What’s the Matter with Our Internal Clock?

Internal clock. No, I don’t mean THAT time tracker for our administrative tasks or internal policies, or that stalkerish multi-screenshot employee monitoring tool. I mean our internal, biological “device” for telling time. Time is intrinsically subjective, and our internal clocks are subject to their own devices (pun intended), often misfiring, a phenomenon which is generally called “time agnosia” or “time blindness”.

Time agnosia, quite literally, means “not knowing time,” and it’s a term borrowed from neurological literature, typically describing the inability to process sensory information. But unlike visual or auditory agnosia, time agnosia doesn’t stem from a broken sensory organ (for there is no organ by which we measure time). Instead, it emerges from the complex interplay between our brain’s multiple timing systems, each operating on different scales and serving distinct purposes in our daily rhythm.

The neuroscience behind internal clocks

The neuroscience here is fascinating. Your striatum (that basal ganglia structure deep in your brain) integrates cortical oscillations and synchronizes neural firing patterns to track seconds and minutes.

Here’s an AI-generated diagram explaining the striatum and cortical oscillations—‘cause I’m bad at drawing :)…

So the striatum serves as this sophisticated timing device, made of white matter fibers interwoven with gray matter (read the full explanation here), while the cortical oscillations are those rhythmic patterns of neural activity organized by frequency into delta (0.5-4 Hz), theta (4-10 Hz), alpha (8-12 Hz), beta (10-30 Hz), and gamma (30-100 Hz).

If your striatum is forced into this high-frequency, fragmented processing mode, it loses the capacity for the slower, more integrated oscillatory patterns that support creative insights, which is why a lot of time pressures and deadlines can kill creativity. (They sure are one great incentive to stop procrastinating, though.) That’s also due to the high cognitive load that short-circuits your brain’s ability to focus and enter that sweet spot of “being in the zone.”

But when you’re “in the zone” (Mihaly Csikszentmihályi’s “Flow State”) writing or designing, your striatum is essentially sampling activity patterns across most of your cortex, creating what researchers call “fictitious norms of timing”(internal rhythms that help you anticipate, predict, and flow through the temporal landscape of your creative endeavors, like a child in Candy Land). It’s your brain’s attempt to impose order on the creative chaos. Granted, this flow state is affected by dopamine, which we’ll discuss in a second.

Let’s use the imagery of an orchestra. Your brain operates more like what researchers call “an orchestra without a conductor”. Instead of one central authority dictating tempo, you basically have an improv band where different instruments break into their own rhythms, some attuned to the dominant pattern, others going rogue entirely, and still others syncopating in unexpected ways.

Or, think of all the percussionists at a Rio de Janeiro festival: imagine multiple metronomes initially ticking at random, then gradually synchronizing into perfect harmony through some invisible musical magnetism. But it’s not just keeping one beat; it’s tracking multiple temporal scales simultaneously, like a master percussionist who can maintain a complex polyrhythm while keeping the whole ensemble from falling apart.

Dopamine basically is the conductor (or sound guy?) of this orchestra of an internal clock: some rhythms get amplified, others get dampened, and the whole temporal landscape of your brain shifts, with any dopaminergic input (dopamine-releasing trigger) distorting our perception of time. Anything from stimulant drugs to novelty, sheer fun, to anxiety can lead to fast-spiking interneurons that accelerate the perception of time.

And it probably happened to you: you’ve just started your creative agency and are spearheading your first project. You thought it’d be done in two hours, yet seven hours in, you’re still tackling the brunt of it.

If you managed to timeblock your calendar (and skip those dreaded Microsoft Teams calls or mute Slack notifications for deep work), you probably even lost track of time.

Again, time feels complicated: it’s fixed, yet relative, as I mentioned in my previous post on subjective time—here’s your cue to read it for extra context.

Better said, our relationship with time is complicated. We want to be aware of it – we want to know our time warps, how we might waste our time in between multitasking – but not too intensely, as it will create a panic around “fugit irreparabile tempus,” Latin for “the inevitable passing of time”. Anxiety-laced deadlines are certain to kill creativity, but not always productivity (here’s how and here’s why).

