Rhythms of Focus

Far too often we operate under the assumption that "pushing" ourselves and "forcing" ourselves to do something are the same thing. Both can definitely be difficult, but the end results are vastly different.

When we put effort into something, we have chosen to do it, we have agency over the decision.

When we force ourselves, however, we lose our agency and are usually left with a combination of guilt, shame, and anger.

Effort gives us the option to show up, meet ourselves exactly where we are, and build trust in ourselves over time to do things consistently.

Force injures our relationship with ourselves and creates a sense of distrust.

In today’s episode, we walk through the difference between effort and force, what each one leaves behind, and why the costlier one can feel like the virtuous one.

Previous Episode Referenced: Rhythms of Focus Episode 26 - The Trouble Isn't Interest, It's Force

Transcript

There's something in that last sentence that we need to pay attention to. It's this idea of, am I failing at this because I still have to push?

Underneath that question is the assumption that many of us hold, which is that pushing and forcing are the same thing.

They're not, and the difference between them may be the difference between a practice that grows and one that wears us down.

Effort is chosen exertion. It's our being moving through the work, a channel that deepens with use. That is why a practice running on effort tends to cost us less over time rather than more.

Force is exertion applied against a channel rather than through it. It hurts or injures our sense of confidence in ourselves. It's the push that arrives with shame behind it or the deadline that we're waiting for because we can't seem to engage work otherwise.

Effort deepens a channel, engages us and works with our sense of trust in ourselves, while force injures it. And injured often enough, we might even feel scarred.

Particularly with a long habit of these forced ways of working, we find trouble. This single forced session is this injury that, that mends.

Years of forcing leave the scar tissue, which is why some of us show up to work unable to feel trust in ourselves at all. So the practice we need to work with turns away from the injury, not exertion.

Hard work is hard. Hard work is emotional work. There are mornings that writing doesn't show up. It doesn't work with us for whatever reason.

And we can sit there for a while. We can be there in that visit. Being with the feeling itself is the labor, not distracting ourselves in the meantime, engaging that feeling to whatever degree feels caring to ourselves.

Then what is the working made of?

We don't use force because we are weak or foolish. We use it because it has, in fact, worked well enough for us to use it again.

The deadline did get the report written. Shame did get us off the sofa. Have a listen to episode twenty-six for a fuller look at those methods and what each of them tells us about ourselves in that using.

In this way, force half-works, but there's another way to approach things.

In the community recently this came up. Our culture tends to hand us these lines ready-made, like no pain, no gain, no fight, no glory, life begins at the end of your comfort zone.

She really worked hard on this. She deserves the promotion. Underneath these sits one motif, that exertion is value and breaking ourselves for a goal is a form of piety. To sacrifice is to be good.

But that distinction between force and exertion is important here. What that equation of sacrifice honors is not effort. Effort is being, moving through work, a channel that deepens it. Sometimes we even find ourselves more engaged and even enlivened.

What the equation wrongly honors is the damage. The claim is not, "I worked, therefore it counted." It was, "I, I was hurt, therefore it counted." And maybe this is why that voice in the back of mind says, "This is unhealthy," it feels faint. It's not competing with a preference, it's competing with a virtue.

We can be mid-session aware that other matters are going untended. We've not gotten up in hours. We register this, if at all, at the edge of attention, and we don't stop.

For those of us who spend a good deal of the week in shiny distractions or on the sofa with the project sitting untouched across the room, those times of pain offer absolution, if you will.

The forced session is not only productive, it seems to redeem the days that weren't. You know, it's, "This is unhealthy, but look at me. Look at how hard I'm working now."

Force now seems to arrive as this cure for the shame that force created in the first place. Force then becomes hard to put down, again, because it half works.

It's hard to want to put down something because setting it down can feel like we're giving up on being good. Any turn away from force has to answer both. Showing that force costs more than it delivers is not enough on its own.

We also have to address the sense that the cost was the point, that we seem to be drawing meaning from the pain. None of this says that losses don't matter.

They do. It's a matter of seeing where that loss comes from. The word decide carries cut inside it, from decidere or decidere. I'm not sure exactly how to pronounce it. It means to cut off.

Every decision cuts, and something is always either lost or risked as we cut. Choose to play the piano this evening and not the book.

We take this project and not that one. But the loss is the residue of reaching for something. It exists only because we were engaged with something else, something we wanted. Somewhere along the way, the two got turned around and the residue, the sacrifice, became evidence of the worth. A needless cut is still a cut.

So maybe here's the takeaway.

When the work is hard, and often it is, this changes the question we ask. Not how do I push harder, but whether there's a better way, something that engages the emotions of care and play rather than anger, anxiety, or shame.

That framing, I think, tends to make it move better. The smaller version for the moment itself is the single question is, "Am I moving through this work or against myself?"

And if the answer is against, there's somewhere to go. We use that visit approach, that smaller door back in. We show up, be there, engage the feelings, and then decide.

We may not always be able to tell, and that's fine, but consider that after effort, we tend to be able to come back. And after force, coming back tends to be harder.

It's not always true. This is not a clear, uh, sort of division, but I think there's something to that.

Sometimes it takes days to show or weeks to show. Some part of us remembers, and the returning is where we can read it. So it's not that we stop working hard engaging the emotions. It's that we stop using caustic fuels.

Today's piece is called Ascend. It's recorded April 24th, 2026. I hope you enjoy it.

Listen to/Download Rhythms of Focus Podcast Episode 76: No Pain, No Gain, and the Wandering Mind

Mentioned in this episode:

Waves of Focus YouTube Series

Look out for new episodes of the new Waves of Focus YouTube series here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJpQS5q6yvRw

Comparison can not only be the thief of joy, it can also be the bearer of guilt, shame, and inadequacy. For those of us with wandering minds, ADHD, and the like, it's easy to feel like running away from things our minds aren't instant experts at.

But, much like someone using weights for the first time needs to start small and build up towards heavier pursuits, a wandering mind doesn't need to carry the full load of any task in the moment.

If we can break a task down to meet us exactly where we are at and then trust our future self to come back to it later, we are much closer to completing what had once felt insurmountable.

This week we focus on agency, showing up for ourselves, and building trust within ourselves over time.

Episode Referenced: Trust, Decay, and Retooling (ep. 58)

Transcript:

We said that fast, almost in passing, a thought that just goes through and moves on. But there's something in that way of thinking and that way of considering ourselves that's worth slowing down to pay attention to.

It can be all too easy to feel defeated before we even start. We read about that new hack, some trick, some tip. Maybe we try it. A few days later, we lose it. Throw ourselves against the wall. Nothing seems to stick.

Wallowing in whatever comes, running on whim, on deadlines, we stay at the mercy of the seas, hardly sailing on our own terms.

Until that next idea comes by, and maybe that one will work. So we harness that new spark of interest and go with that, and go fast and go hard. Can't let that seemingly negative energy of past failures catch up to us.

We run as fast as we can, hoping that maybe, just maybe, we'll cross some horizon into the place where things finally click.

We can do what we wanna do, do it on our own time without guilt, be on top of what matters, engaged when and where we are needed. That promised land. Ha. Maybe this time I'll get there.

And of course, we find that it doesn't exist, except that it seems to for others. So defeated again, we wonder, why can't we get there ourselves?

There's trouble hiding in this cycle. It's the run itself, the run from previous failures, that can create troubles. We can look at that distrust of ourselves with disgust and lose sight of how important that feeling of distrust itself is, and how much we need it to carry ourselves forward.

Trust is this developing sense that something will keep behaving as it has been such that we can rely on it.

It's vital. It's the thing we build. It's what makes our worlds. It's the very land we're seeking, that sense that we can trust ourselves and trust ourselves across time.

Trust is not willed into being. It's a feeling grown from experience. In a conversation on trust, decay, and retooling with Michael Porter in an earlier episode, trust turned out to be something that we tend, something we rebuild rather than something we simply have.

It can grow, it can strengthen, much like a muscle.

