Are you good at telling how much time has passed?

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For example: Let's say you're waiting at a bus stop with no watch, phone or clock. If someone asks how long you've been waiting for the bus, do you know whether you've been waiting for 15 minutes versus 20 minutes? Can you remember if it's been 4 or 5 months since your last haircut? I have a poor sense of time. I suspect this is autism related.

I have a very poor sense of time, at whatever scale. For example, it would be very common for me to look outside and be surprised that it has got dark, because I don't realise how long I have been engrossed in a special interest, or even to see no leaves on the trees and need to think for a moment whether it is late autumn or early spring (when it snowed a couple of weeks ago, I really had to rack my brain to decide whether Xmas had happened yet or not.) Likewise with less common events - I find it hard to know whether I had a conversation with a friend only yesterday or several weeks ago, and have great difficulty pinpointing what age I was when describing events in my life.

To what extent this might be autism related, I don't know; the human perception of time and memory are notoriously subjective things (for example; I'm old enough that I can confirm just how much faster the years seem to pass as I get older, which seems to be a common experience for all people as they age.) However, I can think of a few common autistic traits which might affect our time perception:

- Hyperfocus/Dissociation: It's common for anybody to lose track of time when doing something they enjoy or when reflecting on their inner thoughts, but autistic people may be more prone to "zone out" in this way.

- Need for routines: The more similar each day is, the more difficult it would be to tell one day apart from any other, making it harder to sort our memories into the right time order.

- Social isolation: Might give the subjective experience of fewer "events" happening which would mark the passing of time.

- Alexithymia: For those of us who struggle to identify our feelings, our memories might be "recorded" with less emotional context, so that the memories are less "connected" with other memories which would give us clues about when they happened.

The above wouldn't necessarily mean that our time perception is intrinsically different, just that we might be more likely to be in states of mind or live a lifestyle where the passage of time would be less obvious to us. It's certainly an interesting question, as I do feel that I live somewhat "outside of time" compared to most people around me.

Sorry but this is not a serious post , there is a fictional condition called Temporal Dysplasia that a character in Stitchers has , it 'sort' of presents like Aspergers

I have a poor sense of time. In my case it's an autism thing.

Hit or miss.

It's a kind of hobby of mine to guess the time without looking at the clock. Sometimes I hit it almost on the minute, sometimes I'm off by 30 minutes. All in all I think I'm on an NT average in this aspect.

Right now I was 25 minutes off.

When I practice guessing the time or how much time has passed and then compare my results to the actual clock, I can become very accurate. It's like I'm making a guess, but it turns out to be highly accurate. However when I don't practice, I doubt I'm much different than average accuracy. I used to use this at work in the lab. I also have done this with the indoor and outdoor temperatures. When I practice guessing, over time I can get to be accurate to within 1-2 degrees Fahrenheit. Oddly, I can generally guess the outdoor temperature to the same accuracy even when I'm inside - I think it must be from the temperature differences I can feel from room-to-room. But when I don't practice with the temperature, I can be off quite a bit.

I can tell by the hour, for the most part... Not by the minute. I could probably guess within a half hour.

During the day, I'm average, but at night, I am incredible. I can wake myself up at any time of night I want to, and I'll be 15 minutes earlier than the time I needed to wake up. Never set an alarm.

I've usually got little faith in my track of time, because I've often got absorbed in an activity and then looked up to find it's much later than I thought and I've missed some deadline or other. Beyond that situation I don't know how well I can guess how much time has elapsed. When I've checked, it's often been quite good if I'm not deeply focussed on anything. Assuming hyperfocus is essentially enjoyable, maybe it's just a result of the common truism that time flies when you're having fun and drags when you're bored. Knowing that my track of time can be fallible, for whatever reason, I prefer not to trust it, and I set alarms instead.

I've heard that people can be hypnotised to wake up at a particular time, and if that works I wonder why people need clocks.

No, I'm not good at it at all. Just earlier today it felt like I had been up for at least an hour and a half, but it hadn't even been 40 minutes.

I am unaware of how to guess accurately what time it is without a clock/timer most days...this includes in my memory. I have often tried to cram too many tasks into a time slot and think I'd give myself enough time...sigh.