Tag: hyperactivity

Making the Bees Walk in Line [en]

Unverified AI transcript (22.07.2026):

Lausanne, 11th July 2026

It’s too hot. Is this the second or the third heat wave? I’m losing count. I think it’s the third, because we’re already hearing about the fourth, right on the heels of the third. So it’s the third, but it’s also just a blur of trying to function day after day in a building that definitely wasn’t designed for this type of weather. Between seven and eight I can enjoy my balcony with Juju. Before it got too hot, I tidied the kitchen, but by the time I was done, somewhere between 8:30 and 9:00, it was already too hot to move. Check the various temperature sensors, close windows, head downstairs for a more static activity.

In addition to figuring out how to function with less energy — still a problem following my accident — I have to figure out dealing with heatwaves. We’ve had them all these last years of course, but this year is way worse. I am so thankful I don’t have an old, sick cat to care for right now, and that Juju is self-maintaining.

Writing on paper is a more linear experience than writing on-screen. Although I’ve always very much been a “first draft” kind of person (even at school, I never made that many changes in between the first “pencil draft” and the “copied copy” I handed in), when typing I am more concerned about the structure of what I’m writing. Not overly, but more. I generally don’t proofread my blog posts, but I do pause whilst writing to read back up and sometimes make some changes as I go along.

Here, I’m approaching writing much more as a “handwriting exercise” (let’s see what it does to my brain!) and so I don’t start writing with a clear intention. It’s stream-of-consciousness, to a large extent. I sometimes write blog posts like that, but less often. A blog post (nowadays) has a TITLE, it’s supposed to be about SOMETHING. Not this. This is about getting legible words on paper with a pen. So I might as well talk-write about something.

The linear experience of lining up words on a page is funneling my scattered hyperactive mind into one direction. Left to → right (write?), the next word can be written in only one place, and once it is written it cannot be taken back. Lines above this one are dead and gone, set in ink, nothing more can be done about them. The only thing that counts is the next word I will write, following the sentence that is taking shape in my head, with the brakes on, because writing by hand is a slow process. As soon as I try to speed up to catch up with my brain, words become scribbles and hand muscles start to cramp.

So it’s interesting. Slowing down is the point. One can train a lot of things, including things our brain does, and “training”, repeating an exercise again and again, is how you train.

I have a lot of trouble resting, stopping, taking a break — not to mention “doing nothing”. Post-accident, I am trying to learn. Actually, I was already trying before (half-heartedly), but now I HAVE to, or the consequences are severe. Lying down and closing my eyes for just five minutes is often impossible, because it’s just too uncomfortable. Try staying still and “doing nothing” when your head is a beehive of thoughts, ideas, emotions, intentions, and desires. Sadly, I often end up scrolling. It gives the illusion of “stopping”, but it doesn’t help the beehive.

So I have a collection of “rest activities”. Jigsaw puzzles. Listen to a podcast or watch a TV series. Read a book. Listen to a song. Physical activity of course, but that’s off the table, particularly with this heat. I’m going to add writing. Not for the content, but for giving my brain a linear experience without input. Because input feeds the bees.

Bees are good. They produce honey. (Can you see I’m tiring?) But when they’re just buzzing around, agitated or angry, no honey is being made. And that helps no one, especially not me.

I will be the queen bee.

Less Input [en]

In the spirit of shortening things, I’m taking a few moments during my lunch break to share some thoughts I’ve been having recently. Various things have contributed to these thoughts:

  • my permanent struggle with “too many ideas” and “too many things I want to do” (which predates my accident, but is now exacerbated given my reduced energy)
  • pondering on how to manage my energy (already underway since my accident, but now fed by the occupational therapy programme for energy management that I’m in the middle of)
  • my training at IGB, and the two-day course I just did in Paris (the recurring focus is “how something that works for the person at some point becomes the thing that feeds the problem”)
  • my exploration of AI and in particular the framework/project/took that was previously called PAI (now LifeOS) (output is cheap now: feed a genAI model a few lines and it can spit out thousands of words for you).

I’m not going to be able to reconstruct how my ideas around this have shifted in a chronological or well-organised way, but here’s more or less where I’m at: I’m somebody who believes that “knowledge is power”, that “more information is better”, that by learning and analysing and understanding, I can find answers.