When we lift weights, we don't begin at three hundred pounds. That leads to injury, and that's what we do to ourselves when we ignore our current state of trust and dive straight into the next great idea.

But what if instead we started with ten pounds?

Maybe do three sets of six. That's fine. We sense it. Where are we now? Ah, I can do this. And over a few days, it gets easier. We might even find we've got some energy to spare.

Now maybe we do three sets of seven. Hold there for a while. At some point, we're doing three sets of twelve, and we're ready to add weight.

Go up five percent, ten percent. Drop back to three sets of six and begin again.

Beginning with where we are doing this helps us build the muscles from where they are.

Now, that small return teaches us something, about the mind caught in the pull of the moment, something the mind finds hard to believe.

We can put a thing down and pick it up later because the moment is singular. We can only do one thing at a time while the waves of the moment crash and carry us here and now.

To do anything well, we need to be able to set other things aside. That setting aside is a kind of message in a bottle to our future self.

It says, "Can you pick this up for me? I can't do it now." It asks us to trust that whoever finds will pick that up, that future self, decide with their own agency whether it's good to do, and in that deciding, honor and care for the self who sent it.

What I'm talking about here is being able to send an invitation to our future selves and say, "Hey, can you make a visit here?"

If they can do that, they can pick up with where we left off and then maybe send another invitation going forward. Doing that strengthens this muscle over time. It's a tall order. At the beginning, there is no trust. There's only that 10 pounds and a sense that we can maybe lift it

So we hold on to that distrust because that feeling itself is important.

Emotion is a messenger. If we don't listen to it, we risk injuring ourselves. Maybe 10 pounds is too much. Maybe we don't set that thing for tomorrow. Maybe it's not a visit, maybe it's a consideration. Maybe it's for an hour from now, 10 minutes from now.

Listening doesn't mean we only do whatever the feeling says. Being tired doesn't mean we only crash onto the couch. We might instead make a small visit to the work while we're tired, feeling the exhaustion there fully as we maybe nudge something forward, resting in that tension itself. Sometimes the, the session is a slog, goes nowhere.

Sometimes a wave forms slow. Sometimes it gets fast. Even when nothing seems to happen, that visit can be the node that carries momentum from one session into the next.

In that practice of listening, , the distrust can begin to shift. Oh, I can continue a thing. Ideas form between sessions. I can put something down and pick it up later.

That land of trust, that growing confidence to carry ideas across our past, present, and future selves, that place of agency turns out to be something we garden, grown over time.

So here's a small rep to try. Pick one thing you don't quite trust yourself with yet and ask what, what is its ten-pound version? Maybe its five-pound version. Small enough that you sense, "I think this is right there. This is about where I can do it." And return to that version a few times across a few days before you add any weight.

Maybe it's about the dishes, maybe it's about a report you have to write, maybe it's whatever it happens to be. Alongside that rep, have a reflection. Consider the things you already trust yourself to do, the ones you don't, and of the ones you trust, ask, "What is it that I do trust here? How did that come to be?"

Of the ones you don't, ask, "What do I not trust yet? What small risk could I take to grow it?" We begin with where we are and move from there.

Today's piece is called Seeing the Tunnel. I hope you enjoy it.

Mentioned in this episode:

Waves of Focus YouTube Series

Look out for new episodes of the new Waves of Focus YouTube series here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJpQS5q6yvRw

For those of us with ADHD, wandering minds, and the like, coming up against the feelings of guilt, shame, and frustration at being unable to get our work done can feel like torture.

This can lead to anxiety and the urge to run away entirely.

Instead, if we sit with these hard feelings to examine where they may be coming from, we give ourselves the opportunity to name it, and give it a tangible presense rather than allowing it to be a mysterious force we are up against.

Pausing with this fear then brings with it the possibility that the emotion is our mind's attempt to understand or maybe tell us something.

If we can have the bravery to sit with our fears and combine it with the care of giving ourselves space, we are often more receptive to the possibilities which allow us to move forward.

And even if we say, "This is all I can do for now," we can invite a future self to return.

Transcript

Maybe I'm sitting at the piano, the spreadsheet, the page of whatever report. Somehow as this work sits in front of us, this tiredness appears, and we might wonder, maybe I'm just not able.

Maybe I'm dumb. Maybe I'm not confident enough.

There's that moment where the work stops making sense, and the mind reaches for some verdict about ourselves in that. That's where I wanna look at it right now. There's that feeling of tiredness, of bleakness, of confusion, a sense of not getting it, and it can happen anywhere.

Recently I'd been playing at the piano. I was trying to understand some jazz chords. Symbols are right there in front of me. I know what they mean. Still, something stalls. There's this cloud that forms, hard for me to memorize, hard for me to know what goes where and when, and somehow it's just not coming to mind.

Pushing through, using force often begins with that word of "should."

We're reading the emotion of confusion, or whatever it is, some negative feeling, as evidence of our own ineptitude.

There is a way through, and it has a couple of parts that are hard to separate. A shift in how we hold the moment and the practice of that shift over time.

What do I mean?

The change of perspective is a change of how we look at something. We often hear this in a simple phrase like, "Don't worry about it."

But a shift of perspective cannot be done by dissociation. Don't worry about it doesn't exactly work. Otherwise, I wouldn't have a job. We can't simply leave the original perspective behind. There's history behind it, and therefore emotion, which can't be argued with.

We don't simply adopt a new view and drop the one that hurts. Instead, the practice is to hold both at once, the old sense and the possibility of the new side by side.

This is one of those strengths of the psychoanalytic approach, for example. There we practice following associations. We come to a recognition that conflicting perspectives can be held at the same time.

Nothing has to be banished for a new idea to show up. And then over time, one may form over the other.

So we begin often by asking how we feel about the story we're telling ourselves. That asking itself can create a space of observation, an area a little bit freer of that belief's influence, even in the act of acknowledging it.

That sense of, "Oh, this means I'm dumb." Okay, how do I feel about that idea, that thing that comes to mind? Well, I don't like it, or I'm upset about it, or whatever it is, but it's there.

The pause initiates that process, pausing with the emotion, with the pain, with the fear. That space then holds a possibility that the emotion is the mind's own attempt to understand or maybe tell us something.

It may not be telling us in the best possible way, but it's saying something. Confusion, at least in this way, is not inherently negative. The first step is to simply stay with it and to notice that the negative charge is something we have added in some way.

What turns the emotions negative beyond the perspective is that shove, is it's that I have to study this, the test is tomorrow.

When we cut corners in that memorization and bypass the play that would have otherwise let that understanding settle in, we leave the session without having understood.

We lose the signal that confusion could have given us. Further, we also deepen the sense that we cannot do things deliberately, that we must rely on these harsh measures against ourselves.

Instead, resting our attention on the emotion, on the confusion, or any other negative sense, we can ask, "What is confusing about this?"

An answer may or may not come. But more importantly, in that pause, in that waiting with that feeling, we've practiced bravery.

All right, what makes that bravery? There's this idea I keep returning to from a theologian by the name of Paul Tillich. "Anxiety," he says, "has no object." It's this cloud.

Meanwhile, fear has an object, something that can be faced.

Much of courage is the slow work of turning the cloud into an object, naming the thing so it can be met, turning the anxiety into a fear.

When we stay with the confusion, perhaps worried about what it might mean to us, and ask what exactly is confusing about it, we're doing that. We're letting the fog crystallize into something we can look at.

We remained with the sense that we do not know. We stayed with the confusion as it went on, being tangled up with the old belief that we're somehow dumb or otherwise.

Were we to shove ourselves through or bolt off to find something shinier somewhere else, something on fire somewhere else, we would have lost that chance.

That pause enabled the practice of bravery.

The harder part is that even while staying with this thing that we fear we cannot do, we may still discover that we cannot.

We may not understand it. We may still be just as confused as we began, if not worse.

Injured this way can be terribly hard to hold on to a larger possibility, which is that I can't do this now, but maybe it's just about now. Maybe it's just about not today.

