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How to Speed Up and Slow Down Time at Work

One of the first things you’re going to notice when you quit Adderall (at least during the 5 hours per day that you manage to stay awake) is that time moves excruciatingly slowly without Adderall. But that’s just the beginning. Over the course of quitting Adderall and rebuilding yourself, your perception of time will change several times in weird ways.

Time moves fast on Adderall

You’re accustomed to going into work, popping a pill, getting your nice Adderall buzz, and then diving into work so deeply that you don’t even get to what you intended to do that day until the sun starts to go down (because you’ve been lost in minutiae all day). Every Adderall-fueled workday can be like a race against the clock. You’ll think: “Ok, I’ll just tweak this little thing…there…now I can get back to that other tweak, and then finally back to what I started out to do — crap another hour is gone! It keeps moving so fast and I have so much epic work to do!”

Time slows down when you quit Adderall

When you quit Adderall, your relationship with the clock changes. You still keep looking at it every 2 minutes, but not because you’re anxious about it moving so fast — because you’re tortured by how excruciatingly slow it moves. You try to do a little work. Try to distract yourself. Try to resist checking the clock. But then you finally look. You must have killed an hour by now. That felt like an hour. Nope, it was just 14 lousy minutes. Urgh! Kill me now! This day will never end! I’ve got to pop a pill; I can’t handle this.

Finding a new “slacker groove” at work speeds time back up

OK, slacking off at work is bad…we all know that. But when you first quit Adderall, you’re going to slack like you’ve never slacked in your life. You will come in as late as you can. You will leave as early as you can get away with. You will look for any and every excuse to escape into smoke breaks/long lunches/errands of questionable-necessity/whatever.

But eventually you won’t be able to escape anymore. You cannot maintain the frequent-escape schedule and still keep your job. You’ve got to figure out how you can make it the whole day tethered to your miserable desk/cash register/stripper pole/whatever.

After forcing yourself to sit at your desk for 8 hours, you figure out how to make it bearable: you simply don’t do any work. For you desk jockeys, this means lots of time on sites like reddit, StumbleUpon, YouTube, Facebook, Hulu, Netflix, and anything else that you can dive into and get your happy/entertained juices flowing.

Of course, you have to squeeze in some work, or people will get wise.

After a while, you learn to squeeze in about equal parts slacking and work. It gets comfortable. You can go through the whole day without having to think hardly at all. Time at work isn’t so unbearable anymore. At the end of the day you have next to zero feeling of accomplishment, and you’ll be exhausted from all that not thinking and not working, but at least you’re getting through the day.

You learn to kill whole weeks with this “slack + minimum effort” routine…and then you start killing whole months. And then you’ve killed a year. And then you have a new problem.

How to slow time back down when you’re ready

Eventually, you may find that you’ve gotten a little too good at killing the days and weeks. Now your life is rushing beneath you, and you’re getting nothing of merit accomplished during the day. That starts to matter to you.

Having to stare at the clock while every second takes an eternity to tick away is bad; realizing that it’s Friday again and you haven’t had a significant thought all week is worse.

Now you can venture out. With your time-speeding minimum slack routine there to fall back to, you can start adding some meaningful effort-requiring tasks and obligations to your life. Basically, you’ve learned how to walk for as far as you want; now it’s time to add in a little jogging.

The proper speed of time

Everybody says “time flies”. Or “time moves so tragically fast”. “Life is over in an instant”, they say. Now, take a person who fell in love, but was only able to spend two months with their Love before he/she died. Ask them about that time of their life, and they will say “I lived an eternity in those two months.”

The more love and enjoyment you add to your life, and the more you keep something worthwhile in focus, the more time assumes its proper speed: slow an memorable.

Short of falling in love, here are some quick ways to pleasantly slow time down:

  1. Add events that you look forward to at the end of the day. A hot date after work. Meeting up with friends. Or failing that, something that is just a little awesome. Some of my slowest, happiest days at work are when I bring my bike to work (so I can hit the trails at the local park when I get off).
  2. Schedule fun events in the future, so you have to wait on them. A vacation. A big purchase that you’re saving for.
  3. Get in the habit of regenerative breaking (purposeful slacking) during the day
  4. Keep adding unique experiences to your life. You need to keep cramming your memory with new stuff that matters, otherwise your brain starts glossing over everything because it’s all the same.
  5. Don’t forget to build in some pursuits where the passage of time works in your favor. Get into a positive-trending routine with your finances and your education. That way if you change nothing else for two years, at least you’ll have paid off a lot of debts and gotten much closer to your next degree…all without thinking consciously about it.

Remember: A wasted life passes beneath you in dull, mediocre instant. A life truly lived, with every moment cherished and growth pursued, moves more slowly and deliberately, one goal at a time.

13 Responses to “How to Speed Up and Slow Down Time at Work”

  1. Brandon says:

    Hey, I made a video presentation about the dangers associated with Adderall. I made the video after a hard fought victory over an addiction to this crazy medication. Anyway, I wanted to know if you would like to post it to this site or link it so the word can be spread! I have posted a link to your website below this video as well.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvjXqf3Yhn8

  2. Mike says:

    Hi Brandon,

    Great job with the video! And thanks for the link to my site. I’ll definitley post your video on the front page this coming Tuesday.

  3. Andrea says:

    Wow, this is so right on, I had my husband read it, he is soo supportive, but I have no idea how to explain to him what I am going through, and this sums it up!! Great article!

  4. Mike says:

    Thanks, Andrea!

