A few years ago I was in a meeting with an old friend. For the first thirty minutes I was the most locked-in person in the room, finishing his sentences, three steps ahead of the agenda, completely present. Then, somewhere around minute thirty one, the interest drained out of me like someone had pulled a plug, and although I stayed in my chair I was no longer in the meeting.
He watched it happen and laughed, and asked if we should get me some Ritalin.
He was joking. He was also the first person to say out loud what I had spent a career quietly engineering around.
The signs were always there
Another friend put it more gently. When I am with you, they said, I feel like the only person in the world. They meant it as a compliment, and then they finished the thought: and the moment I am not, you disappear, the calls go unanswered, and weeks pass. They were describing the same thing from the other side. The total presence, and the shadow it casts when it moves.
Once you see the pattern it turns up everywhere. I have never finished a book the way you are supposed to; I read the first few chapters, feel the shape of the argument, and go straight to the last ones. My gym routine has been restarted more times than some of my companies. I can build a working product in a weekend and take a week to send one boring email.
I am not going to claim a diagnosis, because there was no clinic, no test, no letter with my name on it. But I am clearly somewhere on the spectrum of ADHD, the signs were always there, and I understood it embarrassingly late, because by the time anyone might have caught it I had already, without knowing it, built my whole life around it.
I never had a productivity system. I had a coping mechanism I hadn't named.
The range on it is brutal
ADHD is a spectrum, and nothing like the joke version. The range on it is brutal.
At my end it looks like restlessness you can dress up as drive: hours that vanish inside what felt like twenty minutes, a strange wall between you and a task you genuinely care about, a dozen tabs open in your head at any hour, rabbit holes that swallow whole days and occasionally come back holding something valuable.
At the other end it is debilitating. I have met people who cannot reliably get out of bed, whose careers and relationships keep collapsing under a wiring they never chose and cannot explain to anyone who does not share it. If that is your end of the spectrum, nothing here is a lecture, and I am not a doctor. These are field notes from the lucky end. High functioning, they call it, which mostly means my coping arrived before my crisis did.
The accidental hack
Looking back, my whole career was the wiring choosing its own environments.
Urbaneye, my first company, was a digital agency with clients across a dozen industries, and everyone told me focus was the smarter play. But the variety was the point. Every day brought a different problem in a different vertical, and the restlessness that would have sunk me in a narrower job kept the place fed instead. Network18 was a newsroom, where the whole job resets every hour. Then the Times Group, where for the first time I had an army, and I discovered that delegation is what a restless mind looks like when it finally gets permission to let go. Later I ran several companies at once, and people called it ambition. Some of it was. Some of it was the engine asking for fuel.
Underneath it all sat one rule I never said out loud: do it today, because tomorrow I may not care. It sounds like a hustle poster. It was closer to a confession, because I was racing my own interest before it expired.
And around that rule a system grew. Every day gets one big task and two smaller ones, chosen the night before. The day gets blocked into rooms, each company lives in its own room, and the rooms do not visit each other. The gym is maintenance, and so is sleep. It took me years to see that what I had built was a containment system, and it worked so well that nobody, including me, thought to ask what it was containing.
The bill
None of it was free.
It has cost me career stability, or at least the look of it. There is a permanent itch to build and to move, and when it is not fed I do not feel calm, I feel stagnant. I left the Times Group when staying was the obvious move. I sold Scootsy a beat before the market proved the thesis, and I have written elsewhere about what that one still costs me. Some of those exits were right. A few of them were the itch dressed up as strategy, and I carry the regrets.
It has cost me friendships. Focus mode reads as coldness from the outside, and people do not understand how you can be the most present person in their life on a Tuesday and unreachable for the three weeks after. The honest explanation, that my attention was never fully mine to give, sounds like an excuse, so for years I did not offer it.
And it kept me quiet. I have built under the radar for most of my life, in an industry that runs on personal branding. Some of that is taste. Some of it, I suspect, is that staying unseen was easier than explaining the pattern.
Why everyone suddenly has it
It can seem like everyone has ADHD now. I do not think the wiring got more common. Two other things happened at the same time.
The world got rebuilt to exploit exactly this wiring. The reel, the infinite scroll, the autoplay episode: an entire economy now runs on capturing dopamine, and it is very good at its job. Minds that were quietly manageable for decades are being strip-mined in real time, and wiring that used to hide inside a busy life is being dragged into the open.
The same machine also manufactures what it profits from. Give any brain six hours of short-format content a day and it starts to behave like an ADHD brain, with the fragmented attention, the cold starts and the restlessness of the real thing. A generation is diagnosing itself from thirty-second videos, and some of them are not wired differently at all, their attention has simply been farmed. The cruel part is that both groups land in the same place, feeling broken, holding a label and no method.
The world got better at farming attention.