That revisit again and again sometimes helps work it through. But it's hard to hold on to that perspective. Even so, it may never come to us, and we don't know.

That too is what makes this bravery. There's real fear. Fear is not always unfounded. So we temper our bravery with care.

A sword is made out of steel. Steel that's only hardened, quenched, and made as hard as it can be is brittle and shatters at that first real blow.

Tempering is a gentle heat afterwards, and it trades a little of that hardness for toughness, so the blade can flex under a strike and survive it.

Care is that gentle heat. Bravery alone, untempered, is hard, brittle, tends to shatter on exactly the day it meets real resistance, the day we find the fear was founded. But tempered with care, it can bend and hold.

So we can ask ourselves, to what degree does staying here actually serve me?

I'll give you another example. When we lift weights, we don't do well by trying to lift the most we possibly can. That's how we injure ourselves. Muscle grows faster than bone and tendon. If we just try to lift as much as we can, something will break somewhere.

We attend instead to the sensations of the movement, the good and bad pain that we can feel, a rough division between what builds us and what harms us.

The same principle holds in our work. This bravery and care becoming courage.

Care is not an unmitigated good. I did a episode on this some time ago.

Overzealous, it can hold us back from the work. We procrastinate. We avoid on impulse. Maybe we tell ourselves we are waiting for better conditions or that things must be just right before we begin.

With this hypertrophied sense of care, we may avoid the work entirely. And bravery without care is reckless.

While care without bravery can lead to stagnation. Bringing them together, bravery and care, courage.

The practice is simple and of course, not easy. Simplicity is this: when we run into the difficult sense inside work, the confusion, the overwhelm, the loss, we can pause and ask what exactly is confusing, overwhelming, and raging about it.

Somewhere in there, we may be able to shrink our vision, slow ourselves down, find something smaller that we can hold onto, maybe even find some ease, and maybe face that question, is this all I can do?

Back at the piano, the chord chart sits in front of me, C minor seven, F seven, B-flat major seven, two, five, one, rootless chords.

How do I ever remember these formations? I don't know how to do this. How does anyone know how to do this?

I feel that strain. My mind goes blank. I could stay and push, but then frustration builds. Trouble builds in that push.

Try to give ourselves the hollow reassurance that belief alone would carry us. I can make it through if I only believe enough.

No, I don't have that belief. Force is hollow. Instead, I face it with that courage, and I find, yeah, that's all I can do right now. It's all I know.

And I can sit there and maybe somewhere in those moments I'll be able to find something. But if I push, I'll become injured. I'll start to not like it. I'll start not to want to play.

That's where that child says, "Ah, I don't wanna play the piano anymore." That's why they say that, "I'm not good at this."

But there is another strength at our side: time. We can say, "This is it for this moment," whether we pause for a few moments and see if another wave of something comes from within, or we go longer.

We can invite a future self to return — a difficult thing for all the reasons I already mentioned. But if we can make that visit tomorrow, meaning an invitation to ourself, we might find that some part of us has worked out of sight, loosened the confusion, eased the overwhelm.

Those are the moments of insight that seem to arrive on their own, that stir out of the times we stayed when we faced the demon, the lion, the darkness of the forest.

So at the piano, I let go. I let go of the keys. In a few moments, I might bring my fingers back to the keys.

Or I might realize, "No, no, no, this is pushing. This is going beyond something. It's time to let go of the session itself." But then invite myself tomorrow.

I rest in the knowledge that I've been there now, and I can return tomorrow. And tomorrow comes, and I realize, "Ah, what if I shrink the vision to only practicing the two chord and the B formation? Ah, so that's the shape."

And I work to only get better at that, that little tiny something. And in the ease that gradually forms in that simple repetition of something tiny, a bit of play often appears.

What if I poke randomly at any key? Can I form a rootless two chord from that? Oh, yes, I can. What if I tried it there too? Ah. Well, sometimes nothing comes.

Whatever we find, we're stronger for having made the attempt. Both care, bravery, and ultimately courage.

Staying with a hard thing, setting it down for a while, its own kind of a return. I end with a piece called "Unwritten." I hope you enjoy it.

Mentioned in this episode:

Waves of Focus YouTube Series

Look out for new episodes of the new Waves of Focus YouTube series here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJpQS5q6yvRw

I came across a social media post recently that made me laugh. "I'm so sorry," it said, "I can't do the laundry, I just don't have the dopamine." I laughed because it rang so true.

And while it's funny, things also need to get done, so we don't laugh ourselves into tears.

In today’s episode, we look at what “not having the dopamine” really points to, and how we might begin anyway. Not by forcing a start, but by showing up and, for a breath, simply being.

#ADHD #FindingFlowWithADHD #WavesOfFocus #ADHDadults #WanderingMind #ADHDfocus #FlowState #ExecutiveFunction

Dr. William Dodson, the interest-based nervous system: https://www.additudemag.com/secrets-of-the-adhd-brain/

Mesolimbic pathway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesolimbic_pathway

Transcript

I saw this post on Instagram. It was funny. I laughed. It's this honesty that makes something real.

We can join in with more examples, more laughter. It's great. I love that, "I can't do the laundry. I don't have the dopamine."

Laughter's good medicine, but past a certain dose, any medicine can be a poison. We have to be cautious because we can fall together into this sort of celebration of helplessness. Not because any of us are weak, but because the joke becomes the whole conversation, and then it leaves us where we began.

Those of us with wandering minds can have real difficulties, and they can be hard for others to understand. But I think it's vital that when the laughter fades, we need to be able to ask, "What, what can we do from here?"

What do we do when we don't have the dopamine? We might even use science against ourselves, naming dopamine as the prime mover of a reward system deep in the brain.

And because it's this chemical that we can't touch with our fingers, we might conclude that the only access we have is through medication or some trickery or something outside of our own sense of agency.

Another path might be reaching for a more psychological version of the same move. For example, we can invoke Dr. William Dodson's otherwise very helpful description of what tends to engage an ADHD mind, namely challenge, interest, novelty, urgency, and passion.

And then we can say, if none of these emotions are present, then like the missing dopamine, I suppose we are helpless.

This is that interest-based nervous system we explored in episode eight. It's real, it's a useful description, but the trouble is that conclusion that we draw from it.

Much of this, though, we can gather under the single idea of play and its close cousin, learning. Challenge, interest, novelty, passion, dopamine itself are all aspects of playful.

And, novelty is play reaching towards something new. Challenge is play testing itself against an edge. Interest and passion are play that has found something it cares for. Even urgency, at its best, is play with the stakes raised.

And the ADHD mind, in my experience, both of myself and as a clinician, often carries this powerful capacity of play.

And everything it represents, whether it's whimsy or discovery or deep engagement.

That play describes so much of what goes right when we're in flow, and so much of what is missing when we can't begin.

We looked at some of this before in episode seven as the cautions of dopamine and a lean toward mastery.

So we need to be cautious not to reduce our brains to buttons and levers, this remnant and a metaphor of the industrial age.

We can point to a dopaminergic pathway called the mesolimbic pathway, and tie it to pleasure, to reward, then to drugs and sex and food as though that were all it were for.

But if we look experientially, where we actually have agency, we can notice that when we're engaged well, we're in flow. We're learning, at play. The motions of molecules and the firings of neurons from one nucleus to the next make a flow no less deep or nuanced than our climates and oceans.

We can see that the experience is not some on-off switch. We don't leap from, "I don't feel like it," to, "I feel like it," by some sudden revelation. There's a process we move through from one state to another.

From our depths, emotions gather, ideas form. They crest in their own time on the surface.

We can't win arguments with an emotion, but we're also not helpless against ourselves.

Emotions shift and change with their conditions, and we do have the ability to change conditions. We can position ourselves to make those small transitions that might stir the mind.

One way I often espouse to changing conditions is through the visit, in which we show up to a task, hard or not, and then simply be.

Whether it's laundry, a budget, a report, we bring the materials in front of us, move distractions aside, and for a few moments do nothing but be with it. We pause in the now.

