It is finally time to port the tool that has been quietly keeping my neurodivergent operating system from crashing for about fifteen years now. As you might have read in a lot of my other articles, I carry a few built in quirks that completely derail daily life whenever they are left unaccounted for. The first preview (milestone 1) is on-line, ready to be expanded to the entire suite of tools and algorithms for stuff that matters!
My internal sense of time is as good as zero. I know I am aging just like anyone else because time keeps marching forward, yet without daylight outside I could not guess the hour to save my life. This complete blindness to time comes with a wonderful trick where I can stand under a shower for half an hour and swear only ten minutes have passed. The exact same glitch happens while listening to music, gaming or travelling, leaving sunset as my only reliable clock.
That temporal void drops me straight into the classic alley of AuDHD madness, where I show up to an appointment either painfully early or grandiosely too late. Whenever my mind gets too full or overloaded, a thick mental haze slams the brakes on my punctuality no matter how hard I try.
The harder I push to be on time, the harder I fail and the less I like myself for it.
It is no coincidence that around the age of sixteen I started building systems to compensate for my weaker traits.
Getting out of bed for school was a daily nightmare, not only for me, though also for my grandmother trying to pry me out from under the blankets. I have never been a morning person, and the earlier the alarm rang, the deeper it dragged my entire mood state into the floor until I was practically crawling across the carpet. Was it the brutal mornings, the broken sleep or the endless nocturnal pondering while staring at the ceiling? Looking back, it was clearly the hyperactivity I had nowhere to put.
That morning misery drove me to engineer a staged wake up system. First came a small bedside lamp, then a brighter light and finally a 500 watt halogen floodlight aimed straight at my face, which during freezing winters was actually rather pleasant to wait for because of the heat it threw off. That beast was basically the only halogen lamp on the market back then, driven at blazing speed by MS-DOS while I was studying electrical engineering.