  5. Matt says:

    Although I still take adderall for ADHD this article is helpful. It’s funny. When you actually have ADHD the slacker part happens when you take the adderall and when you don’t you’re either a loose helium balloon or a vegetable. That being said, the last part with the tips is great advice no matter who you are or what you do.

  6. jk says:

    What you’re talking about there is Einstein’s dreams, the theory of relativity; the movement of time. I was reading it the other night lingering on the language too long on Adderall when I actually had an insight that stuck with me after 2 nights of not sleeping and the following crash. I don’t know if you’ve read it; it’s pretty short but in every “time” he describes, the limitation of the self or the choices or way they looked back; only looked forward. In short, time was a terrible measure of their moments. In our reality, time, he says, is visible; is absolute.

    I had briefly quit earlier this year but now, I’m married to the idea of trying. This is why. You know when you take Adderall you’re so creative and like you said perfectly…absorbed in the minutae and end up looking back when you’re off and feeling like that might have helped at another time in my life because I needed to be absorbed in me. But now, it’s really fucking selfish. It’s a good way for me to never get what I want because I’m too busy reaaranging papers in a folder perfectly.
    It’s like Einstein called me out on my pretending to live my life or live it in my own space-time continuum. Yeah, he called that a lie and I’ve known that too.
    Sometimes Adderall made me feel so excited and inspired about the world and its possibilities but what does that moment mean anymore…it’s not’s that moment, it’s time to go; and while Adderall has always made me feel like I was going somewhere. One to many mornings awake, I started to feel numb.
    I turned 30 in September; I had a promise to myself to never be this age on Adderall and I tried to convince myself I was off and on not all the time. That could be said, but my breaks were at the most 3 weeks, a long tried, 3 months. This kills me. I built myself at college what I knew I could do. I could win a National Championship. And, I worked my ass off and loved it and was scheduled and happy and ready….ready to take over the world…the world of what I had known. I knew I wasn’t going to run for a living but I tried. It wasn’t me. It was isolated. It was all. So I did it and went to grad school and on graduation weekend when my whole friggin family showed that the Dean said my practice scores for the boards for the boards were in the top 5%. The insecurity…my intellect. I knew I had had breezed through those tests so i could get the hell out of the building. They didn’t count. But, I also know I sucked at their tests and most tests I’ve taken. And, I’d be damned if I was going to be one of the ones she would secretly love to see fail but deplore to our faculty. I knew I could be good at what I chose; it wasn’t showing on some bullshit test that I have now known are nothing close to even representing what it is I do.

    I had taken it once in college when I wrote my graduation speech. It was awesome. Adderall a boyfriend gave me. I made an appointment with a joke doctor and got some. It helped to go through boring books of multiple choice question after question but I did more questions so that even if I wouldn’t know them, maybe my memory would recognize something I had seen before. It worked. I stopped.

    I also lost myself in too crazy back to back relationships which made me now pick Adderall to help with the relationship and the rest of program. It was my undoing. And, the relationship that killed me asked me to marry him while six months later, he was like a different person. There we go…when the highs and lows of his depression and my Adderall resemble now the relationship that broke me for a while…

    and here i am in some ways much better…and no better. i love my job;. and i need to say if i can to myself and to someone one so i can hold myself to something here. but, i couldn’t this past week because my two days off…i stayed up and couldn’t control what i had felt was once a choice.

    That’s my undoing. I used to have so much control of my life, then I lost it; but I miss it. I don’t want to be that person I was; but I want to be able to fucking go to the gym everyday; have a neat place, send off poems I’ve worked on all over the place. I want to start. I’ve wanted to go to Med School And, you know, Adderall…it made me make an excuse to try some other things….why…because I was/am fucking scared. It all comes back to what I felt I couldn’t do. But, I know I can do it. And, if I really want to live the life I feel oh so strong about…I know it will never happen over Adderall. I want to be an absolute life. absolutely living it; without feeling like I’d miss something being my fun self at the bar, the lounge, the lunch table. Maybe the tolerance goes further than the chemical. You get numb to the needs, too…right, it’s not so real.

    This week has been telling me its time. Before, I wanted to see if I could find a docter to help wean me off…c’mon are you kidding? Quit placing in someone else’s time to put off yours.

    I woke up this morning; my Mom called immediately which made me know something was wrong.
    My uncle whom I love so much; who means light and life to me, had a headache this morning; they called the ambulance, he got in. He had a hemorrhage on the way to the hospital. Right now, he’s on a vent, in a coma, and all of us nps and mds in my family know what this means…and then when know what it means in another.
    I’m hoping

    and the only way to help my uncle is heed his advice and live like he does, and wants everyone to have…and i do to.

    i googled…”how to get off adderall” knowing i’d get bunch of drugsites and parent shit. thank you so much for being here. i have been looking for something like this. and, i thought i was the only one who dealt with this; i hid it well. honestly and honesty. I’m so here’s to hope.

  7. Ganic says:

    This article is the first one, which actually hits my own opinion to 100%! To my own, the relationship between addys and time changes are exactly like that article

  8. Rahmat says:

    He said it is still He said it is still little bit of a cut of what he was mkanig which is $72 000 a year, that’s $6000 a month.So if he have income of $450 a day from only one agent every day thats $13 500 which is over double of what he was mkanig before.Than if he have 150 islands that bring $ 100 each would be $15 000 a month profit. So they gave $ 1500 a month in compassion. divide by 30 days is $50. which one agent is mkanig a day and he mention that they have several agents.You got it? Was this answer helpful?

  9. That’s not just the best answer. It’s the bestest answer!

  10. Alright alright alright that’s exactly what I needed!

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