We don't need to force ourselves to do anything, and it can seem strange to think of this as a unit of work. What good is it to do nothing?

Too often we privilege action. "Just start," we're told. But such advice can be corrosive, a repeated message that we cannot trust ourselves to decide and to act.

By being with the work, we're not doing nothing. We're meeting the emotions, the true ground from which our decisions are made, from which action of any real conviction is born.

Whether we begin in anxiety, shame, irritation, or more likely, a whole ecology of feeling, any real flow begins in being with those sensations.

In this way, we do the visit, which is we show up, be, and then decide.

The winds and waters of dopamine, of interest, of engagement, of whatever we choose to call them, may even begin to tickle the sails.

So consider as a takeaway, what's something that you don't have the dopamine for? Sometime today, somewhere before going to sleep, can you show up to it or bring it to you and then simply be, if only for a single deep breath?

You don't have to do it anywhere beyond any reality that says otherwise. And if you can do that, consider what's that like?

I end this week's episode with piece is called "Wind at Play" in C major, all the white keys, and in three-quarters time. Either of which just lends to that childhood play that I like to find. Not sure why, but it does. I hope you enjoy it.

Mentioned in this episode:

Waves of Focus YouTube Series

Look out for new episodes of the new Waves of Focus YouTube series here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJpQS5q6yvRw

One might say the road to hell is paved with well-intentioned lists. Wandering minds tend to collect a stockpile of the latest apps, notebooks, and sticky notes in an effort to keep tasks top of mind.

Unfortunately, when these lists and apps accumulate, it's because they aren't working. It can be difficult to know what tool will meet us in the moment we need it, versus when it's inconvenient and has no chance of being accomplished.

On this week's episode, we discuss why you don't need another list, you need the right prompt.

#ADHD #FindingFlowWithADHD #WavesOfFocus #ADHDadults #WanderingMind #ADHDfocus #FlowState #executivefunction

Transcript

Maybe I just need another list. Things are piling up, something slips. Deadlines creeping up. Project we were working on starting to gather dust.

If I could only find just the right app, the right notebook, the right system, this time it'll finally hold.

All right, so then we build one. And for a day, maybe two, maybe three, it holds up. Then somehow we stop seeing it, slips out of the way. It's out of our fingers. The list is still there. We're just not there with it.

The lists we build are probably fine. Trouble is not usually that we pick the wrong tool or that we're the kind of person who can't keep a system.

One trouble is often that a list stops reaching us in the moments that matter.

For example, let's say we have a report to write. We put it on the kitchen whiteboard. We put it in bold, maybe alternate colors, draw a circle around it.

However we've done it, by the end of the week, it's part of the wall. It's now just part of the decor.

Nothing changed about the note. What changed is that it's no longer arriving. It's faded into the background.

Organizing, at its heart, is this work of clearing and supporting paths for those things that we find to be meaningful.

A list is one of those paths, but a path that never reaches us at the right time is hardly a path at all, which brings us to the part of organizing that does much of the work and the one that we tend to neglect.

When we ask something to reach us at the moment it matters, we're asking for a prompt. Very often our prompts are poor, not because we did not write something down. We wrote them down in 10 different places. We put them in bold, we circled them, we told the app to remind us.

Still, the report sits, the taxes sit, the email we meant to send sits. None of it surfaced when we could actually do something with it, and stayed out of the way the rest of the time.

A good prompt is a matter of timing before it is anything else.

It's the sandwich that I hang on the doorknob so that I can take it on the way out when I go to work. It's resting in our path at the door so it's not left on the counter again.

It's this reminder that says, "Get milk," as we're walking to the store, not while we're lying in bed unable to act on it.

Something that simply sits there blending into the background hardly works. Something that shows up at the right time, well, that meets us.

To prompt is to bring something forward, to make it ready right on time. The word carries its own instructions. Prompts, it's not about being loud. It's about being well-timed.

Now there's a version of prompting that most of us have already tried and it can hurt, in fact.

We make the note bigger. We add another alert. We stack up so many reminders that they begin to drown each other out.

Underneath, there's often this force that's kind of bubbling through. If I can just startle myself hard enough, maybe I'll finally comply. Every louder Post-It is the small message that we can't be trusted. That we have to be cornered into our own life. A wandering mind feeling that way often pulls away.

A good prompt has to respect our working memory. It can't ask us to hold everything in mind at all times. That's precisely the load we're trying to set down. In this way, a good prompt respects our agency.

When that thing surfaces, we still get to decide. We're not commanded, we're informed. We're left free to say yes or not yet or in our own time, all without compromising that prompt.

That freedom is not a loophole in the system, it's the whole point of it. So a good prompt presents itself clearly, arrives on time, and then gets out of the way. Presenting well, that its virtue, timing is its work.

If we look at the tools of this practice, nearly all of them - they are ways of being that prompt, that leave the deciding to us.

In episode 57, we got into the tool of anchoring. It can hold this moment's options in front of us so that short-term memory can stop grabbing at them.

The honor guide brings a project back into view on the day we meant to return to it. The calendar carries an intention across time, hands it back to us when it's due. And the visit shows up at the work, then lets us choose whether to stay.

None of these are force. Each one brings a thing forward at a useful moment, presents it plainly, and then waits for us.

Now there's another layer, that a good prompt is worth building it all.

And it's that when a prompt is poor, we can't really rely on it. And as a result of that, we keep checking. We reopen the list to make sure it's still there or the thing that we need to do is still there.

We carry the report around in the back of our minds because some part of it doesn't really believe that the note's going to do its job. And that checking can be exhausting, and it never fully stops.

A prompt that we trust is one we feel we can stop checking. We set something down, and we can let it go because experience teaches us over time that it can come back to us when we need it.

It's like this message in a bottle that we send forward to our future selves. First time, we don't really believe it'll arrive. We don't know it. We haven't experienced that.

But when it does, and then does so again, that little tendril of trust begins to grow. We can leave things in that current, and they can come back to us, and it does so without force.

In this way, trust is not built by trying harder or trying at all, really. It's built by experience. It's a longer conversation for another episode, perhaps.

Here's the takeaway. Rather than building another list, consider the following: Pick up something that you keep rechecking, this nagging item you keep reopening the app to confirm is there, or carrying around in your head because you don't quite believe it's handled. Just one of these things.

And then ask a single question about it. What would prompt this at the right time, at a place that I can do something with it? What would bring it forward clearly at that moment that it's relevant and not before?

Maybe it's a reminder set for the actual time, a place that you can act. Maybe it's an object that you leave in your path. Maybe it's a spot on your guide.

You don't have to build an entire system, although a system can be made from exactly this process. You only have to improve one prompt. Notice whether you can even a little set that thing down. Could there be some practice in that?

Today's piece of music is called "Wooded Hills." Composed in June of 2025. I've played it before once I think. Maybe, I don't know. It's a good piece. I like it, and I hope you do, too.

Mentioned in this episode:

Waves of Focus YouTube Series

Look out for new episodes of the new Waves of Focus YouTube series here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJpQS5q6yvRw

Using AI to help with productivity and multitasking is not for the faint of heart when you've got ADHD or a wandering mind. We may feel as though we are being more productive while bouncing from one open thread to the next. But we almost always end up with an overwhelming feeling of exhaustion.

In today’s episode, we discuss the quiet cost our brains pay for all that switching. But if we stop to recognize it, we can also lean in to the small pause the machine hands back to us, the one we’re so quick to fill.

Resources Mentioned in Episode:

Interview with chess prodigy Bobby Fischer

Rhythms of Focus Episode 39: Aligning Emotion and Intention with the 8 Gears of Focus

#ADHD #FindingFlowWithADHD #WavesOfFocus #ADHDadults #WanderingMind #ADHDfocus #FlowState #executivefunction #AI #Productivity

Transcript

There are eight or nine of these in a row lined up left side of the screen, some pinned, some not, every one of them are waiting on me, teasing me. These threads of Claude, my AI of choice at the moment, I have to decide among all these different threads, much like I would decide about all these different projects, the tabs across my, my browser.

