I can do a lot of things. Proposing a time to meet is not one of them.
Ask me to build a company supporting neurodivergent families from scratch? Sure. Suggest a time that works for a coffee? Absolutely not. And the strange thing is, it stays difficult even when the person we most want to meet is the one asking.
If this resonates, you are not imagining it. For a lot of neurodivergent people, the seemingly simple task of finding a mutually available slot, committing to it, and holding it in your head without anxiety is genuinely hard. It is not a matter of effort or organisation or wanting to connect. The brain just does not process time and forward-planning in the same way. That gap between intention and action is real, and it is worth talking about honestly.
Every System We Have Tried
Over the years I have tried every strategy going to get better at this.
First came the old-school paper diary, which had a certain charm but got lost, ignored, or scribbled into illegibility within weeks. Then a wall calendar, which felt promising: large, visual, impossible to misplace. That helped for a while. But life is rarely contained to one room, and a calendar you can only consult at home has obvious limits.
Now I have gone full tech, with everything synced across phone, laptop, and Google Calendar. We have even connected an AI assistant to it, so it can suggest available times and send out invites. The hope was that removing as many of the manual steps as possible would reduce the friction that turns ‘let’s find a time’ into ‘let’s never speak again’.
Each stage felt like progress. And each stage revealed a new layer of the problem.
The Moment That Actually Changed Things
Connecting an AI calendar assistant to handle the scheduling process has been a genuine breakthrough.
Previously, ‘let’s find a time to chat’ was basically a polite way of saying goodbye forever. The AI can now suggest available slots, draft the invite, and send it, which removes the part of the process that felt most impossible: the moment of having to hold multiple people’s schedules in your head and commit to a specific time under social pressure.
For neurodivergent people, that moment of commitment can carry a disproportionate cognitive and emotional weight. Automating it does not make you less capable. It means you have found a tool that works with how your brain is wired, rather than against it. That matters.
A useful next step, if calendaring is a persistent sticking point, is to look at scheduling tools that let others book directly into your availability. Removing the back-and-forth entirely can make a real difference.
When the System Still Is Not Enough
Here is the honest part: even with all of that in place, the anxiety does not always disappear.
Lying awake at 2am thinking ‘have I double-booked Thursday?’ is still a familiar experience. The tools help. They reduce the chaos and create structure that would not otherwise exist. But the underlying relationship with time, the difficulty holding a mental map of the week ahead, the fear of having let someone down without realising it, that does not vanish because you have a well-organised calendar.
That is not a failure of the system or of the person using it. It is a reminder that tools can support a neurodivergent brain, but they work best alongside self-awareness, realistic expectations, and, where possible, other people who understand why scheduling might need to be handled differently.
Protect your energy by building in buffer time around commitments, and by being honest with the people you meet with about how you manage your diary. Most people respond well when you explain what works for you.
What Works for You?
We are genuinely asking.
Scheduling systems are not one-size-fits-all, and the neurodivergent community has come up with some genuinely creative approaches that no productivity guru has ever thought to put in a book. Paper diaries, wall planners, shared calendars, AI tools, body-doubling accountability, or simply telling someone else ‘please just pick a time and I will show up’: all of these may work depending on the person and the season of life they are in.
If you have found something that helps, we would love to hear about it in the comments. And if you are still in the ‘goodbye forever’ stage of scheduling, that is understandable too. You are not alone in it, and there are options worth trying. Start with whatever removes the most steps between intention and actually getting it in the diary.
