Philosophy

I'm nearly four years into my challenge of hacking my brain to be successful at working remote with Attention Deficit Disorder. I've struggled with trying to understand my behaviors and challenge myself to change incrementely over time. There's one repeated concept that always comes up in my practice - my past experiences both help and hinder my progress. The key is being able to experience life as a beginner. Beginners have a great platform to learn knew things. First off they realize they have a set of things they need and want to learn. There is motivation to better yourself and usually a fairly well defined place to gain the knowledge from. Beginners have (or will quickly) admit they don't have all the answers. Those of us with experience trying to learn new things may think we understand things well enough. We're not open to seeing things as a whole. ...

Back in the mid 1980s there was a kids' TV Game Show called "Double Dare" on the Nickelodeon channel. We didn't have cable TV but at some point it started to air on regular television. Our local TV station even aired an episode early in the morning before school at 6:30am. The show format was fairly simple. One part were standard panel-type questions with answers gaining you points. Sometimes your team would have to perform "physical challenges" which usually involved something messy - like digging through a small pool of pizza sauce looking for a flag. The team with the most points at the end got to go through an obstacle course for sixty seconds. Collecting flags throughout the course got you more money and prizes to take home. ...

We all do it - look back at the previous year somewhere around January 1st. We total up what we've accomplished in that one year and determine if it was a success or it sucked. Variables like births, deaths, accidents, career changes, friendships, personal health, and travel all seem to be popular indicators of success or suck. The reality is you should really stop looking at your past as increments of one year advances. ...

A lot of my friends on Instagram are also my friends on Facebook. They, like myself, tend to cross-post photos from Instagram onto Facebook and Twitter. I noticed a funny effect from that cross-posting - you end up missing a lot of posts from your friends. Mindless scrolling. We all do it. Facebook was made for it as well as Instagram. Your brain is bored so you grab your phone and start scrolling through posts. I think we're sort of zombies when this mode clicks in. I usually end up snapping out of that zombie scrolling mode when I see posts I've already remember seeing. Semi-conciously I feel I've reached the end of any content that I may want to read or view. ...

Bicycling is my meditation. I use it as part of my toolset to calm my brain and to train my mind to take in a lot of input and focus on important things. I recently realized that there's a moment that doesn't happen very often when biking. It sometimes takes an entire summer for me to have it occur. I call it the Bicycler's Quiet. Bicycler's Quiet is the sudden loss of wind noise in your ears when you're cycling with the wind. It doesn't happen very often because you need to be cycling at roughly the same speed and direction of the wind. Biking on days with very little to no wind doesn't do it because your movement creates wind across your ears. ...

I turn 37 today. It's been an amazing journey through life so far and I can't wait to see where the next 37+ years lead me. In the past five years alone things have changed so much. I finished my master's degree, we got a place "up north" for the weekends and met so many fun people, I've had amazing jobs doing what I love - software development, and I've had the opportunity to speak at a number of conferences about the things I've done. I've also learned a lot about myself listening to my brain and figuring out this thing called ADD/ADHD. ...

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. ...

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. ...

Minutes can make a difference. This is something I quickly discovered early on when I started working remote. The granularity of a usable block of time was much bigger when I worked in an office and had a 20 minute commute each way. Unconsciously I believe I felt 15 minutes was the smallest unit of time I could use to create or do something effective. Since I started working remote, I've discovered that unit of time has decreased to something even smaller which is closer to five minutes. ...

Sometimes the hardest part of being a teacher is figuring out what your students DON'T know. It's relatively easy to teach a subject to an entire group when you're following a prescribed curriculum. The problem comes when the teacher doesn't realize everyone is learning at a different rate or figuring out what some students may already know. Maybe the needed skill is empathy - knowing when students are lost/misdirected - and to foster less resistance to ask questions. ...