Rhythms of Focus

This episode examines how our minds can often wander in the middle of conversations, while reading, or tackling a project. This can lead to embarrassment and concern of being perceived as uncaring.
In reality, our minds are processing and making connections, participating in a bit of play.
Instead of suppressing our wandering mind, what might happen if you explore some of the connections and bring it into conversations or creative work?
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We do something a little different on this episode of The Rhythms of Focus. Join me for an informal piano practice session and get a glimpse of my own wandering mind as I reflect on the role of emotion in learning.
We explore the constant tension between free play and structured learning and the need to make real-time choices while respecting limits and using questions as a container for confusion.
I end with a developing piece called “Witch/Which Beauty.”
Transcript
Welcome to another episode of The Rhythms of Focus. I thought today I would sit down at the keys and just kind of, um, have a practice session, kind of describe what goes on.

The Practice of a Passion
You know, I think something that's not often talked about is, the sense of passion and mastery, when it comes to wandering minds, ADHD and the like.
There's the so-called, interest-based mind — which I still have troubles with the idea of using that phrase, because brains all flow with emotion and there are many emotions.
And, interest is an important one, certainly, but even there, Dr. William Dotson psychiatrist points out, what one client abbreviated to the Chin Up Emotions: challenge, interest, novelty, urgency, and then passion.
And I'll leave aside for a moment that there are many other emotions as well that can be very driving, even for ADHD and wandering minds, and perhaps even especially so.
But for the moment, I just wanted to get into this idea of passion, which I, to some degree, maybe even entirely, equate with mastery. Because mastery is a path, it's something we do over time, it's, it's not a line that we cross so much, although I think that idea can be put in there too.
So the idea of mastery, it's in many ways simple, it's that we be with a thing every day. If you can do that, you know, here I have this practice I picked up from my piano teacher from years past who said, touch the keys every day. Which has since translated into this idea of a visit every day, being with something every day.
And if you do that, there's a good chance you're on the path of mastery. And there's something incredibly organizing to that process.
Anyway, I'll just play a piece here. I like minor keys.
I often play in what are called a modal style of playing, where I stay within a scale.
This piece that I'll play here is called "Speaking Spirits."

A Balance of Play and Structure
Whenever I sit down to practice, I have to balance there's part of me that wants to play and goof off and go wherever the heck I want to go. And this other part of me that says, well, if you just do that, nothing will get learned, nothing will happen, nothing will grow, there is no structure.
And this is kind of a major issue, if you will, for wandering minds in general. This tug of war between the ideas of play and structure. We manage this with the ideas of agency that we are able to pause and make a decision and say, okay, what if I go in that direction?
And then at that point we throw ourselves into play once again. But it becomes a real time issue, it's a constant thing.
For example, if I am playing a piece and I'm enjoying it, there's this part of me that wants to keep enjoying it, just wants to keep going with it, keep going with that flow and finding where it goes and all that.
But, if I let it go on too long, it grows bitter. You know, there's a, I think a philosophical, something about the respect of death in that. But there's also, this feeling of, I need to respect limits, right? It's, it's that there's something to learn in that.
Anyway, I think I'm going off on a tangent now.