I have to remember where I was last. I have to spin the drive in my own head to start doing anything. So I choose one, start going. Now it has to think. And in the time that it's thinking, maybe I start thinking, I could be more efficient by picking up some other thread.

And so I do, and then I say my piece there, and then I glance back at that left-hand panel, and I see the first one was working, and then I move on to the third. And after enough of this, I'm bouncing. Waiting for one to start up, watching one turn blue, one turn gray, so it needs me again, and I'm juggling. I'm productive. I'm exhausted.

Recently I've found myself bouncing around between eight or nine different open threads with my AI, choosing one of them, then starting another while it was thinking, and then reaching for a third, and I'm juggling, feeling like, "Am I being productive? Maybe." But I'm also feeling pretty worn out.

Those with ADHD and wandering minds, I think, know the sense that bouncing between several things at once, whatever it happens to be, it doesn't have to be AI, can be this thrill and exhaustion, like I'm being used up in the process, something like a workout. But what are we working out?

I've talked before about the foundational channels of decision, consideration.

When we're deciding, we are choosing our intention. What is the thing that's in front of us? Where do we want our mind to be?

And here, that boundary of what's holding where we want our mind to be is already porous. For a wandering mind, it's trouble.

It takes some type of energy to hold that boundary, to keep ourselves in line. And once it's broken, it's easier to injure it again, like the sprained ankle.

We can call it creativity, the realization of this vision and the act of making something. The channel of beginning — really this channel of beginning again and again, this iteration unifies with where we are envisioning things with that consideration

The decision tends to hold better when we're drawing that border of whatever it is that we're making. We can always update where we want our mind to be, but there's effort in doing that. There's energy.

It draws us out each time as we re-exercise that agency to realign what we want to be doing with how we feel.

When we're considering something, we are picturing it in mind, we're envisioning. And we fill the border that decision established, we're there with it. We see what comes to mind, where things are, where they could be, and then have to realign ourselves every time that we switch. More energy gets drained.

I once heard this interview with Bobby Fischer, this chess prodigy. He said that he could play 20 games at once, moving from one to the next, cycling through.

But he also said to the interviewer that it was for show, and he didn't like doing it. He described how the ideas could work themselves out, maybe in this unconscious world as he moved from one table to the next.

This parallel process that I think we have within ourselves. We engage in a thing, and then we walk away as our unconscious mind can bubble around it.

But do enough of this, this, you know, extended sort of rhythm between multiple things, and I think there's this exhaustion that comes with it.

Holding things in mind has its gifts, of course. We can better traverse those maps of whatever it is we're doing. But when those intentions, those things we want to do, don't align as we run several things at once, we're, we're switch tasking, and there's a cost to it.

Alright, so what's the solution? Well, I'm not sure there's a clean rule. Uh, for a moment, for a single thread, for, you know, this is one moment for several, it's not clear.

It's not always obvious when things relate, but when they relate, it seems like it can be a good idea to bring several ideas together. It's like a tennis stroke that all aligns at once as we practice this part and that part and the other part, and we kind of bring them together.

But sometimes they don't, like making dinner while learning how to play the piano and creating a mess.

I will say this, though, when I'm at Claude or any AI really, and I stay with a single thread, and I pause to watch the AI think, not filling every moment with something else, I'm giving my own thoughts a certain space to come to mind.

I can rest in that more fundamental state of being. And when I do that, that reformulating of decision, of vision, of all the rest of those channels of engagement, things become simpler.

That pause let me restore myself in that place of being. I can reflect on meaning, where energy is flowing from, from something within me, from beyond me.

It's no longer me working against the grain of multiple waves, this sea of emotion and interest that's become this complex mess. Instead, I'm more in tune with what's already there.

I define motivation as the degree to which our emotions align with our intention, something I explored in episode 39.

So much of the work is the skill of sailing these seas of emotion with the intentions that we carry. When we can pause in that state of being, we're so much more in tune with that sea. Sometimes we find the intention we had can be set down or reformed, or it arrives, and we can sail it more readily too.

Maybe I'm being a broken record here. I talk about pausing so much. Somehow it's still the hardest thing to do and the most important.

But it's in this particular day and age when I can notice that there are times, like when I'm waiting for the machine to think, that I can pause to think. In a sense, the machine handed me the pause. My only move is not to fill it.

Today's piece I won't say too much about. I think it's just a piece to listen to. It's called Waves on Night's Shore, and I hope you enjoy it.

Mentioned in this episode:

Waves of Focus YouTube Series

Look out for new episodes of the new Waves of Focus YouTube series here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJpQS5q6yvRw

This week we discuss the very real fear of disclosing our wandering minds with bosses and managers. Will they think less of us? Will they support the perhaps unique conditions of how our brains are capable of being used best?

It's a complicated scenario, and of course can depend very much on the work and people involved. It's not something to take lightly, but it's important to recognize, at its core the question comes from a place of care for your work.

While it can feel like a burden, a wandering mind is powerful, is creative, and can contribute positively. It's about asking ourselves the right questions to find the right structure for productivity.

We close with a piece called Weight in Arms.

Should I tell my boss about my wandering mind, my ADHD?

It's an understandable but profoundly tricky question, rarely comes alone. A few other questions tend to follow in its wake, like what could I gain by saying something? Could it cost me my job? Would they even understand? And we can sit a long while in that not knowing.

That question, should I tell my boss about my ADHD, about my wandering mind?

Before anything else, it helps to say clearly that that worry, what it could do, what harm it could create, it's not imaginary. Telling someone can carry real weight. How a manager hears it, the protections it may or may not apply, whether it suddenly changes how our work gets read.

Some bosses can meet it with grace, others not. You might even get fired for it, but maybe they would just point at something else as the culprit. Even so, sometimes being fired, whether out of fear, wish, or both, can be useful. So even if that were to happen, is that the right thing? It's not clear.

Weighing whether to raise it is not simple. It's not weakness. It's care. Nothing here, of course, is meant to talk us past some genuine risk. I want to be clear about it. It's meant to be an idea that opens the question wider once the risks have been honestly faced.

These questions have a history, something behind them. Wandering mind, ADHD or otherwise, is not just a person living in the moment. There's this history that follows us into the now.

In the days of school, there's a depth of creativity and intelligence that needs to connect with reality, and then it can be met with so many different attitudes.

As an example, when you raise your hand in class and this young kid wondering, "Why do I need to know this?"

One teacher may take the time to truly think about the power of the knowledge they are trying to impart, the sense of changing the world that could be beneficial to you, and then maybe find ways to connect with that driven spirit of care and play behind the question.

But many others, exhausted by their own gauntlet of impossible rules, conflicting requirements, and the like, find that question to just be frustrating. And with enough accusations, enough feelings of frustration from up above in the class, we might lose sight of the positive behind that question.

We might ask for accommodations. "Hey, give me more time. Give me a fidget. Give me a break." Any and all of them could be helpful, but the person asked to do more for us might end up feeling resentful, consciously or otherwise.

Each of us carrying more than the other can easily see. We can try to argue that such resentment is or is not warranted, but arguing the resentment away hardly works.

Our arguments for accommodations are often these attempts to do what others do, get the homework in on time, avoid disrupting others, pass the tests. Such approaches play out in the days well beyond school.

In other words, behind the question of whether to tell a boss about ADHD is something along the lines of, "What if I forget something? What if I miss a deadline? Could it get me off the hook?" Or, "Give me lots of reminders. I can't handle them myself." And running underneath is all, "How can I not be a troublemaker?"

What's missing is the wonderful power and beauty of a wandering mind, the deep focus, creativity, discovery, play, invention, and more. Why leave these behind in this discussion? When our strengths are unseen in the glimmer of another's eye, there's no mirror to see them in ourselves.

Growing up now in a world of work, we often forget that these powers are there laying dormant. Instead, we continue to ask for mercy and forgiveness in the form of accommodations rather than the conditions that allow us to shine.