That works a lot of the time, for me. It has worked very well for me. But I’m starting to see how this is part of what is trapping me, right now.

At some point in my struggles with my AI infrastructure (trying to get the PAI Digital Assistant up and running correctly, fixing bugs, making sure it learns correctly, setting up workflows for the things I want it to do for me) I realised that it had a built-in bias (the model, most probably) towards “producing more is better”. LLMs are verbose, we all know that by now. The more you feed them, the more words they spit out – but not necessarily the more useful information.

I kept giving instructions for concision. I would provide examples of how to write things up. I would set up guardrails, have it self-correct, hunt for fluff and filler content. At some point I realised that “the system” was just growing and growing in terms of content (the number of words and files that contained the instructions), and the output was not improving – more like the contrary. This is nothing new, right. We know that complex systems balloon up and lose efficiency. And I’ve seen more than once in my dealings with AI that I pretty much always end up spending more time “fixing the system” than actually using it. This, actually, is something I’d noticed about myself in general; but it’s easier for me to rein in when I don’t have an LLM at the other end of the keyboard. So here, it became even more visible.

So here it is. The mantra I keep repeating to people in all sorts of context: “less is more”; “better is the enemy of good” (that’s what we say in French). If I feed my AI system less input, I get less bloated output in the system. I read somewhere (can’t remember the source, probably have it stashed away somewhere) that in the age of generative AI, the bottleneck was shifting from content production to content consumption. What we can “ingest” is the limiting factor, now that we have machines that can spew out words and sentences and paragraphs and essays and reports like there’s no tomorrow. But it’s worthless unless we can read it and understand it and do something with it. Just feeding that AI output to another AI is just going to magnify errors and biases and produce more slop, unless there is a humain mind in charge that understands what it’s doing and what it’s asking.

Early on, in 2024, I remember reflecting at some point that the AI I was using seemed “more ADHD than me”. And what my more recent experiences have helped me understand about myself is this:

  1. My problem, my “slop/bloat” is ideas and things I want to do. I am somebody for whom ideas are cheap. I have ideas all the time. I can come up with stuff I’d like to do all day. My problem (bottleneck) lies in selecting what I run with, and that is a difficult exercise – even more difficult since my accident.
  2. The more “input” I get, the more – just like the LLM – I produce ideas and desires. I read an article, there are 5 more I want to read. I have a discussion on a topic, I want to read more stuff or write articles or create a community around it. I learn about something new, oooh it’s nice and shiny and I want to do it.

Having a large capacity for input and lots of ideas, followed by enough energy to take a handful of them and run with them (OK, frustrating to have to leave so many aside, but at least I’m busy doing something useful/interesting with some of them) has, as I said above, served me very well in life. But trees don’t grow to the sky. At some point, what has worked well becomes the source of the problem.

And I’m realising that the way out of this, at least now, is not better prioritising. First of all, it’s reducing input.

Less input, less ideas, less “oh I want to do this thing”, less slop to sort through, less frustration with everything I’m not doing.

Exactly how to achieve that is still a thought in progress. But that’s what I’ve been thinking of this last week or so.

All The Things [en]

I’m writing this blog post thanks to Jeffrey. Because I kind of said I’d be able to blog today, and it’s just a bit past 8.30pm, the dishes are done, the cat has had his meds and insulin (so have I – the meds, not the insulin), even the clean laundry is in the cupboard. So instead of clumsily playing through practice deals on Funbridge or hanging out on the socials, I’m here writing.

I’ve been sick most of the last week. Two days down under a post-vaccine ton of bricks (I’d kind of wilfully forgotten how nasty my 2nd and 3rd Covid boosters had been when I decided to start getting the shots again), but a sore throat before that, and after that, and a lost voice because I talked too much on said sore throat, some lingering fever, and now a nasty cough. Anyway. It’s getting better but my friend codeine and I have had to start hanging out again.

