Build For The Brain You Have

... not the one you wish you had.

Disclaimer: This piece grew out of a conversation with Emma Klint about why a user interface designed by a normal brain, for a normal brain, tends to fail the moment a different kind of brain tries to use it. I’ve learned a lot from her ideas lately, and I'm writing about this because the topic around neurodivergence is fascinating from a systems and feedback perspective, which is also the excuse I use for most of my opinions and interests.

Although I got called out on neurodivergent behavior by one of my best and longest standing friends, and she has the horrible habit of being right, I have no diagnosis, no clinical training, and honestly no idea which category my own brain falls into, so take everything below as a systems guy’s outside view, not an insider’s report.

So if you came for medical insight about neurodivergence, I have none to offer. What I do have is a professional habit of asking why well-designed things fail, and productivity systems fail certain brains with a consistency that boggles my mind.

A few years back I built an inbox management system that would have made a McKinsey deck look like the new Ferrari Luce. Unlike the newest Ferrari design, my system looked beautiful. It was complete with folders and rules that did the sorting before I ever opened the thing in the morning. It survived about two weeks before I started ignoring the folders and codes, and missed an email to pay a company operational fee that cost me over €250 in fines.

That is the paradox I want to talk about. Highly skilled people who can design the most beautiful organizational structure in twenty minutes, complete with hierarchies and all the bells and whistles. Then the system gets abandoned by three in the afternoon while the actual to-do list turns into a display of mayhem nobody dares to look at.

Been there, done it.

The standard non-medical diagnosis is laziness, and the standard prescription is “more discipline.” From a systems perspective, that prescription is comedy of the worst kind, whatever your taste in comedy happens to be.

Willpower is like a TV remote with a drained battery because you sat on it for four hours while watching LOTR. Any engineer will tell you that a design requiring one component to run at maximum output indefinitely, with no slack, results in warranty cases piling up and a mass layoff Oracle style.

When you run a system past spec long enough, eventually something restructures it for you.

But when it’s a person running past spec, we call it Tuesday. Have an energy drink and three espressos, and grind away.

Productivity systems are built for an idealized brain. See the word “idealized”. I didn’t say normal, I said idealized, as in “the brain I would like to have”. Steady motivation and energy that shows up on schedule like it has somewhere to be.

We just ignore the edge cases, the same way every system does right up until the edge case is the one paying you. If your motivation runs on interest instead of importance, or comes in waves nobody can predict, you’re running someone else’s software on hardware it was never built for. The software isn’t buggy. It just wasn’t written for you, and nobody’s going to patch it.

And because we’re all human, we fall back into character judgment anyway. This is exactly where systems thinking earns its keep, so let’s use it.

Look, when a well-intentioned person fails the same way hundreds of times, the interesting variable stopped being the person a long time ago. it’s the structure they keep failing inside of, over and over, like a rat that keeps hitting the same wall and getting blamed for not trying a different wall.

Donella Meadows made this point about interventions in general. “Try harder” sits near the bottom of her leverage list, right next to hoping really hard and fiddling with voodoo.

Changing the structure that produces the behavior is the only thing that actually pays off, and that’s exactly what external scaffolding does.

Scaffolding means moving “try harder” out of your head and into the environment, where it can’t get tired and can’t call in sick when you actually needed it.

Setting up your environment around how your brain actually operates does more for task initiation than any morning routine ever sold to me. Finding your blind spots and dragging them out into the open closes a feedback loop your brain refuses to close alone.

Public commitments work the same way. Telling a client “you’ll have it Friday” turns a private intention into a social contract, and social contract is a far more reliable driver than self-respect. I say this with the full authority of someone who has disappointed his own calendar more times than I’ll admit here, but has never once missed a client deadline.

Externalize memory with whiteboards, sticky notes, whatever makes the small decisions for you by default so you don’t spend energy and time with things you already know the answer to.

For some brains, out of sight is out of existence. A drawer is where tasks go to get duly procrastinated to death, while a visible post-it about something you actually enjoy will beat your own medication alarm in the fight for your attention.

None of this is elegant, and that’s the whole point. Scaffolding on a building looks ugly precisely because it’s doing work the building can’t do for itself, and your environment can hold you up the same way while everyone around you keeps insisting you should be self-supporting. But try telling a contractor he should climb to the 8th floor of the building’s facade without the scaffolding, and see what he thinks about self-supporting.

Actually, let me tell you something. Everyone has scaffolding. We just rename it the second we’re talking about someone who isn’t neurodivergent.

We call them “environment design", "commitment devices”, “accountability partners" and many other fancy, positive-spin names that makes these people look smart and proactive. Productivity role models. In the end of the day, potato potahto.

Once you accept the wiring is what it is, the question changes. You stop asking how to become an average-shaped person and start asking where to point the custom machine you were already driving.

Hyperfocus is the obvious example. The ability to disappear into a problem for six hours is a rare, expensive capability, and most people who have it burn it on whatever hijacked their attention that morning, The problem is the targeting. The trait is actually a brutal advantage when compared to the average person, who gives up after the first roadblock.

Meanwhile enormous energy goes into flattening, into lowering the bar on purpose, into performing normalcy, or averagecy, which should absolutely be a word by now and isn’t.

That’s a waste of energy and time both, and wasting two things at once is worse than wasting one.

In my own client work I run into the highly skilled, poorly paid person constantly, and I hate how common they’ve become. Their competence would produce serious money, and their best hours flow instead into perfectionism and polish, spent performing normal for an audience that was never paying attention in the first place.

I propose two practical exercises, though there are probably more, and I’m open to being told what I’m missing.

First, build the scaffolding so starting, remembering, and finishing stop depending on how you feel at 9 a.m., or whatever hour your day happens to start.

Second, put a price tag on everything you do, and aim your hyperfocus capacity at whatever carries the highest ones, because the market never once paid for what happened inside your head. It only pays for what comes out the other side.

I recognize some of this in myself, though I still don’t know what category my own brain belongs to. In German VS Autistic, I score 51% autistic, but I score German even higher, which is likely a stronger clue. But anyway, at this point the label matters less than the loop.

Behavior follows structure. I optimized for a brain I don’t have for a very long time before someone noticed, and I wish somebody had sent me an email about it 20 years ago.

The lesson: if the structure around you is built for a brain you don’t have, change the structure and keep the brain. Send the hyperfocus somewhere it can invoice.

Happy building,

-- R.