The Path
2 February 2024
This is part of a series:
Mine was the classic American story of the ’93 baby: a big imagination, decent grades, and ADHD. I always did fine in school, but I struggled to engage with the material in a deep and meaningful way. The feeling carried into my personal endeavors as well, never able to stay with one thing very long and always jumping to the next big idea. I could achieve certain milestones with fits and spurts of energy, but the idea of some passion taking hold for more than a few months was inconceivable. Even things I loved doing, playing guitar or reading, lay dormant for long stretches of time over the years. I was able to survive college and find a line of work that suited me well, programming backend services for web and mobile applications. This was a complete shift for me mentally, realizing that to do well in the world of software I would have to approach every day with a curious mindset and try to learn something. It required trying new things, failing a lot, and making mistakes. You look forward to tomorrow hopefully, knowing that you’ll be better off for what you’ve done today.
It’s the path, the process, the way, known by a million other names. Religions the world over have sketched its outline, philosophers have mulled over it since the dawn of civilization, and self help books have been hawking it since the ‘60s.
Working at the same thing consistently brings me great joy, but during the pandemic I hit an inflection point with my mental health that hindered my ability to do this. Shifting to work from home completely saw all of my routines break down, so I went through a year of cognitive behavioral therapy to untie some of the knots that had spawned in my mind. Doc was a cool cat and we had a ton of great discussion around mindfulness, setting expectations, and establishing some sort of system to balance working consistently on personal projects with life’s constant barrage of priorities.
There’s a lot of overlap with productivity culture when you start looking for a solution for this particular issue. It’s clearly a complex problem, one with no unified solution and the best we can do is find something that works for our personal situation. I leaned on a book that Doc recommended, The Adult ADHD toolkit, and the works of Cal Newport to develop my system. I’ll walk through the system in full in subsequent posts, but here’s a high level view of it.
The goals I wanted to achieve with my design:
- make regular incremental progress towards goals
- spend more time doing things that generate true fulfillment, instead of things that just give a quick hit of dopamine
- build, change, and break habits
- break out of stale routines
- create written records of lessons learned and strategies applied while working on a project
- make something easy to use with some elements of gamification so that it sticks
After a lot of attempts and iteration, I realized a good system for me must:
- handle scheduling of tasks
- have regular planning and reflection
- track stepwise progress towards long term goals
- support organized note taking
I started managing my time this way actively in 2021, and have been using it consistently since. I’ve felt incredibly engaged and fulfilled; each day feels like a step forward.