Sitting with Frustration
Let me tell you what I've been studying lately. So I've been looking at this book, "The Jazz Piano Book" by Mark Levine. Bought this many years ago when I was in college. And when I had looked at it then, it didn't make much sense to me. There were these things that were written in there, these chords.
I'm just flipping through it now if you hear the paper rustling, I was looking at the chords and I'm like, where are you coming up with this?
I'm even looking at it on page two and it says that there's a G7 cord. And there's no G in the chord. Like what are you doing? The G7 flat 9 it starts in an F in the base, and then there's a B, and there's an E, A, G, sharp and a B, and he calls that a G7 flat 9.
And maybe it is. But there's no G and that just bugs me. And that just in itself — I ran into a couple of incidents like that in this book and that was enough to stop me. That one stopped me many years ago, and only recently have I come back and started to play with it. So if I take that chord that I just mentioned, let me play this here.
Right? That's supposedly somewhere in there, a G7 flat 9. Here's the 7 here's the major third, which makes it a major key. This E is a sixth, which he doesn't mention anywhere. And then there's this G sharp, which is the flat 9. And again, we've got this B at the top, which is a repeat of the B before, which is that major third.
Now that resolves into a C— is it a dominant? Yeah, dominant C. But once again, here's a 9 in here in the right hand and a sixth and a third in the base, the major third of the E. So it goes and I'm like, how? How, why is that the cord? What are you talking about anyway? So once again, I got stumped.
Using Questions to Contain Confusion
So what do I do with that? I think the important thing is to be able to add questions to things and recognize the question as being the container.
So I look at the thing and say, my question is essentially, huh? Just H-U-H question mark. Huh? Then I can resolve that a little further into, well, as I was talking about, I don't see these, in one case, I don't see the root note in the chord at all. And the other one, it's at the very top. Does that count and what are the sixths in there doing?
So anyway, I make these questions. Whether you understand the music of it or not, it's regardless of whatever field you're in, you'll have your own unique questions to you. But the questions do, help contain the confusion.
And so once I do that, I can start flipping through and going, okay, well maybe I'll just play these chords a little bit here and there, and then I'll get to something that might make more sense and I can come back to this.
I can resolve into something about this and ah, you know, I get to the next little bit here and it starts talking about triads. Oh, okay. These make sense. The C major triad, here you go, starts with a major third and then a minor third on top of that.
And you call that a C major triad. There's a major, that's a minor. We got the C minor triad, which reverses it. You got the minor in the bottom and the major top. Right. So you got just basically you move the middle note down a half step. There you go. Diminish, you move the top note down a half step, which means there's two minor triads in there.
And then you got the augmented triad where you've got a major in the bottom again, and then another major on top. So it's all just a mix of different majors and minors and how they all play out.
And you keep playing with these things and realize, oh yeah, I could do that, I could do that and then, oh my goodness, is this hard? The simple, supposedly simple, minor 2 7, 2 seventh, and then you go to a major, a dominant seven for the fifth. And go to the, root note or little, major seventh in that guy.
It's a nice little combination you got there, you know. Sounds good.
And then you just goof off. So it is like, okay, there's a part of me that just wants to start playing and then I start playing.
What if I did a minor there?
Would it still resolve well?
Yeah. And what if I throw in other things?
And then I don't know what I'm doing. Then I want to go back to something that has structure, something I can hold onto and say, yeah, I can make some sounds. And I kinda listen to myself. I say, you know, what am I interested in playing right now? And maybe something I've been doing recently.
Here's one called "Witch/Which Beauty" that I kind of like.
Anyway, that one still needs work. I'm playing around with it. You can tell that there's some structured kind of form in there — or at least I can tell.
Anyway. Not sure if you guys are enjoying this sort of thing. Uh, I thought why not do an episode where I'm just kind of making some sounds and talking about it out loud.
If you're enjoying this and would like to hear more of these, let me know and maybe I can make that happen. Alright, till next time.
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The Weekly Wind Down is an exploration of wandering minds, task and time management, and more importantly, how we find calmer focus and meaningful work.

When does AI help—and when does it hinder our agency? In this thoughtful episode of Rhythms of Focus, we explore the delicate balance between using powerful tools like AI and staying connected to our own creative process. Together, we reflect on ancient wisdom, modern technology, and the vital tension that fuels genuine discovery.
Listeners will learn:
• How the “tension of not knowing” nurtures creativity.
• Why AI can both empower and erode agency.
• A mindful way to stay engaged with our work’s unfolding.
Featuring the original piano piece “If You Feed a Squirrel.”
For more, subscribe and visit rhythmsoffocus.com.