The trouble is often not that we cannot. It's that we do not have the practice of knowing and nurturing our abilities. Communicating, crafting the stories, conveying the sense of what we have to offer all take practice.

In putting my own thoughts together for my dear audience of fellow wandering minds, I've had to practice describing how whatever I have to say might be of benefit. Without doing so, I'm just another talking head easily ignored.

But when I can, for example, in the opening 90 seconds of my podcast, something I've worked hard to put together and then practiced, I hope to convey, "Hey, maybe I can help."

Certainly I'm simplifying a deeply complex issue. This is not an overnight endeavor. It takes practice, visits over time. Sometimes it helps to recruit caring others to the cause.

Among others, I give great thanks to my dear friends. one person who, uh, you've heard on an episode we did together, Rachel, who helped me recognize my voice, present my story, and describe the strengths I'm trying to portray.

Another, Billy, who, uh, on another episode we did together helped me think through also, "How do I craft my voice? How do I present something? How do I present that I have something to offer, hopefully, to an audience?"

With practice, we learn for ourselves where we can and cannot trust ourselves to follow through on something. We find how to structure our work, our ideas, so we can be alerted when we need to be, clear of distractions, respectful of our own working memory as unique as it is.

We learn not only what we need to get by, but more importantly, what we can use to excel. When we know how we can excel, what it takes to support our ability to do well, it's no longer about, "Do I tell my boss whatever?" It's about discussing specifics that help nurture an environment that works for you, that helps you build the relationships between yourself and the work that helps you engage yourself as a best self.

So for a moment, consider what helps bring about those spirits of play and care for yourself, maybe at home. What are those conditions? What comes from those conditions, those ways of working? And then rather than focus on conditions first, what if you considered what you could do and create if those conditions were there?

Today's piece of music is called Weight in Arms. Enjoy.

#ADHD #FindingFlowWithADHD #WavesOfFocus #ADHDadults #WanderingMind #ADHDfocus #FlowState #executivefunctions

Mentioned in this episode:

Waves of Focus YouTube Series

Look out for new episodes of the new Waves of Focus YouTube series here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJpQS5q6yvRw

As someone who loves tools and figuring out the best ways to use them, I've been intrigued with the potentials of AI, particularly using it as someone with a wandering mind.

This week I delve into my recent experiments existential dilemmas, and adventures with the so-called artificial intelligence I am feeding my own intelligence into.

So is it helpful, more efficient, how can I use it without giving away my agency? Let's find out.

#Mindfulness #Neurodivergence #ADHDpodcast #ADHD #WanderingMinds #Anchoring #AI

Transcript

Every Friday morning, I sit down to write on my own without the help of any AI this draft of my podcast and newsletter. So this morning, I tiptoed to the edge and asked, uh, "Hey, AI, I like to write on Fridays. I usually do so from this blank slate, but I wanna give it a try here and see what, uh, you've been about.

Maybe you can help me out. Maybe take a look at what I've been recently writing about. Give me... Show me what that's been and, and, uh, and then suggest something." And I used the latest and greatest from Claude, this Fable 5, and it gave me this perfectly cogent response, totally looked at what I did, and then I ignored it completely.

So here I am writing about AI instead.

Today's a bit of a wanderer, but I think I land somewhere useful, so tag along if you will.

Does AI help the wandering mind? My goodness, have I drunk the Kool-Aid with this thing. It's been a whirlwind, and my goodness, can there be controversy behind it?

I heard this story about some school somewhere using AI to announce its graduates walking across the stage. It then mispronounced a bunch of names, forgot to mention others, and by the time it was all done, they couldn't go back and announce those that it had missed. And then I get these emails, much like you get emails, and can't you just smell the AI on them?

What's that about? Why would I want to respond to a robot?

I hear stories of the massive warehouses that are being built, draining water from an entire state perhaps. But hey, maybe it's providing jobs? Or is it taking jobs? Or is it changing jobs? Having frank discussions with my longtime graphic designer and friend, Matt, who, was a guest in episode 64. Play around with Claude Design and see what happens.

I wonder about our civilization as it progresses here. Going through the industrial age, we polluted the heck out of things, didn't we? Beautiful Chicago River and its tributaries were just nasty. We could barely go near them. We'd choke in the smog, walk through horse crap. It was awful. But once we made it through that developmental stage, if you will, we've now come to some place where things are cleaner and kinda nice sometimes.

Progressively think about the world we live in.

Is it a truism that we go through messy stages to get to cleaner ones? How do we know if we're going through construction or maybe destruction? It's not always clear. Sometimes we think of the fight between money and the environment, those greedy people who have more money than various countries.

The question isn't how we resolve this fight between money and environment. It's, it's how do we align them? How do we make a clean environment profitable? How do we extend our vision beyond the myopic moment, beyond the quarterly report? But, ah, maybe that's not where I am. I'm one who likes to tinker. I like tools.

Tagline for my website when I first built it in 2000 or so used to be Mind, Music, and Technology. So the tinkerman tinkers. After wrapping up the last bits of The Waves of Focus, I had this idea to put together a beginner's series of the course for YouTube, um, and, uh, why not test the waters with AI?

Let's see what it can do. It's already released by the time, or at least partially released by the time this podcast episode's going out, so do check that out.

I don't even remember the first question I had asked of AI. It was maybe something like, "Hey, I'm building a YouTube series. Help me out, would you?"

A couple months later, I'm full steam ahead with not only that, but I've created several compendia of ideas from my DevonThink database. I've organized multiple next steps for marketing, extracted the nearly 360,000 words. Yes, I'm not so subtly bragging. From my course keynote to create a reserve of information from which to build the YouTube series and my next book and all that good stuff. How do I reconcile these?

Clearly there's a benefit, but clearly there are also problems.

I often like to say the more powerful the tool, the more caution it requires. And I wonder about AI and its impact on the mind. The trouble comes from the sense of, "Please think for me."

When we ask an AI to write our emails for us without our editing or rewriting it to fit our voice, when we ask it to come up with a gift idea for someone rather than reflecting on what we know of that person ourselves, when we ask it to tell us what to do without reflecting on what's meaningful to us in the first place, we only grow more lost at sea.

Thought is this cresting of emotion into mind, and as such, it's not static it takes time to form, something we often find in scarcity. So we often come to this erroneous, unspoken assumption that thinking is hard.

It's only hard in the sense of any hard work, that it's emotional work. We can pause where we offer the seed, the soil, and the sun, and somehow our brains seem to do the rest.

But of course, there may be other waves of motion at work, maybe in the difficulty to finish things. We fear the feelings of failure and how this rests on our inability to trust ourselves. The effort, if you will, is in allowing and sustaining a vision where we pause and ask, "What's on my mind about this?"

Allowing that question to linger and stir those unconscious waters, that's how we build the creative moment. Some part of us looks to reconnect, to grow.

Whatever the distance, whatever the injuries it may represent, there's some posing of a threshold beyond which it's difficult for us to engage this moment. That vision that we have necessarily comes from within us.

Our AI's vision comes from within it. The human tendency is to avoid difficult emotion, including those that would require forming a thought, these difficult things that are in our lives, marred by anger, irritation, shame, regret, pain of any and every sort.

The bridge between is to recognize that the pain and the lost trust may be one and the same, easier said than done. Where am I wandering off now? Let me return to this, uh, episode I'd recently done, Anchoring and the Option to Work, Episode 57.

Symbiotic, Not Parasitic

We allow thoughts, emotions, sensations, and perceptions to come to mind. We pause to allow ourselves these thoughts. When they come to that place of being settled where no new thoughts are coming to mind and there are only ripples and variation, then all the information about whatever can come to mind has come to mind. That's the strongest ground on which we can stand.

And from that firmly anchored place, we can then decide on our next action, this next direction, with whatever vision we have, as clear as we can make it. When we do that and then ask AI, "Hey, what do you think?" rather than it giving me garbage, it now gives me an approximation of where I am. I work with it and what I understand of it, and it can work with me and what it understands of me to develop a vision that I see as ringing true. We work together. It feels meaningful to me. But then I guess we're also talking about the art of relating to anything and anyone, aren't we?

