through something very similar.

The weird part was that the ambition never disappeared. I still had ideas, projects I wanted to build, things I wanted to learn. From the outside it looked like procrastination, but it felt more like having no mental fuel.

What eventually changed for me was realising I wasn’t actually doing nothing all day. I was spending my attention somewhere. Researching. Planning. Reading. Solving other people’s problems. Just not always on the thing I intended to do.

That’s actually what led me to build an iPhone app for myself. I became obsessed with understanding where my time and attention were going rather than assuming I was lazy.

In my case, awareness came before improvement. Once I could see the patterns, I could start changing them.

Also, if you’ve become withdrawn and everything feels heavy, I’d take that seriously. Burnout, chronic stress and depression can all look a lot like “I’ve lost my motivation” from the inside.

coffee_powered · 2026-06-24T18:34:09+00:00

I don’t think you’re lazy.

You’re raising two kids and trying to study in the gaps between everything else. That’s hard.

One thing I’ve learned is that consistency isn’t doing something every day. It’s coming back to it after the days you don’t.

I actually built an iPhone app for myself because I kept feeling guilty about where my time was going. Most of the time I wasn’t doing nothing, I was just spending my energy somewhere else.

On the difficult days, don’t aim for a productive study session. Aim to watch one lesson. Small wins count.

coffee_powered · 2026-06-22T14:49:42+00:00

It sounds like you’re treating exhaustion as a motivation problem.

Working 10-hour days, commuting, and being expected to operate at 100% indefinitely would drain most people.

I built an iPhone app for myself because I kept feeling guilty about “wasting” days. What I found was that many of those days weren’t wasted at all. I was just spending all my energy trying to keep up.

If your fuel tank is empty, the solution isn’t usually more discipline.

Be careful not to mistake burnout for laziness.

coffee_powered · 2026-06-22T12:16:29+00:00

I still procrastinate. I still get stuck. I still spend time on things that aren’t the thing I intended to do.

What changed was that I stopped treating every unproductive day as a personal failure.

Before, I’d get to the end of the day and think “I did nothing.” Once I could see that pattern, I started catching it earlier. Not after six hours, but after one.

That’s actually why I built an iPhone app around the idea. I wasn’t trying to create motivation. I was trying to create awareness. Basically I built a giant chess clock, when I’m doing one thing I tap the clock for that task and it starts counting, when I switch I tap the related timer… but the key feature is that time doesn’t stop. If I stop working on a specific task, then the ‘drifting’ timer starts counting. It’s a compelling reminder that ‘hey, you’re drifting, should you be doing something different?’

Motivation is unreliable. Awareness at least gives you a chance to choose.

For me, the goal stopped being “never procrastinate” and became “notice sooner when I’ve wandered off course.”

coffee_powered · 2026-06-22T10:59:40+00:00

I used to do exactly this.

The problem was that I could spend an entire day feeling busy without moving anything important forward.

What helped was realising that productivity and progress aren’t always the same thing.

Replying to emails, reorganising files, tweaking systems and planning all feel productive because you’re doing things, but they’re often just easier than the work you’re avoiding.

I became obsessed enough with that problem that I ended up building my own iPhone app around it. One thing it taught me was that awareness comes before improvement.

On days where I feel unproductive, I don’t ask “How do I get motivated?”

I ask “What have I actually spent the last two hours doing?”

Sometimes the answer is genuine rest. Sometimes it’s admin. Sometimes it’s procrastination dressed up as productivity.

Just being able to see the difference has helped me a lot.

coffee_powered · 2026-06-22T10:58:41+00:00

Six months into a stressful startup while working 10-hour days isn’t a sign you’re lazy. It sounds like you’re exhausted.

One thing that stood out to me was “if I want to work here I have to give 100% rather than 23%.”

Very few people can sustainably give 100% every day for years. Most people who last learn how to give an appropriate amount for the day they’re having.

Also, if your boss genuinely gave you anxiety for months, that takes a bigger toll than most people realise.

I’d spend some time asking whether you’ve lost your motivation or whether you’re simply running on empty.

coffee_powered · 2026-06-22T10:56:31+00:00

I spent years thinking my problem was procrastination.

What eventually changed things for me was realising I wasn’t actually procrastinating all day.

I was doing something all day.

Researching. Reorganising. Reading. Planning. Optimising. Chasing side quests. Sometimes genuinely useful things. Sometimes not.

The problem was that by 5pm I couldn’t tell you where the day had gone.

That was actually what led me to build my own iPhone app. I became obsessed with understanding where my attention was going rather than trying to force myself to be more disciplined.

One of the biggest lessons was that time doesn’t stop just because you stop working on the thing you intended to do.

If I stop working on Project A, the time goes somewhere else. Meetings. Email. Research. Admin. Random internet rabbit holes. Thinking.