I’ve been back to work, three half-days a week, since mid-October. It’s going pretty much as expected, meaning OK, but tiring. Work, but also “just life”. Even before my accident, I struggled with the fact that I had too many wants for the time life gives us. Having less energy all these last months has put this issue on the front of the scene – in addition to the fact it is tightly linked to the complications I developed after my accident. And now that most of the symptoms have abated, and that I’m feeling more “back to normal” each month, my expectations of what I should be able to do are rising fast beyond where they should be remaining.

So, I’m trying to tackle the issue. A few things are becoming clear. One is that everybody seems to be struggling to stay on top of their lives, not only us hyperactives. There is something about the world we live in that drags us along: so many opportunities and temptations, the incentive to be happy, live a meaningful life, take care of oneself but also of others, pursue success but also slow down. But there is also the increasing administrative complexity of our lives. Technology has made it easier for me to pay my bills (in Switzerland at least: open letter, whip out phone, scan QR code, confirm, done), but it has also contributed (hand in hand with runaway capitalism applied to everything, from private companies to public services) to irrevocably breaking the processes that make things happen in our organisations. Any interaction becomes a bureaucratic nightmare. And it’s not just because the person on the phone (if there is one) is a script-fed robot (they aren’t always, by far, at least here), but because the systems are broken, tasks get lost, not mentioning bugs in the software, and nobody knows how the whole machine is supposed to work anymore so it can be fixed.

So when I want to move my insurance 3rd pillar into a normal one, it takes me 4 phone calls and e-mails over 3 months to make it happen. And each time the person on the end of the line is listening well, taking the issue seriously, looking for traces of my last contact (gone), asking for some information again, promising me that they are on it and that this time, the order is underway and will be dealt with.

This is just one example. You have yours, too, I’m sure. I remember a time when I could call customer service, wait on hold for a bit, and have my problem solved. Now I call customer service with a question, they actually create an additional problem on top of the one I was trying to solve, I spend an hour on the phone with them first in disbelief trying to clarify that they actually did do the stupid thing I feared they would do but they assured me they wouldn’t, getting them to admit it was a mistake, escalate me to somebody who actually can’t do anything for me that I couldn’t do myself.

This, of course, is a separate problem from the fact I want to Do All The Things, but it doesn’t help. Because on top of working to earn a living, we need to spend hours managing the Admin of Life. Those hours are not available for other stuff.

You should listen to the podcast episode Your Call Is Important to Us by 99% Invisible. Years ago I tried launching the World Wide Paperwork and Administrivia Day. And I can totally see myself doing Admin Nights at my coworking space (listen to the podcast). Amongst all the other things I want to organise there: board game afternoons, puzzle days, drop-in tea parties…

All The Things, see.

I realised, recently, that my expectation that I should be able to find a way to manage my life and feel reasonably on top of things was most certainly an illusion. It’s not me who is failing, it’s the objective that’s out of touch with reality. You know, just like we realised at one point that it wasn’t fair to make women believe they could have a full-time work life (“like men”), be great invested parents, manage the household and have hobbies and take care of themselves, oh yeah, and social life. So, I’m trying to accept that there will always be something falling through the cracks. Instead of building a system without any cracks, I need to shift into building a system that allows for them.

Maybe I can officially decide that I’m not checking that the reimbursements from the insurance for the cats‘ medical bills are correct. I don’t do it, but it’s always on my to-do list, because one should check this kind of thing to run personal finances well, right? So, a type of management that is less airtight, but with safety nets. Which takes into account that of all the balls we are juggling, some are glass and cannot be dropped, whilst others are rubber and will bounce back up if we let them escape.

One of the ways I’ve tried to tackle my “activity overload” issue is by readjusting my expectations. How many hikes in a year? How many times can I actually manage to go to judo per month? How many stays at the chalet? How many blog posts a month? Using historical data seemed a good place to start. My calendar is not very reliable for that, because I sometimes make plans I don’t follow, and they stay in the calendar – or go off on a hike with a friend on the week-end and hadn’t written it down. But my Google Timeline know where I was, and when. I exported it, chopped it up so I had just the couple of years I was interested in in a file (the whole thing is massive), and fed it to Gemini along with an export of my calendar. I usually use ChatGPT, but I had the hope that Gemini might be able to plug into my Google Photos and get some extra data from there – but no luck, not for me. I stuck with Gemini because it clearly did a way better job than ChatGPT analysing my data. Of course, as usual with LLMs, what seemed like a straightforward missing turned into a long series of prompts and reprompts, but I’m happy to say I did get somewhere, with less anguish and more fun (if not less time) than if I had painstakingly done it by hand.

