I've had grand ideas that I fixate on all my life—often working into the early hours of the morning for weeks; then, I falter, and progress stops. Of the many projects I've undertaken—software, stories, articles, poems, clothes, drawings, carvings, and more—incomplete ones constitute the vast majority. Sometimes, I do return: in bursts and volleys, adding to the original idea, pushing the finish line further over the horizon. Mostly, I submerge myself in denial until I wholly forget the project.

## The problem

All of my projects start in the same way: something ignites a spark in my brain, and it becomes the only thing I can think about. This persists for a while—sometimes a long while—but I inevitably lose the drive at some point, usually before meeting the goal I had in mind.

The root of the matter is not that I'm choosing the wrong projects. It isn't that I'm weak-willed. It isn't even my ADHD—well, not entirely. It's how my projects start: impulse.

I start on impulse, and I follow instincts whilst I'm working on things. I change requirements, shift goalposts, and smudge boundaries until I run out of energy or time. The solution is structure.

## The solution

Nick Cave had an office where he wrote from 09:00–17:00, 6 days a week. I remember the shock, at 14, when my dad relayed this fact; a musician treating their work like an office job? Nowadays, it conjures the advice writers frequently give for completing work: write *x* words every day. The value of *x* varies, but it's not important beyond being achievable within a day. The crucial part is discipline: you do it daily. You're working towards your goal consistently.

It's discipline that I want to employ. I have an embarrassment of ideas and relatively little to show for it; I pursued them in unsustainable ways and burned myself out. Taking a structured, *disciplined* approach should allow me to:

- work towards projects consistently
- understand how much time I have
- develop a healthier work/life balance
- complete things(!)

Sounds great to me; I'll start today—

Wait. This sounds like every other productivity hack that's failed to change my life. Why should this be any different?

Well, it won't be—if I approach it like I've dove into so many similar ideas. The point of this is to recognise that the issue is my cognition. It's the classic drawback creative people face: the thrill of chasing an idea's first flushes is intoxicating, but the novelty wears off, new ideas come along, circumstantial changes beget less project time, etc. If you want to complete something, you must be deliberate. So here goes...

### What's important to me?

My last few months have been a maelstrom of productivity and action centring on my career. I've had my first encounter with recruiters, successfully leveraged their interest in me to effect real change at my work, learned incredible amounts about the technology I use daily, made an excellent impression on my new team, developed strong friendships with colleagues, and an unseemly amount of other things I'm forgetting.

What I haven't done is everything else. My social life, physical/mental health, art, website, etc., are untended. I'm on holiday from work now, and I can reflect on the last three months as a genuinely exciting time *for* me but not such a great time to *know* me.

Whilst I was in the midst of it, that was fine. I was content in my dogged pursuit of... well, many things at once. I was looking for quick gratification instead of building towards things consistently; it paid off this time, but this approach isn't sustainable—the cost is steep.

Now that I've got my first free week—no work, no obligations—I intend to resolve an important question: how do I want to use my time once I'm back? To which end are structure and discipline my means? These things are important to me:

- Learning
- Writing
- Reading
- Exercise
- Socialising
- Mental health

Let's attempt to make some [S.M.A.R.T. goals](https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/smart-goals.htm) from these. Each day, I want to:

- Read at least 1 page.
- Write something creative or educational.
- Meditate for 5 minutes.
- Learn for 30 minutes.

Each week, I want to:

- Post something to my website.
- See people outside of work (x2).
- Run (x3).
- Work out (x2).

From these goals, I'll create a weekly schedule. I want to start simple; I probably won't have all of the above represented in my first schedule. If things go well, I may expand it. But I can't think of many other things I want to do.

## Conclusions

This piece was marketed as musings on harnessing creativity, and appears to have finished with a strategy for organising your life. Now *that*'s value for money.


It's difficult to complete projects; turns out, sustaining effort isn't the problem.

Disciplining creativity

ADHD

Luke Scanlan

Whew. About time.

From a cursory glance at some old files, I've been working on various websites for myself since 2018. A lot more goes into web development than people think, but it's not the labour of four years. Those four years hung heavily over my head until about two weeks ago. Now I have the perfect excuse.

