Disclaimer: I’m having a very ADHD day, so if this post feels a little disjointed, that’s why. Even doing the interview for this post, I caught myself and said out loud, “this is kind of a disjointed interview and I am very distracted today.”

Yesterday I was supposed to do schoolwork.

I sat down around six in the morning. I had already started doomscrolling, then I turned on YouTube to see what the algorithm thought I needed to watch that day. It gave me Tina Huang’s “10X Productivity in 10 Minutes”.

She talked about a bunch of productivity techniques, and one of them was a little desk app that looks like an avocado, basically a timer, but you can add notes to it, and it logs into an Obsidian markdown file. Then you get an agent, basically a life coach, that looks at that log and does analytics on it, how much time you’re spending on what, and gives you hints on how to save time and be more efficient. I saw it and thought that might work for me, so I decided to build one.

I built it in Codex, one of the AI coding tools I use. Codex does better with creative design work, and I use Claude Code, another one, for the technical stuff. It took about 30 minutes to get the first version running. That one was a capybara named Cappy. Then I looked at the little Cthulhu plush on my bookcase and changed it. I like capybaras. I don’t have any problem with capybaras, but I’m kind of a Cthulhu man myself. I’ve got Cthulhu on my desktop background, Cthulhu plushies, a lot of Cthulhu things.

The monster is chubby pixel art in sea green and a couple of other green colors. It sits on my desktop and blinks. It has a timer for when I want to give myself 25 minutes to work on something, and a stopwatch for when I just want to know how long something takes. It makes a chime when the timer is done. The notes go into Obsidian.

I haven’t done the life-coach analysis yet. The monster is just sitting there logging in silence. I did also make a Grok bot persona named Mr. Miyagi, and eventually that bot is supposed to read the log and hold me accountable. So far I have mostly been playing with the monster and setting timers.

I hyperfocused on being productive and didn’t do my schoolwork because I was too busy trying to be productive.

Every once in a while I catch myself going off the rails, having one of those dog-squirrel moments, like Hammy from Over the Hedge. All over the place. I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all. The problem is I know what the problem is and I can’t stop, or don’t stop, the problem. That is why I keep building reminders and tools around myself. I am banking on one sacrifice day turning into more productive days later.

Right now I get up around five in the morning because my body wakes me up and I can’t go back to sleep. My computer is set up just outside the kitchen. I sit down, usually watch some YouTube, and turn on the extra TV I use as a board.

The board sits on my desk where I can see it just by turning my head. It updates once in the morning and stays on all day. It has the weather, what I am doing that day, what I should be doing right now, what dinner is, a couple of countdowns and percentages for my projects. That morning it said I had 15 days to an FSNP milestone, one of my school deadlines, and 21 days to the move.

I need that thing sitting there. I am bad at to-do lists because first I have to fill out the list, which means remembering to do that. Then I have to remember to look at it. Then I have to check things off. Those are three different places where I will forget the to-do list exists. When I remember something now, I tell my AI personal assistant, Z4nn, and keep the board in front of my face.

The board also tells me I have 28 active projects, four completed and three paused. I did the math out loud: 28 active, plus 4 completed is 32, plus 3 paused is 35. Is that right? I don’t know. I think it is. The only reason I knew any of those numbers was because they were on the board. Otherwise I would have had to go count them manually.

Some of the active projects will never really end. Preston, my research agent and one of the standing AI projects I keep running, keeps getting updated. Then there is a video game for my kids and friends, and a separate MUD for my kids, friends and me, and a lot of other things I started because building with AI is my shiny thing right now. I’m a ferret about it. I see something shiny and I want to pick it up and play with it. I love putting an idea down, having it built and then getting to play with it.

I have had ADHD my whole life. I was diagnosed as a kid, and after I got on medicine I did much better in school. Then I stopped taking it for years, really decades. I learned how to deal with ADHD. Not very well, but I was able to get by, and it made everything harder.

When I was in the Coast Guard, I could have ADHD but I could not be on medication for it. I thought that was the stupidest thing ever. They could acknowledge that I had a problem and then not let me fix it. I did 20 years without medication and I was able to excel at my job. I also think it would have been easier if I had been medicated. One hundred percent.

I am on medication now. I am a proponent of medication because why make it harder for yourself? It is not a magic pill. I still have to do things, and I still find it hard to concentrate. It makes it easier. I don’t have to fight my own mind as hard.

ADHD is real. There is a difference between a kid having a lot of energy and trying to sit down and learn a subject when your mind will not let you do it. School is super hard for me to concentrate on right now. There are hard things I need to do, and I would rather do the fun things, but I have to be an adult and do them.

Sometimes the same brain gives me almost superpower focus. These hyperfixations are why I am learning about AI faster than I thought was possible.

The accountability part is bigger than a timer. For years I was married, and my ex-wife kept me in check. Now I don’t have that. I have nobody keeping me in check, so I needed to create one.

I named the Grok bot persona Mr. Miyagi because of The Karate Kid. He took Daniel LaRusso and taught him to focus and channel some of his aggression. I remember pretending to wax the cars and paint the fence. I wanted a Mr. Miyagi in my life. Now I am going to train this bot up and see if it can keep me productive and keep me on track.

It is outsourcing the ability to say no to myself, to a robot. Yeah. It is how I am dealing with it right now, so take it for what it is.