All the while I had the nagging feeling that maybe I was tackling this wrong. A feeling that I was hovering around the entrance of a rabbit-hole signposted “over-engineering”. I confess, I’m no stranger to this flaw.

I know I need to set priorities. Priorities is the issue on a daily basis. Do I take time to write, or rest? Do I spend time with the cat outside or do a puzzle? Do I see a friend or write a blog post? Do I deal with my taxes next week-end or pick up the future of blogging/socials ball and write about that? Or spend some time volunteering in the diabetic cat community? Or…? Or…? And so on.

So far it’s become clear to me that as long as my life priorities are not sorted, it’s going to make choosing between writing a blog post, sorting through my boxes of stuff, hiking or seeing a friend pretty tricky. People keep telling me that I have too much on my plate and I need to drop something, but there is nothing there I feel like I can drop. I’m not going to stop judo. I’m not going to shut down the diabetic cat community. I’m not going to stop writing, or skiing, or hiking, or sailing. I’m not going to stop having friends. And so on… again.

Priorities. What is most important? What is less important? What is more meaningful to me? It hit me today that beyond the pervasive Life Overwhelm of our times, the way this difficulty to choose and prioritise expresses itself in my life is that I am interested in too many things. It may sound trivial said like this, but it’s not. I suffer from too much “want”, too much “oh, how exciting”, “love this”. It’s as if my threshold for something to be interesting was very very low. It doesn’t take much to get me interested! Just like I’m an easy customer when it comes to food, I’m an easy customer for many things. This feels like it must be related to the “ADHD weak filter” which makes it difficult to distinguish between signal and noise amongst the available information. Maybe I’m stretching things a bit, but for me, it’s as if my “filter” for what is something I want to do or am interested in is letting pretty much everything through, resulting in this deluge of “wants”, projects, interests, etc. (The “weak filter” has advantages when it comes to thinking outside the box or being creative, but that’s another story). So, maybe in addition to setting some guidelines and realistic expectations for the operational management of my time (e.g. max n social activities in a given week), it would make sense to work on that filter a bit, and make it a little more discriminating.

I can’t make my ADHD go away. However, what I can do is identify which core needs these various activities satisfy, or not, for example. Maybe, when I then look at my overall activity schedule (hi Gemini), I will notice that it is lopsided, in terms of which needs are met or underrepresented. This would be a way of tightening my filter a bit. Another angle that is important is if a given activity or interest requires regularity to be feasible. This is easy, with physical activities: if I’m doing judo, I need to train regularly enough. I can’t just “go and do judo” twice a year – my body won’t let me. Same with hiking and skiing, they require a certain level of fitness that comes from regular practice. Blogging, however, can be neglected for months or years and then come back to. Not surprisingly, activities that don’t require regular practice might be more likely to be deprioritised, although they might actually be important.

I’m a firm believer in tracking things. Get that feedback loop going first, rather than just set objectives and despair trying to reach them. How things are now is a great starting point for introducing incremental changes in the desired direction. So, for example, this last week or so I’ve been thinking I should track my hours of intense interaction (because although I enjoy it, it exhausts me) and also, how much time I write, when I do write. I know I already blogged (more than once probably) about the problem of monster blog posts like this one, versus shorter writing. See, I’ve been writing for two hours now. Crazy, right, when you think it took you about 10 minutes or so to get down to here if you’re reading everything. I’m hungry (yes I had dinner, I’m hungry again/already) and tired.

So, although I would have many more things to say (see, another filter thing: each day brings at least 2-3 blog post ideas – keeping up is just not possible unless I spend all my time writing…), I will wrap up this blog post, pick a title for it, publish, and go to bed.

With a bit of luck I’ll blog again soon.