## I have ADHD.

Still feels a bit strange to be able to say it. I was formally diagnosed on 19.04.2022, five months after first trying to get assessed. But what’s this ADHD thing everyone seems to have these days? Well, any old search engine will help you find it's a neurodevelopmental disorder defined by either hyperactivity and impulsivity, inattentiveness, or both. For me, it’s profound procrastination, infernal inner-monologuing, and perpetual pacing. It’s battling sleep in the day due to none at night. It’s months of aimlessness followed by weeks of singular purpose. It’s a chasm between me and my past, and a long trail of former friends.

My relationship with this diagnosis is something I’d like to explore further, in a dedicated article. I’ll use the above as a jumping-off point, as what I typed surprised me a little.

Circling back to the website, I’ve worked on this in flurries several times throughout previous years. Here’s an early version of an ‘about’ page, that I may yet use for this site:

![old about page.png](https://prod-lukescanlan.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/old_about_page_55ef44d565.png)

It has some primitive javascript and some heinous use of viewport width to set font size. It’d be pretty terrible on mobile. I’ll address these when I try to remake it in react, for this site. Or I’ll do away with it completely. Who knows?

While I’m at it, here are a few other pages and things I coded with getting a website up and running in mind:

![content page1.png](https://prod-lukescanlan.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/content_page1_b6f0a302ea.png)
![content page2.png](https://prod-lukescanlan.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/content_page2_8327b06ada.png)
![landingPage.png](https://prod-lukescanlan.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/landing_Page_80ebfba69c.png)

Clearly, some of my design motifs have stuck around. The latter image is of an idea for a landing page, and the former two were an idea for an article page with a randomised background. (The text is my national 5 english essay, which you can read—at your peril—[here](lukescanlan.com/article/the-poppy).) The pictures were all taken by me, when I fixated on photography for a few weeks. If you hovered over the text, it went transparent and allowed you to see the picture.

All of these were made quickly, and dropped quicker still. The ambition to create a website where I can host things I write, things I make, whatever I like, really, has hounded me for years, but it has stayed out of my grasp until now. Even with five months off work, years more expertise in web development, and no uni to study for, it took me two months to get started on this iteration of my website. Once I started hewing this from various skimmed tutorials, it enveloped me, and I scarcely thought of anything else for weeks. Many late nights begat a nocturnal sleep schedule, working from 20:00 until 05:00 or later. I got the site to near the stage you see now, and it was ready to be deployed. It was going live, after four years of trying and failing. And I lost the drive.

I’m uncertain if I can explain what hyperfocus is like to people who haven’t experienced it. Current psychology says ADHD is caused by a lack of—or lack of responsiveness to—dopamine in the brain. This makes focus difficult to regulate. When you _should_ be working, studying, doing household tasks, you’re watching YouTube, playing games, down a wikipedia rabbit hole. With ADHD, your life is a series of ruts to get stuck in. You gravitate towards instant rewards and low intellectual overhead, shunning intense mental tasks, tasks with delayed gratification or no gratification at all; these are the ruts with the steepest outer walls—the hardest to get stuck in. There is, however, a ladder: novelty. If something is novel, and the person with ADHD has a natural interest in it, they can focus far better than even someone without the condition. This is hyperfocus. In my experience, it can be so intense as to be a detriment to my health, as I forget to eat, sleep, exercise and maintain any kind of routine outside the maelstrom of my fixation. If this could be harnessed in the interests of capital, I’d be the ideal employee. But, of course, novelty is fickle. I don’t maintain hobbies past a few months. I leave virtually all projects unfinished. Once the novelty wears off, and interacting with the subject of my fixation no longer provides dopamine, it becomes incredibly difficult to motivate myself. So, this is what happened with [lukescanlan.com] mk. IV, V, or whatever number I’d reached by this point.