The real misinformation is the version that ends at the label. ADHD as an identity. I can't, because. The wiring is real and the struggle is real, but the sentence that comes after the label matters more than the label. I have watched people build a life around what they cannot do, and I have watched people at every point on the spectrum work out what their version of the engine is actually for.
The ones who made it work are not hiding, and up close the pattern looks almost familiar. David Neeleman built JetBlue on this wiring, and says that offered the choice between being normal and keeping his ADD, he would keep the ADD. Michael Phelps got his diagnosis at nine, around the time a teacher told his mother the boy would never focus on anything; twenty three gold medals settled what that focus was actually for. When hackers leaked Simone Biles's medical records, she refused the shame outright. And Alex Karp, the dyslexic CEO of Palantir, went furthest of all this spring: the way he sees it there are basically two ways to know you have a future, a trade or a neurodivergent mind, and his company recruits for exactly these brains. The people building the future are hunting for it.
What actually helped
There is no cure, and I am suspicious of anyone selling one. There is a method, and mine took twenty years of trial and error, so here it is for free.
Naming it came first. The day I stopped calling it a discipline failure and started calling it wiring, the energy I had been spending on shame went back into the work.
The one-big-thing rule runs my days: one big task, two smaller ones, picked the night before, while tomorrow's version of me is still theoretical and cooperative. The list is a contract with a man who may not care by morning.
Time gets blocked and work gets compartments, because the engine handles many things well and handles many things at once badly.
The gym and sleep I treat as maintenance rather than self-improvement. I still struggle with both, and I do them anyway, badly and repeatedly, because the engine eats itself without them.
Hyperfocus goes somewhere with or without you, and the only choice you actually get is the destination. I stopped fighting the deep dives and started aiming them at things that compound.
And I guard the dopamine. I am careful with feeds the way some people are careful with alcohol, for the same reason: I know what my brain does with the first drink.
Apparently it is generational. My son Aashir watched what the feed does to attention and built Node, a small physical device that blocks the distracting apps on your phone; to get them back you have to walk over and tap it. No software toggle, no skip button, just real friction between you and the slot machine. He saw the war coming earlier than I did.
The start was always the hard part
For all the systems, one problem never yielded: the cold start. The gap between wanting to begin and beginning. For someone with my wiring it is less procrastination than a wall, and it is invisible to everyone who does not have one.
Then AI arrived, and something old woke up with it.
In 2001, at Urbaneye, we built a natural language engine in ColdFusion to run our client interactions and our intranet. We called it Artificial Lexicon, Alexa for short, a decade and change before the other one. It was crude and far ahead of its time and I loved it, and it left me holding a question I never expected to see answered: what would building feel like at the speed of thought?
The first time I used GPT, that question came back with its answer attached. The blank page stopped being blank. An idea at midnight is a working sketch by morning. The wall between wanting to begin and beginning, the one I had spent twenty years engineering ramps around, is simply not there anymore.
That question is also why Antfarm was built the way it was, a studio with a Swiss Army knife of tech, designed to take a company from idea to market in months. Scootsy went from plan to launch in a few months, and so did most of what we have built. What has changed is the cost of that speed. It used to take a team and a toll. Now the start, the part that always cost me most, is nearly free.
Cognitive delegation
The last piece is the one I am building now.
The method I described runs on willpower and calendars, and both leak. What this wiring actually needs is a second mind. Not a smarter feed or another app bidding for attention, but something on your side of the attention war: something that catches what you drop, holds what you cannot, and nudges you at the right moment through a channel built to protect your focus rather than farm it.
I have started calling it cognitive delegation. You keep the ignition, the taste, the judgment and the deep dives, and you hand over what the wiring was never going to do reliably: the reminders, the routines, the follow-ups, the boring email, the push to start the one thing, to take the break, to eat properly, to go to sleep.
That is what we are building at the lab now, first for me and then for people like me. A tool that asks you to start just one thing, without shame, because starting is the whole war. And a chief of staff that runs the routine so your head does not have to, and that at 2am, when the engine is still running, is the one that tells you to go to bed.
Point the engine
I used to think the goal was to fix the wiring, to finally become the person who finishes the book, keeps the routine and answers the calls. Twenty five years in, I can report that he is not coming.
The wiring that leaves a meeting at minute thirty one is the same wiring that locks onto a problem and will not let go of it. The itch that cost me stability built everything I am proud of. It is an engine. Unnamed, it runs you. Named and pointed, it will outrun the standard issue one on any road that matters.
Thirty minutes into a meeting, I still sometimes leave without moving. The difference is that I now know where I have gone, and there is a system, and increasingly a second mind, holding the room until I come back.
If your engine is the same breed, it is not broken. Learn its fuel, learn its walls, and point it at something that deserves it.
If any of this sounded familiar, start with one thing today.