Our problem with time

Our difficulty in estimating time passing is placed on a spectrum, so you’ll hear terms like “time blindness,” “time agnosia,” “dyschronometria,” and “time passage awareness disorder.” Each term represents a different flavor of temporal confusion, like varieties of existential disorientation in the neuroscience candy shop. We’ll just call it by the popular name, “time blindness,” and stick to general bounds (no medical or psychiatric implications).

But let’s decode this alphabet soup of temporal dysfunction, first.

• Time agnosia is associated with ADHD: it’s the brain’s inability to process temporal information despite intact sensory capabilities, much like visual agnosia prevents object recognition even when eyesight functions perfectly.
• Dyschronometria is a disorder that involves damage to the temporal area of the brain (stroke, concussions, etc.), literally meaning “bad time measurement,” and it’s what happens when your cerebellum, that seahorse-shaped neural timekeeper, gets compromised.
• Time passage awareness disorder tried to pen that experience of temporal myopia — a term Dr. Russell Barkley coined to describe ADHD as “nearsightedness to the future”.
• Time horizon. How far can you look into the future? If you could estimate time by seeing, you’d be nearsighted. You’d need glasses to see things farther into the future clearly.

Of all terms, “time blindness” is the most popular variant as it captures that essential truth: you’re not deliberately ignoring time; your brain literally can’t see it clearly, like trying to read fine print through fog, and it is hindering your executive functions.

There are 12 executive skills within executive functioning: self-restraint, working memory, emotion control, focus, task initiation, planning/prioritization, organization, time management, defining/achieving goals, flexibility, observation (bigger picture), and stress tolerance. You probably have 2-3 really strong skills, 2-3 incredibly weak ones, and the rest are somewhere in between — like having a Swiss Army knife where half the tools are brilliantly sharp and the other half are frustratingly dull.

Time blindness (where ‘time management’ is a rather weak skill) could be linked to:

• planning/prioritizing: your brain struggles to sequence tasks temporally;
• task initiation: not knowing how to start on your task because the temporal roadmap feels invisible;
• focus: getting easily distracted by notifications pulls you out of temporal awareness;
• stress tolerance: panic-inducing deadlines create temporal anxiety that further distorts time perception;
• observation (bigger picture): you lose the forest for the trees, missing the temporal context that gives individual moments meaning.

Effects of time blindness include:

• That feeling in which you get no real sense of what can be achieved: it’s like planning a road trip without understanding speed limits or distances.
• Doing things in the wrong order because temporal sequencing feels arbitrary rather than logical.
• Underestimating the time it takes to do tasks: research shows people with ADHD consistently reproduce time intervals as shorter than they actually were, suggesting their internal clocks literally run differently. You feel like you don’t have a good “internal clock” because you genuinely don’t — your striatum struggles to maintain consistent temporal sampling patterns.
• Poor time management. You constantly misjudge how long it takes to do something. You are constantly running late.
• Poor personal organization. Don’t equate spontaneity and flexibility with poor personal organization, because that’s like blaming someone’s creativity for their executive dysfunction.
• You lose track of time due to distractions, boredom, resistance, or procrastination. If you have to switch from a fun task to a hard one, your brain experiences temporal whiplash.
• Resistance, avoidance, distraction, negotiation, or a full-blown meltdown… all these are downstream effects of temporal overwhelm, not character flaws.

I personally had difficulty planning and prioritizing tasks & activities, and estimating the time required. I was almost always late or in a constant rush, and I would often lose track of time. My number one strategy? Zeitgebers, or temporal cues, improved my understanding of time.

Peace of mind for our internal clocks

As for our internal clocks, sure, it would be a good thing to manage our time better. However, I’ll list what peace of mind is not about.

• It’s not about working MORE

Losing a sense of time feels a lot like losing yourself. Isn’t that precisely the existential dread plaguing knowledge workers today? Research from Harvard Business School reveals that time pressure decimates creativity by 45%, yet here we are, still chasing productivity metrics like Victorian factory owners timing piecework. The title of my first draft read “Fine-tuning your internal clock for increased efficiency.” But God forbid I add more anxiety and pressure to those of you struggling to make sense of your already damning workload.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: we’re living through what scholars now call “toxic productivity culture,” a phenomenon so pervasive that 82% of workers report being at risk of burnout. This isn’t hyperbole; it’s documented pathology since some people get to enjoy life more if they finally become productive. Others (perhaps you’re one of them) get to enjoy life more if they have a better sense of their time. If they somehow manage to slow down and alleviate some of that stress and anxiety of jam-packed calendars and hefty to-dos, that is.

