My Philosophy
You’ve spent years trying to fix yourself. This page is about how I see that. Why it starts, what it costs, and what actually helps.
I work with software engineers and tech leaders with ADHD. Mostly on the part no one else sees: the war with yourself at work.
If the situations below sound like your week, keep reading. If they don’t, we’re probably not a fit, and that’s useful to know too.
I’m not here to fix you. I’m here to help you understand yourself.
The war no one sees
From the outside, you’re doing fine. You ship. People trust you. Your career says you’re good at this.
Inside, it’s louder. You sit down to start the thing, and you don’t start, and you have no explanation you’d accept from yourself. An afternoon disappears into something that wasn’t the thing. You watch it happen, narrating the whole time. So you supervise yourself all day. Push, stall, push harder. By evening you’re exhausted from work you’re not even sure counts as work.
And then the verdict arrives, the same one as always:
So you do what’s always worked in your career. More effort. A new system, a new app, a stricter morning. It helps for a week or two. Then it doesn’t, and its failure gets quietly added to the case against you.
What pressure and shame do
Two things are true at once, and neither one shows up in a standup.
The pressure to always be producing never lets up. And most of it was never assigned to you. Nobody asked you to be improving in every spare minute, to treat rest as wasted time, to study on your lunch break. You took that on somewhere along the way. Maybe back when eagerness was how you got noticed as a junior. Maybe when you were the one in the room without the degree, sure you had to work twice as hard to belong there.
And shame narrows you. When “I’m stuck” turns into “I suck”, every hard task becomes a referendum on you. Procrastination reads as a character flaw instead of what it usually is: a response to something. Often ambiguity. From the inside, ambiguity doesn’t feel like ambiguity. It feels like dread.
Pressure and shame are also terrible teachers. They keep you moving, but they keep you on autopilot, and autopilot is exactly where the patterns stay invisible.
Where I’m coming from
I’m not writing this with a method to sell you.
I spent seven years as a software engineer and nine as an engineering manager. I know what standups, code reviews, deadlines, and performance cycles feel like from both chairs. Now I coach and write, privately, with engineers whose brains don’t follow the template.
I work like a coach, not a taskmaster. I won’t hand you a planner or check whether you did your homework. I ask questions, reflect back what I hear, and help you notice what’s actually going on when the work gets hard. Whatever system you end up with grows out of that. It’s yours, not borrowed.
From here, this goes one of two ways
If nothing changes, it doesn’t hold steady. It compounds. The apps keep piling up, and so does the quiet shame of abandoning them. The overwhelm keeps arriving without warning, because nothing about it has been understood. You push harder, withdraw a little more, and trust yourself a little less each time. It rarely looks like collapse. More often it’s a capable engineer on autopilot, producing all day and feeling behind all evening.
If it does change, the ADHD doesn’t vanish. It stops running you. You learn to read your own patterns: when the overwhelm shows up, what was different the week that felt calm, what the procrastination was responding to. The “messy” habits become information instead of evidence against you. Downtime starts counting as rest. And you build a running list of what actually works for you. Not for a template. For you.
What actually helps
Here’s what I think you need, whether or not we ever work together.
A place to slow down. One conversation where nothing is being measured, with someone outside it all, whose only job is to help you see what’s actually going on. You’re good at solving problems. But you’re also very persuasive to yourself, and under pressure that works against you. You can talk yourself into the overwork, into the shame, into the next app. Another set of eyes catches the pattern with you.
A few things make a place like that work:
- Noticing, not homework. Between conversations you run small experiments: watch when the overwhelm shows up, note what was different the calm week. Observation, not assignments.
- No accountability cop. You might think you need accountability. What I’ve seen is that pressure from outside works about as well as pressure from inside. Briefly, and at a cost. You came here to put the pressure down, not outsource it.
- Curiosity before tactics. Tactics that arrive before understanding become next month’s abandoned app. Tactics that grow out of your own patterns tend to stick.
- A relationship over time. Somewhere to come back to as work and life change. Not a one-off.
What I assume about you
- You’re not lazy, and you’re not broken. You built a career with the brain you have. That took more effort than anyone saw.
- The procrastination is a response, not a character flaw. Usually to ambiguity. Naming it changes what you do next.
- More discipline isn’t the missing piece. You’ve run that experiment for years. You have the data.
- Your “messy” system might already be a system. It might just need a real home, and less shame attached to it.
- You don’t have to be fixed before your life can start. The waiting is the expensive part.
What I commit to you
- I won’t be your accountability cop. No chasing, no check-ins you didn’t ask for, no manufactured urgency.
- I won’t hand you a template. If a tactic emerges, it comes from what you noticed, not from my playbook.
- I’ll be honest, warmly. If I think what you need is therapy, or a different kind of coach, I’ll say so and point you there.
- I won’t make you depend on me. The point is you, reading your own patterns. If the work goes well, you’ll need me less over time.
- What you say stays with me.
If this sounds familiar
The next step isn’t more reading, and it isn’t another app. It’s a conversation, to find out whether there’s something here worth doing together. The coaching page has the practical shape of it.
If you’d rather start smaller, the weekly reflection is the quiet way in: a short reflective exercise for engineers with ADHD, once a week.
Send me a weekly reflection