#ADHD #WanderingMinds #MindfulProductivity #Agency #CreativeFocus #ADHDAdults #AIandCreativity #FlowState #IntentionalWork #RhythmsOfFocus

Transcript
I've got a problem. I don't know how this works. I don't know how to write this. I don't know the best order. I don't know where this new idea fits. Maybe I can get AI to do this. Wow. AI has become quite the thing, more than a flavor of the month it's found its way into so many of our apps and tools.
Using a simple Google search now returns with an AI formulation of my query first.
There are AI apps that are used to, break down tasks and help us get moving forward. There are AI things that help us think through how to build an entire book among other possibilities. But the more powerful a tool I find, the more caution it requires. So how much caution does AI require?
The More Powerful the Tool, the More Caution it Requires
There's a rather ridiculous statement. I remember hearing in medical school a sort of backhanded joke towards this pharmaceutical world. Something like this, "Hey, there's a new medication let's use it before it has some side effects."
We often look around at our tools as these unmitigated positives, especially when they first start out.
Some promise, some efficiency, sometimes some clear boost to something we desire opens the door and there's no going back.
As humans, we use tools. The spoken word itself is a tool by which we ask and receive our wants and needs and nuance.
Socrates' Warnings Against the Written Word
Even the written word though can be of concern.
I wanna quote a story of Socrates, but before I do, it's important, dear listener, for you to know that I found this reference using ai. The story goes that an ancient God called Theuth first discovered numbers and calculations, geometry and astronomy, as well as the games of checkers and dice, but above all else writing.
And this God Theuth was excited about his inventions and came to the King of Egypt, Thamos, and he would describe the positives and negatives of these inventions. And one day he said, "oh, king, here's something that once learned will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memory. I've discovered a potion for memory and for wisdom."
Thamos, however, replied, "Oh most expert Theuth, one man can give birth to the elements of an art, but only another can judge how they can benefit or harm those who will use them. And now, since you are the father of writing your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are.
"In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it. They will not practice using their memory because they'll put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside completely on their own.
"You've not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding. You provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they would've come to know much, while for the most part, they will know nothing.
"And they will be difficult to get along with since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so."
Now, even as a writer myself, I absolutely love that paragraph. There are plenty of times where I thought, for example, that I was ready for an exam 'cause I went over the notes over and over again only to realize that it wasn't that I'd known the material, I hadn't remembered them from the inside. I could just recognize them.
So here we are with ai and again, the more powerful the tool, the more caution it requires.
A Discovery without AI
I want to describe a recent experience I had.
I'm inviting you into some of my thinking process lately about this concept I've been working on called The Eight Gears of Work. I go into some detail about it in episode 33, and in short, these eight gears are as follows. There's "Be", how we are without any intention, I should say.
There's consider where we reflect on it. There's our approach where we start dealing with the emotions involved. There's a visit where we are with the work, whatever we do, whether we do anything or not, there's our beginning where we start to iterate. There's complete, which is where we dedicate ourselves to completing the task or project.
There's schedule where we line ourselves up in some synchronization with other people or other times. And lastly, there's perform, where we do things with real live stakes.
And in any case, I was thinking of it as a way to represent, how to manage our sense of, I don't wanna, in the midst of it all,
So what's the spectrum here? What is the line from one end to the other? And my first response was effort.
But then I quickly realized that that was wrong, but I didn't know what was right. Is it engagement? Is it agency? Is it that extension into the world? How does it relate to those? I don't want a feelings. Why is it that the further you go, the stronger those feelings can become?
I had a strong temptation to take the currently 200 plus slide keynote presentation, all my process thoughts on the matter, and then maybe, uh, however many thoughts I have in my my Devon Think app where I have a ton of text files and just throw 'em into my AI app.
And say, here, please make sense of this, but what was that impulse?
The Vital Tension of Not Knowing
There's this tension that comes from not knowing. Creativity is about discovering something in the act of creating it. When we don't know something, we hold on to that not knowing. Maybe we write our questions, maybe we write what we wanna explore, but that feeling, that tension that lives within us when we get an answer to something from elsewhere, we risk bypassing that important path of growth through ourselves, where that release of tension that would come from discovery would create an effect within ourselves.
In the regular visits to the project. I kept coming to the words extension and engagement, and I suddenly realized this focus on agency, this skill and ability to decide and engage non-reactively, not on doing, for example.
So in this reflection, I came to this realization, oh, I've modeled this perspective of agency. Now, I don't know how entertaining this is to you, but for me it was important because now I have a way to describe and help people with those "i don't wanna" feelings in an even better way. I have a more solid foundation within myself that I could then translate.
If I had asked AI to solve my problem, maybe it would've come up with something like this maybe. But I doubt it, more importantly, it was crucial that I did not rely on it to prematurely resolve that sense of tension within me.
Tension and Agency
That tension without irony is exactly what agency is about. Our ability to sit non reactively with our emotions, with our sensations, where ideally, that they can no longer be driver, but instead messenger, had I allowed that tension to be a driver, I would've jumped right into the AI to give me the answer, Hey, tell me what, what, where I need to go.
And so AI is certainly powerful. But I wonder how much of our recent concerns that are bandied about on the internet relate to this idea? Could AI be something by which we abandon our sense of agency?