Anxiety literally makes time move faster in our perception, creating what researchers call “time underestimation“. When you’re anxious about deadlines, your brain allocates attention away from present-moment awareness toward future threats, causing temporal intervals to feel compressed. Meanwhile, studies show that mindfulness practices create “time dilation” — the subjective feeling that time has slowed down. It’s ironic, isn’t it? The more desperately we chase time, the faster it seems to slip away.

Here’s the cruel logic of this temporal Catch-22:

• You feel behind schedule → You become anxious about time
• Anxiety hijacks your attention → Diverts focus away from present-moment temporal awareness
• Time perception becomes compressed → Minutes feel like they’re racing by
• You feel even more behind → Anxiety intensifies
• Repeat ad infinitum

The mechanism is particularly insidious for creative professionals. When you’re cognitively overloaded with time anxiety, your hippocampus struggles to maintain temporal coherence, contributing to that slippery feeling where hours vanish without meaningful progress. Meanwhile, the very productivity systems designed to help you “manage time better” often exacerbate this anxiety-time compression cycle.

You need calm temporal awareness to manage time effectively, but the pressure to manage time effectively destroys your calm temporal awareness. The harder you grip, the faster time runs through your fingers… leaving you trapped in a system where the solution (relaxed time awareness) is prevented by the very problem (time anxiety) you’re trying to solve. It’s like forcing yourself to sleep when you have insomnia.

The escape? Stop chasing time and start dancing with it, which requires the counterintuitive move of loosening your grip precisely when everything in you wants to clench tighter.

• It’s not about working FASTER

Slow down, be intentional about your work, and focus on what’s truly meaningful. According to psychological research, meaningful work serves as “a protector of well-being” that enhances both engagement and mental health. We live in a culture of undeniable speed and productivity. We’re able to do more in less time than at any other point in history. But here’s what the productivity gurus won’t tell you: this advice isn’t about becoming so productive that you cram more into your schedule. It’s about learning to slow down.

The “slow productivity movement” isn’t anti-work; it’s pro-sanity. Iceland and its mandated 4-day workweek proved that quality trumps quantity every single time. Cal Newport’s book, “Slow Productivity,” demonstrates that when we obsess over “pseudo-productivity” (using visible activity as a proxy for actual value creation), we end up buried in administrative overhead with less time for the work that actually matters.

• It’s not about working to OVERACHIEVE

It’s easy to get caught up in the idea that everything you do must lead to some positive outcome in certain “leadership development” cultures. That is absurd and a very bad way to live. The most rewarding careers arise from four pathways, according to research on meaningful work, as pointed out by Joe Terrell: self-agency, other-agency, self-communion, and other-communion. You don’t have to maximise every minute of your life for any of these.

A better internal clock for our welfare

Steps to improve time awareness

Let’s face it: time slips through our fingers not because we’re lazy or fundamentally broken but because the sands of time are, by their nature, shifty. To regain your footing on this ever-moving temporal terrain, let’s move from vague intentions to actionable habits, infused, as always, with a splash of cultural savvy and a wink to our shared human quirks.

1. Acknowledge the issue

Start with honesty. Your temporal sense isn’t flawless, and that’s not a personal shortcoming, but a feature of being human in a world where calendars and clocks were invented precisely because our brains couldn’t keep perfect time on their own. Imagine trying to plot your way home from a memory, only to realize some of the landmarks have vanished or moved overnight. That’s what navigating your day feels like with a faulty internal map of time.

We habitually overestimate how much we’ll achieve in an open afternoon, cheerfully forgetting all the little surprises and interruptions lurking just offstage. As Claudia Hammond, author of Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception, points out, unless we reengineer our lives from the ground up, we’re unlikely to wake up one morning as organizational demigods.

When mapping out your schedule, break every task down to its smallest moving parts, compare those to past endeavors, and always, always add extra buffer time. It’s not procrastination but a sort of strategic compassion towards self.

