Folks, we have reached peak 2025. Just when I thought we’d run out of ways to complicate workers’ compensation, along comes “time blindness” – a condition that apparently makes chronic lateness a medical condition rather than what my father would have called “a lack of respect for other people’s time.”
According to the latest from the medical community, time blindness (or “time agnosia” for those who prefer their conditions with a side of Latin) is a legitimate executive function issue that affects a person’s ability to estimate how long tasks take. It’s commonly associated with ADHD, autism, OCD, and a host of other conditions. In other words, it has the potential to become the Swiss Army knife of workers’ compensation claims.
Picture this: John from shipping is chronically late. Not just occasionally tardy—we’re talking Olympic-level tardiness. He misses meetings, shows up halfway through his shift, and once arrived at the company Christmas party just as they were turning off the lights. Previously, John would have been written up, counseled, and eventually shown the door. But no! John has just been diagnosed with time blindness.
Now John’s habitual lateness isn’t grounds for termination—it’s a disability requiring reasonable accommodation. And when John gets fired anyway (because even the most patient employer has limits), suddenly we have a discrimination claim, a wrongful termination suit, and—here’s where it gets interesting for our industry—a stress-induced workers’ compensation claim because the “hostile work environment” exacerbated his condition.
Let’s say we accept time blindness as a legitimate disability requiring workplace accommodations. What exactly would those accommodations look like? Personal timekeepers? Elimination of all deadlines? A workplace buddy system where someone follows you around saying, “It’s been five minutes since you started that task, just so you know”?
That last example might sound ludicrous, but it is not unprecedented. Celebrations over ancient Roman triumphs would often include a slave whispering “Remember thou art mortal” into the ears of a conquering leader. A scene, by the way, expertly recreated in the movie “History of the World, Part I”. But I digress…
Dr. Mauran Sivananthan from Henry Ford Health suggests using timers and creating consistent routines. That’s reasonable enough, until you realize that in the workers’ compensation world, “reasonable” is just the starting point for negotiations. Before you know it, we’ll be installing atomic clocks in every cubicle and hiring professional chronologists as job coaches.
And here’s the kicker: if time blindness is indeed linked to ADHD, autism, OCD, depression, anxiety, Parkinson’s, and multiple sclerosis, we’re talking about a significant portion of the workforce. The Americans with Disabilities Act could get a whole lot more interesting.
But wait, there’s more! (There always is in workers’ comp.) What happens when an employee develops time blindness as a result of a workplace injury? Say someone suffers a traumatic brain injury on the job – TBIs are listed as one of the causes of time blindness. Now their inability to show up on time isn’t just a disability issue; it’s a workers’ compensation issue.
Or consider the employee who claims their workplace-induced anxiety has manifested as time blindness. They were always punctual before that stressful merger, but now they can’t estimate how long it takes to drive to work. Is that compensable? In some states, it probably already is.
How does an employer defend against a time blindness claim? Request surveillance to prove the employee can, in fact, tell time? Demand they submit to a “temporal perception examination”? Hire an expert witness to testify that arriving two hours late to a deposition is evidence of malingering rather than a medical condition?
Of course, if they are two hours late to their deposition, maybe we just discovered the way to defend these claims…
The article mentions that time blindness isn’t even in the DSM-5 as a standalone diagnosis. But since when has that stopped anyone? We’ve been dealing with “subjective complaints of pain” in workers’ comp for decades. At least pain generally doesn’t make you miss your doctor’s appointment.
Look, I’m not unsympathetic to people with genuine executive function disorders. ADHD is real, autism is real, and the challenges they present in the workplace are real. But I’ve also been in this industry long enough to know that today’s emerging medical condition just might be tomorrow’s go-to claim enhancer.
Time blindness may be a legitimate issue for some people, but in the workers’ compensation world, it’s could become very expensive very quickly. Because once we start compensating people for being unable to estimate time, where exactly do we draw the line?
Do we compensate for “email blindness”—the inability to see important messages in your inbox? “Meeting amnesia”—forgetting what was discussed five minutes after leaving the conference room? “Deadline dyslexia”—consistently misreading project due dates?
If we start that, someone owes me a ton of past due benefits.
The experts recommend using timers, creating routines, and breaking tasks into smaller chunks. You know what else works? Accountability. Consequences. But I suppose that’s too old-fashioned for 2025.
If you’ll excuse me, I need to go set seventeen alarms to make sure I file this article on time. After all, I meant to get this article finished a week ago, but somehow the time just got by me.
It would be quite impressive if we were able to develop some sort of time-keeping device. Imagine this: it would make a beeping sound, or even vibrate, at a predetermined time. It would solve everything!
This was an excellent article and great argument for accountability versus creating unnecessary and questionable medical terminology. I imagine we might all be “time blind” were it not for ancient technology.
I went from government to private sector. In government, the customer always came first so if I was late to a meeting because I was on the line or on the phone with a customer (taxpayer), it was perfectly excusable. I went back to private sector and had a micromanaging boss who would just lose it if I was 2 minutes late to a meeting because I was wrapping up a phone call.
She finally began coming to me to “round me up” before meetings.
Drove me completely bonkers. Finally left the company. In retrospect, perhaps I should have filed the workers’ compensation claim. 🥴