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Ever found your whole day thrown off by “a thing at five”? In this episode of Rhythms of Focus, we explore the quiet storm that happens when time anxiety, fear of distraction, and perfectionism collide. Together, we reflect on why even the simplest tasks can feel impossible when something looms on the calendar—and how we can practice agency and gentler rhythms to bring flow back into our days.
Listeners will uncover how our relationship to endings influences our ability to begin, and how mindful transitions can help us rebuild trust in our focus. We unpack four subtle fears—the fear of the groove, of distraction, of the unfinished, and of courage—and discover how embracing closure can unlock momentum.

Link to ADHDinos - a delightful comic on ADHD: https://www.instagram.com/adhdinos/?hl=en

Takeaways:
• Recognize how fear of endings quietly blocks beginnings.
• Learn mindful strategies to release time vigilance and ease into focus.
• Rebuild self-trust through small, intentional completions.
This episode also features an original piano improvisation, “From Fall,” a contemplative piece in a minor key that mirrors the mood of transition and soft courage.

For more, subscribe and visit rhythmsoffocus.com.
#ADHD #WanderingMinds #MindfulFocus #TimeAnxiety #ADHDProductivity #NeurodivergentLiving #SelfTrust #FlowState #FocusRhythms #EmotionalRegulation

Transcript
There's a wonderful ADHD based comic called ADHDinos Two Dinosaurs talk to each other, and in this particular comic, one of 'em says to the other, Hey, what's wrong? You seem stressed. The other says, well, I've got a thing at five. Well, that's six hours from now. You still have the whole day ahead. I'm confident you can accomplish a lot in that time.
The other one lying on the floor. says my day has absolutely ruined
Dealing with "A thing at 5"
What do we do when we have a thing at five?
We could seemingly do any number of things before five, consciously, rationally, we might even be able to calculate. Such and such would take an hour and that would take half an hour and this errand and that report and the dishes and whatever, and yet we're paralyzed.
Why can't we seem to get much of anything done at all until that time? I think an important clue comes from the paralysis itself. Because paralysis stems from fear. And in fact there are likely several fears. So I'd like to go through about four of them here and see where we get.
Fear of the Groove
The first fear is the groove.
What if I get into a groove? Seemingly getting into a groove would be a wonderful thing. We get into the work, diving in and maybe even enjoying a sense of developing meaning somewhere within and through our lives.
But there's that hyper focus. There may well have been times in our life where we got into a thing and just couldn't seem to get ourselves out.
Maybe we're thinking, Ugh, I can't let go now. I've been procrastinating on it forever. I'm in it now, and I never know if I'll ever be able to come back. And so what if I do a little more now? Oh, I can still make it to that next thing. Maybe I'll be a few minutes late. That's okay. Oh, no, I'm missing it. Oh, no. I'm ashamed that I'm terribly late. I may as well not go at this point.
Yeah, I think a number of us have probably been through that one. The fear of not being able to stop is a real one. There have been times where we've not been able to stop.
We might even fear that we would entirely lose sight of the thing at five. Our sense of time has likely not been our ally, and so we do not trust ourselves for good reason.
Maybe we've tried alerts and we blow those off. Maybe someone calls and we ignore the phone. Without the sense that we might be able to break away, we feel doomed and the day is ruined.
Fear of Distractions
The second fear is that of distraction, mental turbulence, interference to working memory. We may well have a history of getting distracted in whatever it is we're doing, environment or anxiety or some other strong emotion, thinking about plans, daydreaming, incomplete projects and decisions floating into mind, stumbling into doing two or even three things at once, losing a sense of connection between this and that, flooding ourselves with confusion.
As we then seek relief in some emotion that might bring some cohesion to our mind state, whether it's playful, whether it's urgency, we're just looking for the relief of one thing.
All of it can have us lose sight of that thing at five. And so together with a lack of trust in ourselves that we wouldn't be distracted from any signal to remind us of the thing at five, we stay vigilant.