It's nice when we can engage symbiotically rather than parasitically. When we have a friend who hears and listens as we do the same. When we have a job that supports us, and we feel we can support it. When we sit with the dishes and feel engaged because we directly feel how that moment connects and clears paths for those things that we feel meaningful in our lives.

Those are good moments. So does AI help the wandering mind? I think it's the same question about any of our tools, really. Are we asking it to be us, to create our vision? Or is it there to help us realize the vision that can only come from within ourselves? Depends on whether we've anchored, recognized where we are, where we'd like to be.

From there, from that deep place of being, play, care, meaning, we can consider how to arrange for those places of symbiosis, for those gardens, if you will. Thought and AI, money and environment, self and world.

Today's piece is an improvisation called Torn. It twiddles a bit between two or three main notes with some chords floating around. Improvisations are essentially the realization of some vision in the process of creating them. Well, I guess that's really any form of creativity, isn't it? Enjoy the piece.

Mentioned in this episode:

Waves of Focus YouTube Series

Look out for new episodes of the new Waves of Focus YouTube series here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJpQS5q6yvRw

The anxiety of a task taking too long, a project starting too late, or the loud silence of an undone to-do list can be incredibly overwhelming. This is particularly true for those of us with ADHD, wandering minds, and the like.

But what if the clock on the wall isn't the only conductor we should be setting our rhythms to? This week, we explore listening to the three foundational rhythms living within ourselves, and reflect on how the anchoring technique can prove useful across them all.

Transcript

The clock. The tick tocks of the clock.

What if this so-called time blindness is less about being unaware and more that our own experience of time takes prominence? So much of our modern society runs on these external measures of time.

Of course, it does. We have to share our existence. We have to meet in places, present our deliverables. But how much gets lost when we ignore our own experience of time?

While the clock does its thing, measuring our days by the seconds and the hours, I wonder if we do ourselves a disservice losing sight of the time within ourselves. The afternoon, the evening, the time before lunch, the walk from here to there, the time to remember a song, the time of being.

Considering our own time isn't a selfish act, it's an act of self-reflection, and when we do it, we start to guide ourselves and gauge better, and sometimes even sync with the world's clocks better if we decide to.

I find three foundational rhythms that I want to call attention to. One is the breath, second is the session, and the third is the day.

Each of these are foundational because they rest in our experience.

So first, the breath. It's useful as a measure for a pause. When we can pause, which may be the most difficult of all the productivity exercises there are, we reach a higher state of agency. Agency is this skill of deciding and engaging non-reactively

It's where we can make our decisions with our greatest sense of meaning. When we can pause, we're able to connect with those things that resonate with us more deeply. That connects with what we care for, how we play, which in turn help us guide our moments, our days into mastery and meaningful work.

A second foundational fundamental rhythm of time is the session. This is the time in which our attention aligns with some intention, even if our intention is just to think about something for a moment. Every time we align our attention with an intention, we create a wave of focus. It might be disrupted, it might be rough, it might be smooth, but each one of these waves has a beginning, middle, and end.

The most experiential way to practice this is to recognize the power of a visit. You know, listen to episode four for a deeper dive on it. But for here and now, the idea is that we approach, we reach this edge of action. We pause at some work in front of us to feel whatever is at risk, whatever we are feeling we might lose, or whatever frustration is there.

We expose ourselves to the emotions of the work and hear what they have to say. And then as needed, we can mount the bravery and care that it takes to engage. At any time beyond, we can let go, whether it's done or not.

A second, a minute, an hour, these have no feeling. But an experienced time, the moment of a breath and its pause, the flow of a thought and action in their own times, those we can pay attention to.

We can feel the beginnings, the middles, and the ends. The beginning is where we approach. It's where we can get thrown off, how emotion might have us avoid something, how we might inadvertently defend against something. The middle, while we're in it, we might feel confused, overwhelmed, bored, angry, anxious.

We could feel excited, excited about something else entirely, and the daydreams that pull us out. And then there's the ending, the transition out. Whether we're done or not, that dreaded hyperfocus or exhaustion or just dropping it and discovering later, "Oh, I didn't finish that." Or maybe the rare, "Oh, I'm done."

Across all three, anchoring can always help. Check out episode fifty-seven for a deeper dive there. But for now, know that you can always grab a pen and paper and write down the thoughts that are on your mind and decide which one you wanna be with. Anchoring itself becomes this moment in time.

And then there's the third, which is the day.

Many of us keep some form of daily to-do list. We think about our habits. We wake up, hopefully every day, until one day we don't. Which, on reflection, points to a fourth cycle, the life itself, momentary or a hundred years, or either way, a single unit. But I guess that's tangent to these three. Back to the day.

If we can visit something and not finish it, that idea that we can step away before it's done and still want to come back, well then, what do we do? We can invite our future self into the next day. Hey, future you, somewhere between waking and sleeping, can you make a visit to this?

That person now has the whole cycle of the day to honor that self who sent the invitation, to then mount the courage to pay the visit, to expose themselves to the emotions of the work, and to make their own decision.

Maybe even to extend yet another invitation to that next future you down the line. Using the experienced time of the day, we practice building a trust with ourselves, a sense that something will keep doing what it's been doing so we can rely on it. In this case, ourselves. Meanwhile, we distance ourselves from alarms artificially bolted onto the mechanical clock, designed to interrupt us wherever we are.

Alarms do their job. They disrupt whatever wave we're in. But that's irritating, and I like to avoid it when I can.

So that rhythm that we return to something perhaps every day can become a current, a stream, this river of trust that's formed of three parts: the honor for the self who gave us the invitation by showing up to it; the respect for the present self by deciding from that deep breath, from that place of, "I've been here"; and the care for our future selves by asking them to return tomorrow for another invitation if we want to.

These are three fundamental cycles: the breath, the session, the day. We all share them, ADHD or not, neurodivergent or neurotypical. It's just that for some of us, they run choppy and hard to navigate, and sometimes our zoomed-in view makes the waves loom so large we lose sight of everything else. But that's another story.

Meanwhile, as a takeaway, may be that somehow you're feeling time blind. May be that your time hasn't yet found some harmony with the hands of a clock.

But what if there's some way to begin practicing that harmony? What if you picked up one thing and invited your future self to visit it sometime tomorrow, sometime between waking and sleeping? It's not something you'd have to finish. You don't even have to do anything once you're there. That single deep breath counts.

May not be easy, but there is a simplicity to it. And if you can do that, and then do it again, well, now you've got two beats. And in two beats, you have a rhythm.

Music's an art form whose very medium is time. And you may notice that it too doesn't necessarily connect with a clock. While there is a metronome, there's other ways of ar-arranging notes to, to music.

Chopin's tempo rubato, this expanding and shrinking of, of the, time and the speed of the way, we play the notes, translates literally as "stolen time."

When I play a series of quarter notes, then a series of half notes, I can tell something's shifted. It doesn't just feel longer, it feels larger, grander. And if I shift to whole notes, it can feel larger still. Yet the quarter notes and the half notes that came before simply are.

There's a relativity of time. It's not just one against the other. It seems to give time its very definition, the experience of time itself. The piece I play in this week's episode is called Feet on Pebbles in Water, and I hope you enjoy it.

Mentioned in this episode:

Waves of Focus YouTube Series

Look out for new episodes of the new Waves of Focus YouTube series here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJpQS5q6yvRw

As someone with ADHD or a wandering mind, you may have been told to keep a scratchpad on you at all times. It's a great way of capturing our thoughts in the moment so they don't flutter away as our minds are want to do.

But, a scratchpad on its own doesn't always spur us into action. And in some cases, it can turn into the thing we avoid at all costs, serving as a reminder of many things that have been left undone.

So how to we move past the scratchpad phase and turn into a powerful tool that is helpful? This week we walk through the different layers of the anchor technique. It's a tool that has worked very well for my students and for myself when feeling scattered. It's one that can be used in conjunction with other tools and often makes them more helpful.

