标签：#adhd

After Trump's claims, Tylenol usage dropped during pregnancies.

For years I thought I had a discipline problem. I had shipped code, finished a degree, built things, and still the dominant private feeling was that I was getting away with something, that the gap between what I could do on a good day and what I could do on a normal one was a character flaw I was hiding. The reframe that changed everything was clinical, not motivational: I do not have a discipline problem. I have an executive function problem. And executive function, unlike character, can be supported from the outside. This is the most personal of the three posts in this cluster. The other two are practical: the CLAUDE.md guide and the five skills . This one is the why underneath both. What Is Executive Function, Actually? Executive function is the brain's management layer. It is not intelligence, and it is not knowledge. It is the set of processes that turn knowing-what-to-do into actually-doing-it. The National Institute of Mental Health describes ADHD as fundamentally a disorder of these self-management processes rather than of attention alone. It is not one function. For the purposes of getting work done, it is at least four distinct ones, and ADHD disrupts each of them in a different way: Working memory , the mental scratchpad holding what you are doing right now. Task initiation , the ability to start, to cross the gap from intention to action. Context switching , the ability to drop one task, pick up another, and come back without losing the first. Time perception , the internal sense of duration that lets you pace and estimate. Calling them out separately matters, because "I struggle with executive function" is too vague to act on. Each of the four breaks differently and each one needs a different prosthetic. Lumping them together is how you end up trying to fix a time-perception problem with a task-initiation strategy and concluding you are just broken. What Is an Executive Function Prosthetic? A prosthetic does not heal. It compensates. Glasses do not repa

I have built 114 Claude Code skills. Most of them are engineering plumbing. But five of them exist for one reason only: my executive function has specific, repeatable holes, and I got tired of falling into the same ones. These five are not productivity hacks. Each one maps to a named ADHD deficit, and each one fills it the same way every time so I do not have to re-improvise around my own brain at 2pm. If you want the broader system this sits inside, start with my Claude Code ADHD workflow and the CLAUDE.md guide . This post is the skills layer specifically. What Is a Claude Code Skill? A skill is a named, repeatable workflow you invoke with a slash command. Instead of re-prompting Claude Code from a blank slate every time ("okay, help me figure out what to work on, here is my situation again..."), you type /adhd-task-triage and it runs the same defined steps it ran yesterday. For an ADHD brain, that determinism is the feature. The skill does not depend on me remembering how to drive it. It just runs. Custom skills live in a .claude/skills/<name>/SKILL.md file that describes what the skill does and when it should fire. You can build one for any gap you fall into more than twice. 1. adhd-task-triage: Energy-Based Prioritization The gap it fills: task initiation paralysis. Standard task managers sort by priority or deadline. That assumes you can act on the top item by willpower. ADHD does not work that way. The top-priority task and the task you can actually start right now are often different tasks, and trying to force the high-priority one when your initiation circuit is offline produces zero output and a guilt spiral. adhd-task-triage sorts by available energy , not importance. You tell it where you are (wired, foggy, depleted), it looks at the work in front of you, and it hands back the task that matches the state you are actually in, not the one you wish you were in. /adhd-task-triage Why it helps specifically: it removes the moral framing. The question stops bei

I reopened a file I had already fixed that morning. Not metaphorically. I literally re-fixed a bug I had closed four hours earlier, because between the fix and the reopen, my brain had quietly deleted the entire afternoon. That is the ADHD tax most productivity advice never names: it is not that you cannot focus, it is that the working model of what you were doing does not survive the gap between sessions. CLAUDE.md is the cheapest fix I have found for that specific failure. This is the companion to my Claude Code ADHD workflow ; that post is the full system, this one zooms all the way in on the single file doing most of the work. What Is CLAUDE.md, Actually? CLAUDE.md is a Markdown file that Claude Code reads automatically at the start of every session. You do not paste it. You do not remind Claude it exists. It just gets read, every time, before the first line of work. There are two places it lives: ./CLAUDE.md at a project root holds rules for that project: the tech stack, the conventions, the gotchas. ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md holds your global rules: things true across everything you build (your voice, your defaults, the things you never want re-litigated). For a neurotypical developer this is a convenience. For an ADHD developer it is a prosthetic. The difference is what the file is replacing. Why CLAUDE.md Is External Working Memory for ADHD Brains Working memory is the mental scratchpad that holds "what I am doing right now and the three things I just decided about it." ADHD shrinks that scratchpad and makes it leaky. Every interruption, a Slack ping, a stray thought, a context-switch to email, knocks items off it. When you return, the scratchpad is blank and you rebuild it from scratch. The American Psychological Association puts the rebuild cost at roughly 23 minutes per context switch for a typical brain. For an ADHD brain that involuntarily switches more often and rebuilds slower, the real cost is higher and it compounds. Ten switches a day is not ten minutes