ADHD on The Dangling Pointer

Always on the cusp of something

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 16:52:44 +0000

That gap between the magic I know I can reach and how often it escapes me — that’s the hardest part of living in my brain.

Reminders, ADHD, and Siri

Thu, 22 Dec 2022 13:17:42 +0000

I heavily rely upon Siri (and Google Home sometimes) to set reminders for myself. I have ADHD. I have hundreds of thoughts flying through my brain throughout the day, all at the same priority and speed. Once in a while, I catch onto something that I need to remember. ADHD brain says “oh hey, it’s important, there’s no way you’ll forget it!” - where my mindful brain says “lol, you’ve already forgotten it, jerkface!”.

When my brain goes on a little adventure

Mon, 28 Dec 2020 20:25:22 +0000

It me.

What a funny (and accurate) way of describing the mental float during conversations when my ADHD is ramped up. This cracks me up! I feel like there should be some background sound effects with this. A nice animated parallax effect would finish it off. 🤪

A letter from your ADHD friend or family member

Sun, 28 Jun 2020 21:47:16 +0000

I worry a lot. Let me rephrase that - I worry often. Additively I think my worry amount is low, as if there were any way to measure worry definitively. Having Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, to me, shatters my day into so many small moments of time. When I worry about something, it doesn't last long because my brain is moving onto some other concern or input. What do I worry most about? People and relationships.

The Impact of Sixty Seconds as a Kid

Sat, 15 Feb 2020 01:06:52 +0000

I have memories from my childhood but most of them are fragmented with how my ADHD brain works. There have been plenty of times talking with family about things that happened when I was young and I have no memory of it. I suppose my crappy attention & focus made it hard to store contiguous memories.

There are some things that are very clear in my head, though. One of those clear memories is of my dad and it lasted exactly 60 seconds.

Mondays through the Eyes of ADHD

Mon, 14 Aug 2017 19:25:29 +0000

Vacuum the Brain with Morning Pages

Thu, 20 Jul 2017 12:42:04 +0000

I've blogged a lot about my struggles with attention and focus over the years since I started working remote. I continue to find tools and adjust my behaviors tiny bits at a time to help align me with the world I work in. I've been doing mindful meditation daily, usually in the morning, to help calm the brain and prepare for the day.

Just yesterday I was introduced to a fun practice called Morning Pages to help organize my thoughts in the morning to start the day. Julia Cameron, author of The Artist's Way, uses morning pages to spill out thoughts and ideas from her head onto three pages of paper. The daily practice involves stream-of-consciousness writing (or commonly called free writing) three full pages of handwritten text. Topic is unimportant - it's whatever comes to mind. Julia says some of her students call it "mourning pages" as it usually turns into a bitch session.

Being Mindful for 122 Days

Sat, 20 May 2017 13:44:13 +0000

It's been nearly four years since I started the journey of understanding how my attention & focus work. Along the way I've learned several things that have been key factors in developing tools to modify my behaviors to perform better.

Most importantly any tools/habits you use or create are ephemeral. The tool may or may not work for you. Maybe the tool works for you for a couple months but then it becomes a hinderance. Possibly even the tool feels like it has always worked but something lets you understand it never really did help. The key thing to realize is your toolbox will and should continually change with you over time. No matter what people say you're a continually changing person - even old dogs learn new tricks. It's okay to throw things out and to try new things.

Don't try to change too much too quickly. This is probably just as important as the first key but it's not very obvious until you start trying new things. If you try to change too many things or switch a habit drastically it's much easier to abandon when you don't feel immediate successes. Instead try to incrementally change towards something longer term.

I've always wanted to have a meditation practice and make it part of my daily regimen. I felt it was the one missing piece to my daily routine with exercise that could help curb some of the ADHD symptoms. The problem was I didn't know where to get started and was really afraid of being a failure. I've always had a very open heart and mind when it comes to spirituality - if I couldn't "get" meditation then that would make me question a lot of things. I realized that my biggest fear was based upon my perception of how meditation can work and look.

Mindfulness meditation is one of the many ways you can practice meditation. Specifically it focuses your mind on being present in the moment - to be aware of what you're doing but not getting overwhelmed or misdirected by emotions, memories, and other inputs. My husband started meditating with the Calm iOS app to help with his challenges with anxiety. I learned that meditation doesn't require hours of effort every day and having an app on my phone made the barrier to entry super low. It also helped that he broke the ice by starting the practice and the two of us support each other with motivation to try to get a session in every day.