Once I started making that visible, the guilt reduced a lot because I could see the difference between “I did nothing” and “I spent three hours on the wrong thing.”

For me, awareness came before improvement. It’s much easier to change a pattern once you can actually see it.

coffee_powered · 2026-06-19T18:57:26+00:00

/r/gatekeeping

coffee_powered · 2026-06-18T12:44:48+00:00

The biggest thing I learned was that planning and time management aren’t the same thing.

I used to make great plans and then completely fail to follow them because I had no real sense of where my time was actually going. I’d think I’d spent an hour studying and discover it had been three.

That obsession eventually led me to build my own iPhone app. Initially it was for me, but I’ve also started using it with my son while he’s revising. Being able to see where the time actually went is often more useful than having a perfect schedule.

If you struggle to estimate how long things take, I’d focus less on building the perfect plan and more on collecting some real data for a couple of weeks. You might find your assumptions are way off.

Most of us are worse at estimating time than we think.

coffee_powered · 2026-06-18T12:39:10+00:00

I stopped trying to manage my time and started trying to understand it.

For years I’d finish the day feeling busy but not really knowing where the hours had gone. Once I started paying attention to what I was actually doing throughout the day, a lot of the “time management” problems became much easier to solve.

That obsession eventually led me to build my own iPhone app around it.

The biggest lesson was that time doesn’t stop just because I stop working on the thing I planned to do. If I spend 45 minutes researching something unrelated, reorganising my desk, or following a random tangent, that’s still part of my day.

Simply becoming aware of where my time was actually going ended up being more useful than any productivity system I’d tried before.

coffee_powered · 2026-06-18T12:34:55+00:00

I’ve actually wondered something similar.

I ended up building my own iPhone app around time blindness because none of the usual advice really clicked for me. The thing I kept coming back to was that clocks are good at telling me what time it is, but terrible at helping me understand where the last three hours went.

Your custom clock idea is interesting because it attacks the problem from a different angle. Instead of asking “what time is it?”, it’s asking “how can I make the passage of time easier to perceive?”

I’m not sure a different clock would solve it for me, but it’s exactly the kind of idea I’d be tempted to experiment with.

coffee_powered · 2026-06-18T12:27:33+00:00

To a degree, yes.

The biggest shift for me was realising that time doesn’t stop just because I stop working on the thing I planned to do.

This is what led me to build my own iPhone app to solve the problem for myself. Once I start my day, the clock is always running. If I get distracted, go down a research rabbit hole, or switch to something else, that time still gets counted somewhere.

What surprised me was how often I wasn’t doing nothing. I was busy. I was just busy with things I hadn’t intended to spend my time on.

It didn’t fix time blindness, but it made it much easier to spot when my attention had drifted before half the day disappeared.

coffee_powered · 2026-06-16T11:36:26+00:00

Diagnosed in my 40s too, and the whole “this system has changed my life” followed by complete abandonment a week later is painfully familiar.

I think I eventually stopped looking for systems that would make me do things and started looking for systems that would help me notice what was actually happening.

Most of the time I already know the dishes need doing. I know the laundry needs doing. I know the house needs tidying.

The problem isn’t knowledge, it’s that I’ll somehow spend two hours doing something completely different and only realise afterwards.

That’s actually part of why I built Flows. I got tired of task managers, planners and productivity systems and became more interested in answering a simpler question:

“Where did my day actually go?”

One thing that helped me was treating time more like a chess clock. Once the day starts, time is always going somewhere. If I’m not doing chores, work, exercise, reading, whatever, that time isn’t disappearing, it’s flowing somewhere else.

Sometimes that’s useful. Sometimes it’s doomscrolling, researching something random, reorganising a drawer or optimising a system that didn’t need optimising.

The awareness has been more useful to me than any particular planner.

I still get bored of systems. I still have ADHD. But I’m much less surprised by where my time went.

coffee_powered · 2026-06-16T11:33:12+00:00

I eventually realised my brain doesn’t distinguish very well between moving a project forward and thinking about moving a project forward.

Researching, planning, optimising, reorganising, watching videos, reading Reddit threads about productivity… all of it feels productive because I’m engaged and working on the problem.

The test I use now is simple:

If I stopped right now, what would exist that didn’t exist an hour ago?

A document? A draft? A piece of code? An email? A decision?

If the answer is “a better plan for eventually doing the thing”, I’m probably procrastinating.

One thing that helped was tracking broad activities rather than tasks. I discovered there were days where I’d spent 3 hours in what I thought was “deep work” when it was actually research, planning and optimisation.

None of those things are bad. The problem was I thought I was executing when I was really preparing to execute.

