Please stop telling me my brain is special — There are two kinds of people when it comes to ADHD. On the one side, there are people like Dr. Russell Barkley, whose research has led him to call ADHD “the diabetes of the psychology”: It’s a chronic disorder that must be managed every day to prevent the secondary harms…

Turns out it’s been with me my whole life. — I am an idea machine. I laugh when I get the spam emails promising yet another course in “how to be more creative.” How is that a problem? I can come up with a dozen ideas for articles, games, stories, projects, you name it, all before my morning coffee is…

There are only two things you need to know about me to frame what I’m about to tell you: First, I’m fifty-three years old. Second, according to my therapists, I almost certainly have been living with untreated ADHD for as long as I can remember. I write a lot about…

All that research into user experience? Money well spent. — We read a lot about how effective app companies are at manipulating our monkey brains with techniques designed to pray upon our desire for pattern, recognition, narrative, and other little dopamine triggers. However, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it so elegantly and clearly done as when I lost my…

And it turned out to be an easy fix. — Let’s get one thing out of the way first: I use a password management program. I’ve used many, from the posh 1Password to the pragmatic team-based LastPass to the nerdy KeePass before finally settling on the amazingly convenient Apple Keychain. This is only sort of that kind of problem. The…

My middle daughter and her spouse took a vacation to New Zealand recently, giving me and my partner the opportunity to watch our darling one-year old granddaughter for a couple of weeks. We were pretty confident in our abilities to handle a one-year-old; my partner had been a professional nanny…

Got a minute? Then you got a practice. — “Surely you can sit still for a minute.” That’s how I was going to start my meditation meetup last week. It was set up by a local networking group, and I was all set to go — but it got “indefinitely rescheduled” (so much nicer than “cancelled”) at the last…

Here’s why it wasn’t a waste of time. — Based on the data, articles about technical subjects do well online. If you key them to specific apps and problems they perform even better, so I had every expectation that my article How to Import Data From a Table in Craft into a Notion Database would boost my reading stats…

Turns out the secret to good writing was not what I thought it was. — As milestones go, it’s a nice one. The number “1000” has a nice ring to it, and when you apply it to something like “articles I’ve written” it has a certain gravitas. My posts tend to average about a thousand words each, so that means I’ve written about 1,000,000 words…