Productivity

You wake up. It’s dark. Somewhere a fan is humming. Your eyes adjust. You’re in a container. Metal walls, a few small windows, and through them: stars. Just stars. No Earth anywhere. There’s a note taped to the wall: “You have everything you need to survive. Nothing goes in, nothing goes out. Good luck.” I bring this thought experiment up when I’m in the right mood with friends. It sounds like science fiction. What it actually does is strip away the thing most of us never question: the assumption that there is an “outside” that absorbs our mistakes and refills our supplies. ...

For context on how my brain works, see Working with an AuDHD Brain. Here is the smallest version of my entire productivity system: task add "Write the intro" +next task 1 start That is it. The task is recorded, the clock is running, and I can see both in under a second without touching a mouse. Everything else in this post builds on top of those two lines. The stack is taskwarrior for task management, timewarrior for time tracking, and vit as a vim-style interface on top. Keyboard-first, terminal-native, plain text on disk. ...

For a long time I thought the problem was me. I have AuDHD: the combination of autism and ADHD. Specifically ADHD-PI, the inattentive variant, without the hyperactivity most people picture when they hear ADHD. For years I treated that as a defect to overcome. I bought the planners. I read the productivity books. I told myself that next Monday I’d finally be disciplined. This post is the story of how that approach failed, what I built instead, and why the systems I ended up depending on turn out to be good engineering for anyone. ...

As a kid I had a word for the things that fascinated me: unbreakable. Indestructible was never quite right, because indestructible means something that never breaks. Unbreakable is the better word. It means something that keeps working even after it breaks. I remember exactly when the fascination started. A photo of an A-10 Thunderbolt II that came back from a mission with half a wing gone, the tail in tatters, and the fuselage full of holes. That thing still brought its pilot home. ...