Rhythms of Focus

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 list was rarely the problem
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.
A prompt is about time
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.
A good prompt leaves the deciding to us
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.
Where good prompts already live
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.
The kind you can stop checking
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.
A takeaway
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?

Decision, Consideration, and the Drain
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.

Twenty Games at Once

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.

When Threads Relate, and When They Don't

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.

The Pause the Machine Hands Us
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.
Music — Waves on a Nights Shore
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.

Transcript
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?
The Stakes Are Real
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.
A Weight of History
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.
When Accommodations Become Apologies
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.
A Practice in Presenting Strengths
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?
Music — Weight in Arms
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.

The Whirlwind
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.
Construction or Destruction?
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.
The Tinker Man Tinkers
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?
Please Think for Me
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

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.
Music — Torn
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.
Be there at eight. Be done by three. How long will this go? Why can't I know how long this will take? Do I have time blindness?
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?
The time within ourselves
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.

The breath
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.
The session
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.
The day
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.
The takeaway
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 — Feet on Pebbles in Water
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