I’ve spent a lot of time thinking I had a motivation problem.

It was the obvious explanation.

Sometimes I can sit in front of something important, something I genuinely want to do, and simply not start.

Not dramatically. There is no rebellion. I just seem to orbit it.

Open the repository. Check something else. Read one thing that might be relevant. Remember another task. Coffee. Back to the repository. Somehow forty minutes have passed and the important thing remains completely untouched.

Then another day I begin working on a problem and six hours disappear with almost no negotiation at all.

Same person. Same desk. Occasionally the same project.

This was one of the things that made ADHD confusing to me for a long time. If I were simply lazy, the distribution of laziness seemed unnecessarily elaborate.

The metaphor I keep coming back to is an unreliable transmission.

The engine works.

Sometimes it works a little too enthusiastically.

Getting power to the wheels is another matter.

I’ve tried solving this with discipline more times than I can count. Schedules. Task systems. Planning systems. More detailed planning systems. Systems for reviewing the planning systems.

There is probably a small abandoned civilization of productivity infrastructure somewhere on my hard drive.

The funny part is that some of those systems genuinely worked.

Until I stopped using them.

Which, in hindsight, is a rather important quality to evaluate in a system designed for the person who stopped using it.

I am trying to change the question now.

Instead of immediately asking, why am I failing to do this?, I am trying to ask what the friction actually is.

Maybe I do not know the first physical action.

Maybe the task has quietly expanded until my brain no longer knows where its edges are.

Maybe I already solved the interesting part and what remains is boring closure work.

Maybe I am avoiding the possibility of finding out that the thing is not as good as it felt while it lived privately in my head.

Maybe I’ve been away long enough that opening it means reconstructing half the context first.

Maybe another idea is currently standing on the table demanding constitutional reform.

Maybe I slept badly and the sophisticated psychological theory is that I am tired.

Those are different problems.

I am not claiming I have solved any of this. This website is currently being built partly because I need somewhere to keep track of the attempts.

But I am increasingly suspicious of any system whose first requirement is that I become a different kind of person before I can use it successfully.

I’d rather learn the machine I actually have.

Then see what I can build with it.