ADHD Diary #001: No-Travel-Day

For some people, ADHD is not a trend.

I’m deeply grateful to one of my bosses who, about two years ago, suggested I get tested. During the assessment, I got to show my old school reports — and the triggers were already visible back then. But growing up in a small village in eastern Germany… you were just “different” as a kid. Not properly challenged. That’s how it was explained. That’s how it was dismissed.

Today I know better.

Sometimes I wonder: am I actually the normal one — and everyone else is the “different” ones?

Building With My Own Brain’s Operating System

I’ve spent over two years reviving my now eight-year-old LLM projects. Today I use them daily. I’ve always been a believer in “keep your data local” — back in my IXP days it was “keep your traffic local”, now it’s the data.

As a neurodivergent person, I’ve come to love not having to talk to people to turn ideas into reality. Instead, I work with my own LLMs. A bit of n8n here for content generation, some fine-tuning there — and what started as a simple one-stage blog generator evolved into an 18-step engine:

Steps 1–15: Core Pipeline
Topic → Angle → Outline → Draft → Reality Check → Depth → Opinion → Kill AI Voice → Reduction → AEM → Style Lock → QA → Quality Score

Step 16: APM — Auto-Precision Mode

Step 17: Viral Signal — Social Masterfile with AVC, ASS, Carry Line, Auto-Kill

Step 18: LinkedIn Post — from Viral Signal or Fallback Generator

And what could be better for building something like this than having ADHD? This brain that doesn’t stop. That only really gets going at 10 PM. That works in seven CLI windows simultaneously and finds that more structured than a day at the office.

Family First — Then the Terminal

But there’s the other side. Family. And the balancing act is usually very difficult.

That’s why there are fixed blockers in my calendar, Monday through Friday — to squeeze out the maximum family time possible. Non-negotiable. That’s the anchor.

And in the evening, when my two ladies are in bed, it begins. Seven LLM CLIs running simultaneously. Projects, ideas, rabbit holes. That’s my mode.

Easter Sunday

Today was Easter Sunday. Got up in the morning, got ready. Hid surprises in the garden, let the little one search at her own pace. Then quickly set up the goulash for dinner and helped my dear Claudi with the strawberry cake.

Afternoon nap. Then my parents came to visit. Grandpa brought the long-awaited, handmade shelf for Claudi’s handcrafted mugs — we mounted that on the wall together.

Dinner. Put the girls to bed. Sit down at the computer.

It’s 10:14 PM.

The Last Two Days in Numbers

Friday and Saturday before Easter: 24 commits across four projects. 13 on Friday, 11 on Saturday. A blog article written and published. Monitoring systems put on 24/7. Constant context switches between projects — but at the end of the day, everything worked.

That’s the ADHD paradox: the productivity is real, but it feels chaotic. You jump between things. You lose the thread and find it again. You work on four things simultaneously and finish all four.

Neurotypical productivity is a straight line. ADHD productivity is a fractal — it looks chaotic, but it has structure.

Why This Diary Exists

ADHD is often either romanticized — “you’re just creative!” — or pathologized — “you never finish anything”. Both are nonsense.

The reality: my brain works differently. Not better, not worse. Differently. And this diary is meant to show exactly that. The good days and the bad ones. The Easter Sundays with strawberry cake and the nights with seven terminal windows.

Starting now: regular entries. Honest and unfiltered.

Day 1 — done. 11:14 PM, Easter Sunday. The goulash was good.