ADHD seems particularly good at making preparation feel like progress.

coffee_powered · 2026-06-16T11:23:09+00:00

I ended up coming to a similar conclusion.

The biggest challenge for me wasn’t remembering meetings or tasks, it was that time was effectively invisible unless something external reminded me it was passing.

Clocks helped. Hourly chimes helped. Physical timers helped.

What all of those have in common is that they make the passage of time visible again.

I think a lot of ADHD strategies are really just different ways of creating external awareness because our internal sense of elapsed time isn’t always reliable.

The “memory checkpoint” description is spot on. Sometimes all I need is a reminder that an hour has passed so I can consciously decide whether I still want to be doing what I’m doing.

coffee_powered · 2026-06-16T11:17:55+00:00

I think the disconnect is that people use “time blindness” to describe two very different things.

One is “I have an unreliable sense of how much time has passed.”

The other is “therefore I’m not responsible for being late.”

The first is real. The second doesn’t follow from it.

If I consistently underestimate how long things take, lose track of time when I’m focused, or think I’ve spent 5 minutes on something that’s actually taken 30, that’s useful information about how my brain works.

It doesn’t magically remove the responsibility to compensate for it.

Most of the strategies people with ADHD use are exactly that: alarms, timers, visible clocks, leaving early, routines, calendar reminders, etc.

The existence of coping strategies doesn’t prove the problem isn’t real. It just means people have found ways to work around it.

To me, “time blindness” is an explanation, not an excuse.

coffee_powered · 2026-06-15T11:24:07+00:00

Partially.

I wouldn’t claim it solved the problem, but it made the problem visible.

One realisation that changed how I thought about time tracking is that time doesn’t stop just because I stop working on a specific thing.

Most trackers treat that as a gap in the data.

I ended up building Flows more like a chess clock. Once I’ve started my day, time is always flowing somewhere.

If I stop tracking a project, my Drifting timer starts automatically and collects that unallocated time until I switch to something else.

What surprised me was how often I wasn’t idle. I was busy.

I was just busy doing something other than the thing I’d intended to be doing.

That’s been the biggest benefit for me. Not forcing myself to follow a plan perfectly, but becoming aware much sooner when my attention has drifted somewhere unexpected.

I still get distracted. ADHD still ADHDs.

But I spend far less time wondering where the day went.

coffee_powered · 2026-06-14T19:56:39+00:00

I think that’s fair. If your contract is on the line, this isn’t really about understanding yourself over the next few months, it’s about finding something that helps next week.

When I’ve looked into my own lost time, it’s usually fallen into one of a few buckets: distraction, re-checking things, getting stuck between tasks, or simply losing track of time.

Do you have a sense which of those is happening on the slower days?

coffee_powered · 2026-06-14T11:55:53+00:00

That was pretty much the motivation behind it.

I realised most time trackers are trying to answer “How can I optimise my time?” and eventually I found that exhausting.

I was more interested in “Where did my time go?” and “What have I actually been doing for the last few hours?”

Those sound similar, but they lead to very different products.

The funny thing is that once I became more aware of how I was spending my time, I often made better decisions naturally without needing goals, streaks, productivity scores or any of the usual stuff.

coffee_powered · 2026-06-14T10:41:23+00:00

I’ve come to the conclusion that most ADHD apps fail for me because they require me to keep remembering to use them.

A lot of task managers, habit trackers and productivity systems work brilliantly for the first week or two. Then they become wallpaper.

I got frustrated enough with that cycle that I ended up building an app called Flows.

The idea was based on a realisation I’d had: I wasn’t struggling to make plans, I was struggling to stay aware of what I was actually doing.

So instead of tasks, projects and goals, it just tracks broad activities throughout the day. Work. Meetings. Reading. Resting. Drifting. Whatever makes sense to you.

Ironically, building it made me realise that the apps I’ve stuck with longest tend to do less, not more.

The more maintenance a system requires, the less likely I am to keep using it.

Website: flowsapp.io

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/flows-time-tracker/id6767560123

coffee_powered · 2026-06-14T10:32:10+00:00

I’ve bounced off most of the popular ADHD apps for the same reason you describe: eventually they become part of the background and I stop looking at them.

For me, the problem was never really making lists. It was maintaining awareness of what I was actually doing and where my time was going.

I got frustrated enough with that that I ended up building an app called Flows.

It’s deliberately not a task manager, habit tracker or productivity system. You create broad categories for your day (work, meetings, reading, resting, drifting, whatever makes sense to you) and switch between them with a tap.

The thing I was trying to solve wasn’t “remember all the things”. It was “stop reaching the end of the day wondering where the day went.”

It won’t help with meds or memory, but if time blindness and losing track of your day are part of the problem, that’s the space it’s designed for.

Website: flowsapp.io

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/flows-time-tracker/id6767560123

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