“I Will Adapt” [en]

A few years ago (don’t ask me exactly when), I started watching Star Trek as my “goodnight” TV series. I chose it because it was entertaining enough but not so fascinating that I would stay up watching episode after episode. Well, that worked out pretty well for TOS and the early seasons of TNG, and completely broke down with DS9 (do watch, if you haven’t yet). But still, by that time, I’d gotten better at “just saying no” to “just another episode”. I’m currently making my way through Voyager and am hugely enjoying the developing character of Seven of Nine.

Hence the title for this blog post: “I will adapt”, which I have heard her say many times these last days.

What will I adapt to?

For the first time in my life, I feel like I have a hold on my future, instead of being swept this way and that by the whims of life. Two major life changes explain this:

  • ADHD diagnosis and treatment – seriously, this is like finally getting admin rights to the operating system my life
  • a stable (employed) job for the foreseeable future – something I haven’t had in a very long time, between self-employment, short-term “this’ll do for the time being” positions, and unemployment.

I’ll probably get more into this in a future post, but one of the effects of ADHD for me is that I was caught in a “permanent present”, slave to immediate gratification and impulses. I definitely harnessed this way of functioning to make the most of it. I built a 10+ year freelance career out of it, a huge network, knowledge, expertise and skills in all sorts of fields, and more. I have been (am) an expert at seizing the opportunities that present themselves. Having a long-term objective and doing things to reach it was, however, pretty much impossible. Short-term planning, yes. Project management, yes – because I have to “project manage” pretty much everything I want to do. So my career went where the winds took me, and my personal life and ambitions lacked a sense of direction – though I always did know what I found interesting and what I didn’t.

This means that now, concretely, I am in a situation where not only do I have a pretty clear vision of what available time I have “for myself”, but making plans for these moments is a lot less daunting. I have 5 weeks of holidays this year: I’ve put them down in the calendar, and thinking about what I want to do/where I want to go for each of them does not fill me with dread. This kind of exercise used to.

I have week-ends, too, and the ability to make plans for them. This week-end I’m at the chalet. Next week-end I’ve saved a day for a hike. I write these things down in my calendar and I follow through, with way less effort than it used to take.

That is the positive change I’m adapting to. Being able to make plans. Even for next year! I’ve been wanting to go to Thailand for a long time, and now, between the job stability and my new-found ability to project myself in future activities, I can say things like “hmm, in 2024 I’m going to use two of my vacation weeks to go to Thailand”. For example.

The more difficult changes I’m adapting to is how “little” time I have outside of work. One of the aspects of my hyperactivity is that I am never short of ideas, projects, people to see or new things to discover. Previously, I had more available time, but my ability to actually use that time for things I wanted was impaired. Now, I am able to be much more productive with the time I have, but… there are a few buts.

First, I’m working four days a week, and work does tire me (surprise). So, I need to rest (another surprise). I have evening activities (judo, singing) 3-4 days a week. Does that already sound like a lot? I’m just getting started…

Basically, my “new life” is very clearly confronting me to the fact that I have to make choices and that I cannot do everything I would like to do. This is life, it isn’t news, of course, but for me, in my “old life”, this wasn’t so much of an issue. In a weird way, because I was pretty much always stuck taking what was in front of me, I didn’t have a clear view of how unrealistic my aspirations were. I was always failing, but also always doing-or-trying-to-do, and on the forefront was a state of constant frustration and overwhelm that I wasn’t managing to do where I really wanted. I was, generally, quite unhappy.

So, now I can see clearly: if I’m doing judo and singing four nights a week, and managing a very busy support community on Facebook, and trying to go to the chalet and ski in winter, hike and take the boat out in summer, in addition to working 80%, managing my household and admin obligations, and getting the rest I need… that doesn’t leave much time for keeping up with people I’m not otherwise seeing through shared activities.

RIP my social life.

This really sucks. I’ve always had a huge social life, lots of friends, and already before, too many lovely people I want to keep in touch with on a regular basis. But now it’s worse on a whole different level. I already struggle to keep to seeing my family from time to time.  But I have to accept that with the choices I’ve made and priorities I’ve set, I have less time to socialise and maintain friendships, less time to “hang out”, less time to dive into new exciting projects, less time for the unexpected.

I will adapt.

Life as an individual has its challenges, but despite all, it definitely beats being a Borg drone.