So to compensate, we keep our eye on the clock, hoping we don't look away at the wrong time. But as a result of this, we can't invest ourselves in the thing that we'd like to get into before five.
Vigilance is exhausting, paralyzing us with this understandable fear.
Fear of the Unfinished
The third fear is what might be called the unfinished symphony. What if I can't get back into the groove? Let's say we do start a thing before five and we're able to stop, but what if we've got this history of leaving projects incomplete? The worry is that we would now risk placing yet another thing in the pile of incomplete projects shaming us from the corner.
When we're working, we often don't know how something might appear in the end, how we might get there, and often both. And as a result, we cannot guess the time it would take. And unfortunately with the lack of trust in ourselves that we could end something on time or pick it back up if left incomplete, we're left with the impossible goal of trying to figure out if the thing can be done in the time we have available.
As soon as there's a thing at five, our time has become limited and our work is shot.
Fear of Courage
And I add one more fear, which may or may not relate, but somehow it seems to fit in my own head.
What if the thing we want to get into before five requires some courage?
Dealing with a sense of maybe we're not intelligent enough to do a thing. Maybe the depth of field of it is too vast for us to comprehend. Maybe we're too old to start now, too young to start now. We'd never be able to get good enough among any other possibility.
Similar to our lack of confidence to estimate time here, we lack a confidence in our own abilities, which then would translate to, I'm not sure how long this would take. The work of mounting courage, acknowledging the risk, knowing we might fail, are not insubstantial, and while we're frozen in vigilance, the resources to mount that courage are not available.
Fears of Endings
Common to all of these fears are the endings. In other words, our difficulty in starting is often related to our fear of how we may or may not be able to handle the endings. If we can practice how we end things, we would then be in a better position to start them.
If we feel we can set something aside that we can trust ourselves to return, or better yet make a clear decision as to where it does or does not fit in our lives, and then stay out of our way in the meantime, we can start.
If we feel that we might be able to not only hear an alert, but it's well positioned to help us transition when it felt like we could smoothly do so, so that the work could then stay out of our way until it meaningfully be picked up again, that we could trust ourselves to be able to make those decisions and engage, we can start.
More fundamentally, we'd feel that the thing at five is more or less safe because we can end.
We practice mindfully bringing our mind to the momentum of work. It's not that we have bicycle strength brakes, it's that we are like a boat on water. We can practice our endings and as we do so, we improve our beginnings.
I'll end with a quote from a book that I've cited in a recent episode. The, uh, Hagakure book of the Samurai. in the Kamagata area, they have a sort of tiered lunchbox they use for a single day. When flower viewing upon returning. They throw them away, trampling them underfoot.
The end is important in all things.
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The Weekly Wind Down is an exploration of wandering minds, task and time management, and more importantly, how we find calmer focus and meaningful work.

When every choice feels like too much—what to do, where to go, even what to eat—indecision can quietly drain our focus and energy. In this episode of Rhythms of Focus, we reflect on the psychology and mindfulness of decision-making for adults with ADHD and wandering minds. Together, we explore how to turn hesitation into awareness and uncertainty into creative flow.
Listeners will discover practical ways to approach decisions with clarity and gentleness, learning how to work with their ADHD rhythms instead of against them. This is not about forcing productivity—it’s about developing mindful structure, emotional insight, and trust in our intuitive process.
In this episode, we explore:
• How emotions guide decision-making and shape focus for ADHD minds.
• A mindfulness-based technique to ease decision fatigue and anxiety.
• How to transform choices into creative, intentional acts of agency.
The episode closes with an original piano composition, Icicle Drips, to help listeners ground in reflection and calm.