Flash Talk: Working Remote Saved my Life

Thu, 27 Apr 2017 00:56:02 +0000

Every year at Automattic's Grand Meetup we're required to give a flash talk of up to four minutes on any topic. This past year I gave mine on a subject related to my post "How Working Remote (Probably) Saved My Life". I'm actually developing a much longer talk to dive deeper into what's been involved with my successes and failures. Until then, here's my flash talk for your enjoyment.

[wpvideo M5HpGRy1]

Focus & The Non-Permanence of Pencils

Tue, 07 Feb 2017 15:11:16 +0000

I've been trying to brainstorm ideas on paper lately before committing to an approach on how to solve a problem. For some reason I wasn't getting a ton of satisfaction switching back to pen & paper - it wasn't helping my focus. Then I realized something from my days in school. I used to prefer pencil over pen because of the feel of the graphite on the paper and the non-permanence it implies.

Conferences & My ADD Brain

Sun, 23 Oct 2016 16:10:17 +0000

I drafted this post with an idea that I wanted to apologize to all the people I've met at conferences and I do not recognize them the next time we meet. It's especially embarrassing when I've had conversations online with them and didn't connect to two realities. The problem lies with how my brain works and how Attention Deficit Disorder can skew memories and how I process things.

Frequently when I meet people I've forgotten their names within seconds. I try to say their name over again and to reinforce the memory of meeting them with some facial features or bits about what they work on. This process works well in the beginning of most events but within a few hours to a second day or more, I'm toast.

I am a procrastinator.

Fri, 12 Aug 2016 14:11:48 +0000

I have always believed I was a procrastinator. I tend to put difficult tasks off until when they are due. I always believed it was the pressure of the deadline that forced me to complete the task. College gave me a series of structured deadlines to learn new things. Procrastination can also add undue stress onto your system. Over time it will make you feel like you're stupid and can't get anything done. ADHD and procrastination seem to go hand in hand as well.

Just Get Started

Thu, 16 Jun 2016 13:10:29 +0000

I tend to set myself up for defeat with how my brain works when trying to accomplish a task. I overthink things.

When I pull a task from my list of things to do a process starts in my head. I visualize the task and then try to figure out what the solution is and how it looks at the end. Smaller tasks with a clear goal seem to start just fine. Tasks that are a bit more nebulous or aren't clear how to do everything end up stalling. I end up wasting time misdirecting myself so I don't have to face the fact that I don't have an immediate solution.

How Working Remote (Probably) Saved My Life

Fri, 25 Mar 2016 20:04:40 +0000

Before Working Remote

In July 2013 I started working remote at Automattic working on the WordPress for iOS app. I was pretty happy with my life at that time and the transition to the new job was not for reasons of disliking my previous job. In fact I loved working for Red Arrow Labs in Milwaukee and it was incredibly hard leaving them. I only left Red Arrow because it felt like Automattic was my unicorn of jobs and I had stumbled upon it by sheer luck. It turns out that I really wasn't entirely happy with how things were going in my life at the time even though the job was great.

Pinning Safari Tabs for Mental Focus

Tue, 01 Dec 2015 13:51:27 +0000

Have you heard about pinning tabs in Safari? If you have Mac OS X El Capitan then you have Safari 9 which includes tab pinning. From Apple's Support documentation:

Pin Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Gmail, or any other website you visit frequently throughout the day. Pinned Sites stay put on the left side of your tab bar so you can easily get to them at any time.

I frequently keep several tabs open on my work computer - the three Gmail instances I'm in and WordPress.com's Reader. Battling with my attention requires me to analyze my behaviors and continuously adapt to prevent problems. I recently discovered I frequently flip back over to Safari to look for the unread count in the tab titles and will derail my current thought process to read the email. My solution? Pinned tabs.

Headphones & Attention

Fri, 13 Nov 2015 01:50:33 +0000

When I worked in an office headphones were a requirement for me. I absolutely needed them to focus. I really don't use headphones all that often anymore since I started working remote 2 1/2 years ago. Listening to music over decent speakers seemed to be enough. Lately I'm discovering I missed the power behind having the sound close to your head.

