Organizing time

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People always tell me that I HAVE to be able to organize my time, but I've never ever in my life have been able to follow specific schedules I've made out for myself. It's like I have to focus on one thing at a time and not be stressed by any time restrictions. I know autistic people -- myself included -- like to follow routines, but not in this way; only the things that come naturally, like certain habits I have, but I can't just decide on following a schedule and go through with it for a significant amount of time.

What do you say?

Oh time management. Yuck.

I'm good at managing my time - I know what needs to be done, and do it when it needs to be done. I know how much I can take on and try not to take on too much because I know that if that happens I will get overloaded and not manage anything.

I like deadlines. Proper, concrete, deadlines. They help me prioritise the things I need/want to do.

The problems for me come when I have organised my time well, and then someone throws other stuff at me to do. Bring on meltdown, why don't you. I'm so close to the edge today with people doing this to me that you wouldn't believe it.

I don't like "fluffy" deadlines - the kind that people seemingly randomly pick out of the air because they want you do something by a particular time, but you know that there is no need for it to *really* be done by that time, there will be no knock on effect if it isn't.

I can't set myself arbitrary deadlines either. Like if there is something I want to do, that doesn't have a knock on effect for anyone or anything else, it'll get done when I'm ready and have enough energy resource to do it. If I randomly pick a date to do it by then I'll know it's a random and not real so why bother with that in the first place????

I get stuff done by the time it needs to be done by. Always.

My routine is a chain of events, not a timetable. Works fine, so long as you're careful of being late for things. I've been thinking of using a music playlist as a clock, which would be much "softer" and circumvent most of my issues with clocks.