2. Visualize your day

Time, to paraphrase Borges, can be a labyrinth (as explored in “The Garden of Forking Paths”), but with visualization, you become Theseus, not the Minotaur. Imagine your day as a path from A to B. If you can’t see the dots connecting each step, you’ll stumble.

Make your own temporal map: picture your daily commute, your afternoon routine, even your conversations as sequenced events. This trick transforms vague hours into discrete stepping stones, helping you resist the gravitational pull of time fog.

Trust me, this has helped immensely to put one foot in front of the other and work on my elusive tasks.

3. Gamify your temporal intuition

Turn the guessing game into art. When doing routine tasks with a specific time frame (think oatmeal that needs exactly 3-5 minutes on the stove), set a timer for the upper bound. Your challenge: sense when the midpoint arrives, and make a guess. If you miss, the timer is your safety net—and your teacher. We once tried this in our family, with a stopwatch dangling from the neck. The outcome? At work, routine kept estimates sharp; at home, where choice rules and priorities shift, estimates unravelled. Structure is the scaffolding of time awareness.

Pro tip: Gamify your tasks in Paymo

4. Track your temporal landscape

Don’t confuse not having enough time with not knowing where your time goes. Time tracking is less about discipline and more about discovery. When you truly see how your minutes are spent, the illusion of the vanishing day dissipates. Such exercise makes you your own project manager: you’ll intuit when to begin, which tasks to prioritize, and which low-priority items can slide.

Time logging, when approached playfully, not punitively, allows you to tame your task list. What I like most about Paymo Track is that I simply turn the desktop app on and leave it running in the background. Then, I can easily map each timestamp to a task, et voilà! I’ve got a clear picture of my work day.

5. “Practice, Reflect, & Adjust”

Feedback is the not-so-secret sauce of growth. Predict task durations; log the reality; compare; repeat. Most people, especially students, are stunned at how optimistic their guesses were. A worksheet or simple journal suffices, but beware: mix this with constant time pressure, and your morale may plummet. When you picture your timeline as an hourglass half-empty, stress spikes, motivation wanes, and the work turns sluggish. Use feedback as a lantern, not a heat lamp.

6. Spot and plug temporal leaks

Create a new habit: become a detective of “time warps.” Do social media, unplanned chit-chat, or sprawling email chains sneak into your day like artful thieves? Shine a light on them. Awareness is half the battle—and with it, you recapture lost time like Sherlock retrieving pocket watches from a villain’s lair.

7. Outsmart the planning fallacy

Here’s the punchline: our brains were built to be optimists (stay tuned for a thought-piece on how now pessimism is ruining your life). The planning fallacy is that insidious tendency to underestimate how long future tasks take. A 30-minute meeting morphs into a lunchtime escape attempt. So, be generous with buffers—your future self will thank you.

True change isn’t brute-forced; it’s the result of gentle self-observation, continuous recalibration, and the humility to know that the only real clock worth trusting is the one you continually tune.

Time awareness isn’t about becoming a steely-eyed manager of every second obsessing over productivity and efficiency, but it’s about being a wise steward of the only hours you’ll ever truly own.

Conclusion

So here we are, having journeyed through the labyrinthine corridors of time agnosia and time perception, and what have we discovered? That our striatum, that sophisticated neural timekeeper, operates best when we stop micromanaging its every oscillation. It’s the temporal equivalent of watching a pot that never boils.

The cruel irony of our hyperconnected age is that we’ve become temporal hypochondriacs, obsessively monitoring our productivity vital signs while missing the actual rhythm of meaningful work. We’ve built elaborate systems to squeeze efficiency from every moment, yet research consistently shows that the tighter we grip our schedules, the more creativity slips through our fingers.

But what if the solution isn’t more sophisticated time management techniques or productivity hacks, but rather a fundamental shift in how we relate to time itself? The seven steps we’ve explored aren’t really about control but about developing temporal literacy, the ability to read the subtle rhythms of our own cognitive “seasons”.

In the end, fine-tuning your internal clock isn’t about becoming a human metronome—it’s about developing the wisdom to know when to speed up, when to slow down, and when to simply let the music play. The clock will keep ticking whether you’re anxious about it or not. The question remains: will you spend your precious hours wrestling with time, or learning to waltz?