I was the kid who forgot the homework, forgot the deadline, forgot halfway through a sentence what he was originally trying to say. ADHD, undiagnosed drama aside, meant my academic years looked like a long string of good intentions with nothing behind them.
What eventually worked wasn't a discovery about willpower. It was giving up on willpower as the plan entirely, and building an environment that did the remembering for me instead.
The part people get wrong about ADHD
The lazy read on ADHD is a motivation problem — that the person just needs to try harder, care more, focus better. Clinical psychologist Russell Barkley, whose decades of research reframed how ADHD is understood, argues the opposite: ADHD isn't a knowledge deficit or a motivation deficit, it's an executive function deficit. Barkley identifies specific executive functions people use to regulate themselves day to day — self-restraint, time management, self-organisation, self-motivation, emotional regulation — and the core impairment in ADHD isn't that a person doesn't know what to do. It's that the internal system responsible for holding onto that intention long enough to act on it isn't reliable.
Read that twice if you grew up being told you "just needed to focus." Knowing what to do was never the missing piece. Holding onto it across time, without external scaffolding, was.
What changed everything: stop relying on the part that's broken
Once I stopped treating memory and in-the-moment self-discipline as tools I could rely on, and started treating them as unreliable components I needed to route around, the whole problem became solvable. Not through more discipline. Through engineering.
I taught myself, across game dev, app dev, frontend, mathematics, and a pile of other domains, largely because traditional structured learning — sit still, absorb, remember, recall on demand — was fighting against exactly the part of my brain that doesn't cooperate. Self-teaching let me build my own scaffolding: project-based, visible, broken into pieces small enough that I didn't need to hold the whole thing in my head to make progress on any one piece.
That habit became the template for everything after. If a task depends on me remembering it unprompted at the right moment, I've already lost. So the task gets externalised — a trigger, a checklist, a physical anchor in my day — until the environment carries the weight my working memory can't.
Why hackathons worked when classrooms didn't
The irony is that the same brain that couldn't reliably remember a homework deadline could sit through 10–11 hours in a single day building something, and win hackathons doing it. Classrooms asked me to hold abstract information in my head with no external structure and produce it on demand later. Hackathons handed me a concrete problem, a visible deadline, and immediate feedback on every attempt — the environment did half the regulating that my own head couldn't. That contrast is exactly where I learned, years before I had Barkley's framework to explain it, that the fix was never going to be "try harder to remember." It was going to be "stop needing to."
Avoiding TV, movies, and mainstream entertainment during that era wasn't discipline for its own sake either — it was one more piece of environment design. Less unstructured input meant less competing for the same limited attention I needed for the scaffolding to hold. Every environment change was really the same move: remove reliance on a part of the system that wasn't reliable, replace it with something external that was.
What the environment actually looks like
Concretely: habits get physically attached to an anchor moment, not to willpower — training starts the second the walk ends, no decision required. Routines get written down outside my head the moment they're decided, not trusted to memory. Big goals get broken into pieces small enough that starting doesn't require recalling the whole plan, just the next physical action in front of me.
None of this is a productivity hack I picked up from a book. It's a survival system I built as a kid who kept failing the version of school that assumed everyone's internal memory and self-discipline worked the same way, and it just kept getting more refined as the stakes got higher — hackathons, then real production systems, then an app built to run entirely offline on someone's phone.
The generalist side-effect
Building my own scaffolding across so many different domains — game dev, app dev, frontend, mathematics, 3D modelling, crafts — wasn't really a decision to "become a generalist" in the identity sense people mean it now. It was a side effect of needing a workaround for one specific problem, applied over and over to whatever I happened to be learning that month. Each new domain got the same treatment: break it into pieces small enough that memory wasn't load-bearing, externalize the plan, attach the next action to something that already happens.
Years later that repeated workaround is most of what people now call being a generalist by design. It didn't start as a philosophy. It started as the only version of learning that worked for a kid whose brain wouldn't reliably hold onto anything it wasn't actively doing something with, right now, in front of him.
The takeaway
If you keep "forgetting" the thing you swore you'd do, stop trying to fix your memory. Fix your environment instead. Attach the behaviour to something that already happens without fail, write down what your brain won't reliably hold, and shrink the task until starting it doesn't require remembering the whole plan — just the next single action in front of you. The system remembers. You just have to follow it.