For more, subscribe and visit rhythmsoffocus.com.

#ADHD #WanderingMinds #MindfulFocus #ADHDMindfulness #DecisionFatigue #NeurodivergentCreativity #CreativeFocus #IntentionalLiving #ADHDWellness #MindfulProductivity
Transcript

Should I or shouldn't I? What should I have for dinner? What if I did this or maybe I should do that. But if I do this, then what if it goes wrong? Well, if I don't decide, well, that's a decision too, isn't it?
Decisions do weigh heavy, don't they? What gives?

Matters of Great and Little Concern
There's a quote I like that I got from, watching this movie called Ghost Dog. It's a Jim Jarmusch film, main character, quotes from the book Hagakure, the Book of the Samurai,
" Matters of great concern, should be treated lightly matters of small concern should be treated seriously."
I dunno how well I follow that advice, but it is something curious.
The Weight of Decisions
Decisions are in no way simple. Even the seemingly small ones, like deciding what to order at a restaurant, making small purchase, these can weigh us down into paralysis. Meanwhile, large ones like considering a change of professions, a move and more, these can plague us. They occupy the crevices of our every day, miring us in this anxieties, fears, regrets, and more.
Sometimes we don't even realize we had a decision we could make until some regret form somewhere later, too little, too late. Or we leave them undecided as they create and sustain multiple waves and storms within us, worsening that scatter of a wandering mind.
So decisions can certainly weigh heavy. When we decide, we cut, the word having the same Latin root as homicide, for example.
We go this way and not any of the others. The universe of possibilities collapse into one.
In fact, one piece of advice for decision leverages this, where we use a coin flip, not because we follow where it lands so much as we realize what's important to us. Something that we don't see or feel in our emotional landscapes until that coin is in the air. And this gives us a clue.
Risk and Loss - Decisions and Consciousness
Every decision involves risk or loss. If it didn't, there wouldn't be a decision. We'd simply act. Consciousness itself may only exist for the reason of decision if we are to adopt a neuropsych analytic point of view. That even echoes William James from 1890 who had said "consciousness seems to arise only in response to a problem."
It's like the brain doesn't call attention to itself until some system of pattern matching is off.
We have tension, frustration, excitement, play care. Emotion- all of these cresting into thought as they brush into consciousness.
Decisions rest on the sea of sensation, intention and emotion. Emotions connect into and through the deepest recesses of our mind and beyond emanating from meaning that we can only partially understand.
We sail these seas from a singular point flowing on and within this moment of now, and we think we decide which emotion, which wave of focus will I sail.
Agency. This ability and skill to decide and engage non-reactivity begins when we pause, examining these emotions as they are. We can maybe sense the meanings behind them.
What are the associations? What comes to mind?
Decisions as Creative Acts
What we might sense then is that decisions themselves could even be a creative act. As these ideas do come to mind, we can place one with another. Set this option with that until no new information comes to mind there.
And if decisions can be a creative act, well, what if we supported them in the ways we would support a creative act?
For example, what if we were to hold that intention to decide to capture it in the power of a task? But not just any task, a regularly repeating considered task.
For example, let's say we're ruminating on the decision to move, the ideas keep coming to mind, weighing us down. They do so because the decision's never completed and it has no boundaries. It doesn't have a place. So it is given free reign to spill over into every thought. By writing a regularly repeating task that says something like, "consider moving." We can give that decision a place, a time within our day for us to reflect, to be creative with it.
We can give it our full attention, at least for a few moments, and sometimes that makes all the difference. If that task can appear somewhere we trust we can see it, if we can take that moment that maybe a deep breath worth of time, we can allow the thoughts and more importantly, the emotions, the reflections to come to mind.
Ideally, we would give these thoughts space to form and settle.
At that point. We've fully acknowledged the decision and the options that are there. We might feel the risk, we might feel the anxiety, but they're not changing.
With this structure, we have a place for a decision to rest, to build with that caring, creative spirit, rather than only be fueled by anxiety and the fear of regret.
It's there that we can feel the risk of one option or another. Mount the courage and then cut.
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