The first twenty minutes was most of it.

I'm 45. Diagnosed with dyslexia since I was nine, ADHD since I was 43. You read that right! I'm new to the club.

They caught the dyslexia because I faked stomachaches on the days we read aloud. This was 1990, so I got pulled out to a portable classroom behind the gym twice a week with four other kids, and everybody knew what that room was. I read fine now if nobody's timing me. I still spell Wednesday by saying Wed-nes-day in my head first.

Capable when focused

Nobody said anything about attention. I wasn't a problem. I sat still and looked at the teacher and thought about other things for six hours a day. The comment on my report cards was "capable when focused," which I got so many times I assumed it was standard.

I've done infrastructure work since I was 24. I'm good at it. And I have never read a design doc all the way through before the meeting about it. Not once, in twenty-one years.

I skim the headings, I get the shape of it, and then I open the call by asking about the tradeoff in the part I did read, and somebody spends four minutes answering, and now I know the rest. I've relied on that since roughly 2005.

Thirty-five minutes for four lines

Writing was worse than reading. For the first decade of my career I wrote every email three times, not editing, starting over, because I couldn't find the sentence. Four lines to my own team, thirty-five minutes.

By Friday there'd be a dozen I hadn't answered, and then it was too late to answer without apologizing for the delay, so I didn't answer them at all. Some of those people probably still think I ignored them. I did ignore them.

In 2013 I got passed over for a team lead job and the director told me I seemed careless. He meant the typos in my slides. There were typos in my slides.

Four lines to my own team, thirty-five minutes. I dictate email now and fix it after, so thirty-five minutes is four minutes.

My daughter’s assessment

My daughter got assessed in fourth grade, and I sat in that meeting and stopped hearing the school psychologist about ten minutes in because I was running my own life against what she was saying. It still took me another fourteen months to call anyone.

The ADHD part explained what I'd filed under personality. The garage I've had half-finished since 2019. Three months of being consumed by bread, then never again. Why I can hold a nine-hour outage together and cannot submit an expense report, and I mean that in the strong sense, I have eaten $4,000 in unfiled expenses over my career because filing them requires starting.

The first twenty minutes

I take Vyvanse. It didn't make me a different person and it didn't make me organized. What it did was make the first twenty minutes of a task possible.

Turns out the first twenty minutes was most of it.

At work I stopped hiding the setup. I ask for the agenda before I'll take the meeting. I record everything and read the transcript instead of taking notes, because I can't listen and write at the same time and never could.

I dictate email and fix it after, so thirty-five minutes is four minutes. My manager knows all of this. That conversation took eleven minutes and I spent nineteen years avoiding it.

I ordered a mic that night

The podcast came out of a guy on my team, Sunil, telling me he was diagnosed at 30. I said me too, at 43, and we talked for an hour, and we both said we'd never told anyone at work.

I ordered a mic that night. Buying equipment is usually a bad sign with me. It's been eleven months, thirty-one episodes.

I'm not good at it yet. I interrupt people. I get excited and take us somewhere else in the middle of their story and then can't find the way back.