The past two weeks I've been using my headphones again to help with my attention & focus in the afternoons. My mornings start with using my treadmill under my desk to walk and work. Mid-day when I find my brain wandering, I stop working and do some sort of exercise. Now in the afternoons I'm finding putting on the noise-canceling headphones gives me the boost to wrap up the work for the day.

Keeping Myself Organized Using Trello

Sun, 08 Nov 2015 04:07:17 +0000

My system for helping keep my brain focused during the workday is a system of lists in a note-taking program like Evernote or Simplenote. Every time I encounter an e-mail, talk to a coworker about something, or get assigned a pull request to review I turn that into a checkbox item. If I don't get to an item in a day, those empty checkbox items get moved to the next day (or week). The system isn't without faults but it seems to work. The only issue with the checkboxes is they don't portray status of longer-running tasks.

The Fear of Missing Out

Wed, 12 Aug 2015 19:59:51 +0000

Working for a 100% distributed company presents a number of benefits as well as challenges. One of those challenges is the fear of missing out or FoMO. It is a real thing.

The Fear of Missing Out is the emotional stress we can experience when we feel like things that should be important to us are occurring without our observance or involvement. Social media plays an important role in this as we experience other people's involvement in activities that portray a perceived positive impact on their well-being. Even though we know that the world isn't as rosy as is portrayed through these sites, we feel a tinge of jealous a number of times.

Biggest Lie To Your ADHD Self

Wed, 15 Jul 2015 12:35:54 +0000

Most of my journey the past couple of years with coping with attention problems is increasing my self-awareness. I am my own obstacle and I must hack my own consciousness to work the way I need it to.

It's easy to slip into old habits and totally forget the tools you've put in place. All it takes is one of those well-known "ooh shiny" moments and you're off track for an hour reading about nuclear testing instead of solving the problem for work.

My Signal-to-Noise Ratio

Tue, 05 May 2015 17:34:57 +0000

I've mentioned before on this site and other places that I have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and that I've been doing a lot to manage it. I didn't really connect the dots until I started working remote for Automattic almost two years ago. It's a continual process for me and I'm continuing to make adjustments over time to combat it. I have good days and I have bad days.

Walking While Working - Another Step For Focus

Tue, 24 Feb 2015 15:14:55 +0000

Walking While You Work

I'm not going to link to any articles or research about the benefits of walking while you work. I've been standing at my desk since I started working at home and to me this is the next progression. I have ADHD and I'm always trying to find ways to hack my brain. I decided to get in on the treadmill desk game.

The First Steps

A couple months back I ended up buying a cheapie treadmill on Amazon to experiment with walking while working. I used it a couple of times with some success but I ultimately felt it didn't provide much help for my focus. I kept doing research to determine what the issue was and spent time observing myself during a walking session with it. I was surprised it wasn't obvious why I didn't like this experiment.

I like Shiny Things

Thu, 10 Apr 2014 11:56:59 +0000

Last week I was having a discussion with my coworkers about how I think someone should feel when viewing/interacting with their site stats in the WordPress world. I made a list of things I'd expect and one of them I wrote down was definitely inspired by my personality:

https://twitter.com/gregibrown/status/452133773727899648

I do really like shiny things. Okay maybe part of it is attention-related but in general I like things that stand out. Why have stuff that's dull and drab when it perform the same function but LOOK AWESOME?

My Attention So Far

Sat, 05 Apr 2014 15:27:04 +0000

In the recent past I blogged about my trials and tribulations with my experiences with ADHD working at Automattic. I figured it was time to give a follow up on how things are going!

Back in October last year I started on a medication called Vyvanse to help me cope with the problems that ADHD had been presenting. My ultimate goal with the medication trial was to keep it just that - a trial. I've lived with the spastic brain patterns all my life and I just wanted a few months of clarity so I knew what to work towards. Late February, I decided to take myself off the medication.

Paying Attention at Automattic

Thu, 31 Oct 2013 13:48:44 +0000

All of my teen and adult life I realized that I perceive the world a little differently than most. I’d like to think I’m a smart guy but I never did very well in high school on exams especially for topics that weren’t science/math/computer related. I couldn’t read textbooks very well; my eyes would gloss over the details and I’d realize after reading a page I retained none of it. I hated research papers the most. In my early teens I discovered electronic music (at the time everything was called techno) and I realized listening to it while doing homework would keep that part of my brain busy so I could somewhat focus. I never put a name to the condition and just moved forward.