We close with a new take on a composition I've played here before, Caregiver, in C minor.

Transcript

What do we actually do with a scratchpad? There are various ADHD talking heads out there who tell us, "Keep paper on the desk, in the car, by the bed, on your person. Capture whatever's loose. Get it out of your head."

Good advice. But you've likely noticed writing things down doesn't make them done. Sometimes it just builds the pile higher. The list itself can become something we dread. So what's the difference between a scratchpad that helps us and one that haunts us?

Again and again, students have told me how they find the anchor technique to be a powerful way of engaging work and life in general, whether they're scattered, exhausted, even when they are focused and they're just trying to figure out a way to be even more so.

Whatever system they build or use, whatever productivity method or app they try, they bring this anchoring technique with them. And I've explained it in some detail in episode sixty-two if you wanna have a listen there.

But what about it works? Isn't it just using a scratchpad? Well, this is similar to asking, "Isn't meditation just about focusing on one thing?" Well, eh, kinda, maybe, some ways, yes. But it also misses the entire point.

We engage a type of mindfulness. The trouble, I think, is in that word, mindfulness. I, I don't know about you, but the word tends to make me feel a bit of the ick. I think it's been kind of mauled by the marketing machinery of, of everything. It's so amorphous, so soft and squishy. Aren't we mindful all the time?

And even if I were to suddenly be mindful somehow, whatever that means, so what? I've still got things to do, matters to address, stuff to stuff. I like this comment that a particular Redditor pointed out and said, "Mindfulness is an unlucky translation of the Pāli word 'sati.' It's remembering to observe how mind's attention moves."

When we do engage in this mindful approach, which I'll point out in a moment, we tend to help ourselves move from scatter to smoother waves of thought where we can more deliberately, deeply, calmly engage the moment.

Okay, so well, that's all well and good. What am I talking about anyway? What is anchoring and how does it relate? So I'm gonna walk you through eight levels of how this practice of pen and paper deepens and, and how it becomes more mindful and hopefully it'll, it'll give you a sense of , what I mean by this.

Level one. We all know how to use a scratch pad, right? You write stuff and sometimes that's totally what we need to do. There's nothing more that we need to do. We just need to write what we need to do and do the things.

Typically we write a to-do list of sorts. We throw things down, remember, "Oh, I gotta do this, that, the other thing," all the things that are weighing us down and ah, doesn't that feel good to get out?

Trouble is none of it's done and that can be exhausting depending on what we've written. Sometimes we can even overwhelm ourselves looking at whatever we've just created, this awful golem ready to destroy its creator.

One thing that's missing is any respect for working or short-term memory, those parts that engage the now. These are the things that would hopefully help us stay with this present moment instead of having to juggle the zillions of things that are bubbling outside.

So level two. What if we just listed what was on our mind to do in this moment? What our mind is juggling just about the now. Those things that are not now, well, we could put those somewhere else. Those are quite likely important in their own ways. Fine. But just doing that, chances are you'll have reduced that list considerably.

Just what's going on in our mind right now? What is on my mind? We might even recognize that having these items of the now sitting on paper can now support us. We have more mental energy available to clearly decide where we want to rest our attention next. We're not being dragged down by whatever we cannot do in this moment.

In this way, anchoring answers two questions. First is, what's on my mind? Maybe something that's bubbling just below consciousness or right there. What's on my mind to do? And then secondly, where would I like my mind to be? And that's where we circle something.

Now, we're only at level two here in terms of the levels of mindfulness, if you will. So let's keep going here. So far, we've only written down the things that are likely "shoulds", but what's also in our mind are "wants."

What if we expanded? What if we allowed onto this list our current wants? I wanna play a game. I wanna step outside. I wanna watch a show. Even allowing ourselves to recognize that we have wants, that they might have a place to sit side by side with our needs, that can be a revelation.

Not the least of which, and one that can take considerable practice for some, is realizing how this sheet of paper can now shift from "shoulds" and "have tos" into a list of options, a sort of menu for the moment.

At the fourth level, even further, when we start to conceptualize more deeply how this is just about the now, we can start feeling like this paper is not here for us to serve it, it's there to serve us. It supports us.

The way we do that is we allow ourselves to throw it away. We can throw this away at any moment, whenever it no longer represents the now. Now, of course, if there's something we wanna keep, we can put that somewhere else. But here we've got this thing that is dynamically shifting to meet us in this moment.

Okay, but what about when we finish writing this beautiful list and perfect it in whatever ways, although I'm not saying that one ought to perfect it in whatever ways, but let's say you're doing it anyway, and then wander off immediately. Well, we've been impulsive, haven't we?

So we can define impulse as this sort of flow of emotion into action that at least in part has overwhelmed or bypassed consciousness. Let me say that one more time. We can define impulse as a flow of emotion into action that at least in part overwhelmed or bypassed consciousness. In other words, something unconsciously happened.

We suddenly realized we were in our emails or social media, three tabs open researching the best possible air fryers when all we wanted was a snack. Well then, what if we acknowledge those, too?

That's level five. In those moments, we catch ourselves, which we may not always be able to do, but when we can, we can return to that list, that anchor path that we've been building here, and write down where we wandered.

In that way, we're doing a few things. We're, we're making the unconscious conscious. But not only that, we're giving it a space, a place that it can rest, where our working and short-term memory can again be supported, where we can gently decide where would we like our mind to be. We're not forcing ourselves out of where we went. We're not forcing ourselves into something else. It is now an option amongst the rest. Agency is strengthened.

With these ideas so far, we've got want, impulse, need. A lovely mnemonic already. WIN. Win of the now, right? This prompt can already be helpful to help us be mindful in engaging, in helping support that sense of agency at the moment.

But there's deeper we can go yet. What if we wanna do nothing?

Level six. Don't we have that right? Of course. We can drift. D for drift. Adding to our mnemonic, we have WIND.

Level seven, deeper yet. We can recognize how our options are all formed from emotion that which is cresting into consciousness. These emotions are coming from somewhere, maybe somewhere of meaning, known, unknown, conscious, unconscious, well beyond.

We could, if we wanted, don't have to, write a word or two about where our mind is. Write one part frustrated, three parts worried, and a dash of curiosity somewhere in the corner. Maybe we start to journal or not at all, but doing so adds E for emotion to a misspelled WIND-E mnemonic.

Finally, we've got level eight. We can think about how these emotions even rest in the body, a tension in the gut, a crinkle of the eyebrows, a tightening of the breath. Our bodies are trying to tell us something, whether clear or not.

So B for body creates the mnemonic B WIND. I find there to be something deliciously paradoxical between the idea of anchoring and being wind, but it works. Anchoring is pausing, not tethering. Often when I mention anchoring, people at first think I'm talking about tying ourselves to something, and that is not at all the case.

Anchoring is about pausing. It's creating that breather, that space between the waves of focus to look at the possibilities. Again, it's about where's my mind? Where would I like it to be? And within, it reminds us of this practice of being.

Once we circle some destination around the visit, we're raising anchor, we're sailing wherever we decided to go. And even if we go somewhere else, somewhere that we didn't write down, whether impulsive or not, the idea is, have we acknowledged it? Is this where I want my mind to be?

When we do this with clarity of thought, a knowing sense of what's influencing us, emotion is less driver than messenger. We can act from those places of deepest meaning. Often that also lends us this strength for greater courage, where we can pay attention to the tensions, consider the risks, rather than leverage, if not abuse ourselves to find some force of impulse. We can instead gently and deliberately find those places that we lean into challenge, and in so doing regularly, perhaps, we lean into mastery.

Music — Caregiver

This following piece I've performed here before, I've played here before. It's called "Caregiver." I'm doing so with another variation on it. I often like to vary pieces. In fact, I don't think I've ever played the same piece the same way twice. This piece is in C minor, three-quarters time. I hope you enjoy it.

Mentioned in this episode:

Waves of Focus YouTube Series

Look out for new episodes of the new Waves of Focus YouTube series here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJpQS5q6yvRw