The website was, as I said, virtually in the condition it appears now. It was the MVP (minimum viable product). I tried to deploy it, and hit a snag. (I may elucidate on this snag in a future dev blog post, but the particulars are unimportant here.) That was all it took. After reaching the outer bounds of my focus, a final issue was an issue too far. I slipped out of the rut. When I did fix it, two months on, it was the work of a few hours. Completely achievable on the day I first encountered the issue, or the day after, or a few days after. I tormented myself over it, even as I moved onto new projects, new hobbies, new fixations. The only thing that got me to go back was finally being diagnosed, and starting medication.

It’s early days yet, but I’m hopeful that this medication will help me update this site with writing regularly. I love writing, but I haven’t had much of a reason to exercise that particular muscle in the last few years. I’d like this site to be my reason. If you see me, please ask when the next post is coming. Sometimes I need a kick up the arse.

Addendum:  
The cover is just a picture I had on my computer, it's me after I got surgery when I was ten or so.

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Hey, guys

there is a concept of this story, an idea. if you try to read it, interact with it, mull it over, really roll it around in your mouth, cover all 9000 tastebuds, you might think it's here, but it isn't.

what is a story? does the label "story" necessitate a narrative? a plot? surely no narrative exists without the concept of time, and that's such a piteously human experience that it's hardly worth writing about. we have a deadline after all. i might call it the 2050 effect. we have an endpoint. science keeps telling us that if we don't do X by 2050, if X doesn't stop by 2050, we're going to run out of X by 2050. i'm preoccupied by this concept, currently. i've inserted myself in the story now. i'm the narrator, i have pronouns.

we have a character and we have temporal context—"currently" and the anticipatory discussion of climate-related disasters looming in "2050". is this a story now? it seems like an essay. or a stream of consciousness. isn't that what catcher in the rye is? if it weren't fiction would it be as great? would it be lauded? what would this be? this has been written in a stream. i have not stopped for the last five minutes and i know i could continue forever. are we still telling a story?

worldstate literature is a type of story telling without characters, instead opting to tell the larger story of a civilisation or a colony or maybe planets or something. it's something i've heard about and never looked into properly, and i had to resist the temptation to go off and do that now. what purpose does this story serve? is a character not an abstract concept anyway? so, the characters in world state fiction are just larger. opposing factions, communities, planets, would have consistent traits, one would become familiar with them in a manner no different to how one becomes familiar with traditional characters.

what of this type of literature, then? is it easier or more difficult to grasp than a story where the characters comprise many undulating minds? this is a tributary of a mind that you could never know or hope to understand, not because the mind is unique but because we are resolutely fixed in our own brain. it's why we can be so evil to one another.

what happens when behaviours become symptoms? how does one rationalise ones accomplishments and talents once they see them through the lens of a psychiatric condition? a neurological disorder. a mental illness. i haven't been diagnosed yet and my foundations are already shaken in a fundamental way.

this is the easiest way for me to think. this is natural. this has been relaxing, or cathartic. it continues to be something. i have the same obsession with the audience now that i did when i had social media. did i always have that, though? is that part of the creative condition? i haven't encountered much media so determined to make the audience uncomfortable. to make them think of themselves as an audience. that's one of the themes of my thoughts for the last few months. there i go again. character and context. chronology. quotidian nonsense, eh? we can't all write grand Kantian fiction, where cause and effect are but quirks of the human experience of reality. some of us have a hard enough time extracting ourselves from thought.

isn't thought reality, though? say you take a human and reduce them to metrics, logs, outputs that could be parsed by a computer. each thought its own entry in on an endlessly scrolling monitor. no, scratch that. that's not the point i want to make. say you take a three-dimensional space containing a human; we'll go with 2 cubic metres for now. if you had a way of measuring every event that took place in that space—every fluctuation in air current; every change in temperature; every sound—and storing it, or displaying it in a room full of CRT monitors (with the occasional test pattern, naturally), would the thoughts of the human show up in these event logs? they're part of reality. there are physical neurons firing that are causing our dear human their grand notions and funny little ideas. could the thoughts ever possibly be perceived by anyone other than the person who is thinking them, though?

with our technology, we can almost make out a dim future where we've got an app where we can scroll through every thought we have. you'll be able to search, they'll be helpfully categorised by subject, or by emotion. you'll be able to peruse them chronologically. the "amazon" branding will be long outmoded, because there is no need for recognisability when there are no other companies. we'll sign up because it's convenient to be able to remember what you thought about buying the other day. they'll provide the service at no cost, because it's convenient for them to have direct access to your decisions. things will appear in your home before you realise you needed them. what's the difference between this and omnipotence? well, god didn't sell their mind to The Company for the power, but we can't know the mind of god anyway. god will be The Company. a group of minds. a faction, in other words. just another character in our worldstate fiction.

AYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAY

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Written in an hour one night when I couldn't sleep.

True Free-form Storytelling

Philosophy

Stream of Conciousness

The remembrance poppy has been around since the First World War. It commemorated the dead soldiers of the American army and was then adopted by veteran groups in the British Empire. It was inspired by the poem “In Flanders Fields” by war poet Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae. Nowadays the poppy is mostly worn in the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, and has been rebranded as a symbol to remember their fallen soldiers in all conflicts.

The question is, can we really justify the origin of the poppy? Does the poppy serve to glorify combat? Glorify losing your life for Queen And Country™? To answer this question, you could look to the poppy website which states proudly “The poppy is NOT a symbol of death or a sign of support for war”. Funnily enough on the same page you will find the poem that the remembrance poppy was inspired by. A poem whose final lines include: *“Take up our quarrel with the foe;”* I’m not sure how the poppy can claim to solely be a symbol of remembrance when its very foundation includes a plea to continue the fighting. In 2014 an art installation of nearly 900,000 ceramic poppies took place in the Tower of London. The name? “Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red”. Perhaps the poppy is intended as a pure symbol, but it has yet to live up to that reputation.

The poppy has a problem in the 21st century. A rotten political core that sours the brand. There is a bitter irony in watching the poppy-wearing political elite shed crocodile tears for our fallen *soldiers*, as they sign legislation that allows *civilians* in other countries to be accidentally murdered or maimed. *Our* fallen soldiers. We picture people from our town, the county we live in, the nearest city. Our poppies are not for the opposing side. They aren’t for the German soldiers forced to commit atrocities, lest they be killed themselves. They aren’t for the more than 100,000 Indian casualties by the end of World War I. Most people aren’t even aware that [1.4 million Indian soldiers](http://mprapeuro.weebly.com/uploads/2/9/3/0/29308547/role_of_noneuro_nations.pdf) were recruited by Britain during the war, and that without whom an allied defeat at the Western Front in 1914 was almost guaranteed. When you think of the remembrance campaign, the face of the army we remember is painfully white. And our politicians like it that way. They don’t mind that the South African Delville Wood memorial in France [doesn’t have the names](http://ww1centenary.oucs.ox.ac.uk/memoryofwar/wwi-memorials-of-the-british-empire-identity-and-memory-on-the-western-front/) of the 70,000 black South African soldiers, allowing us to forget that they never received the British War Medal. It’s preferable to our ethical arbiters that we only remember the white officers that did receive the medal.

And what about modern war? How do we choose to remember the dead of Aleppo? Of Pakistan? Not with a poppy. Poppies are reserved for the white soldiers who die in conflicts which have mainly brown casualties. Poppies are reserved for the side who are responsible for droves of civilian casualties and kill via drone strike. How many British *soldiers* have died since 2000? Officially, 1,146. How about how many *civilians* in Syria and Iraq have died as a result of the intervention which the UK has contributed to? A minimum of 5,058 to 7,682. Oh, and that’s not since 2000. That’s since 2014. And how many casualties has the “War on Terror” caused in Pakistan? [More than 80,000](https://tribune.com.pk/story/860790/80000-pakistanis-killed-in-us-war-on-terror-report/), from 2004 until the end of 2013. How many were civilians? Nearly 50,000. Over 60%. In Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan the death toll from US-led wars in more than a decade is 1.3 million. That’s roughly the same amount as the total British casualties in WWI… if you include the total American casualties as well. It doesn’t seem like our nation has a symbol to remember all the people we’ve helped kill. Not even a symbol for the accidental or civilian casualties. For the children killed. The mothers and fathers. Brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grans and grandas. We need to humanise this death toll, so we can truly comprehend it. We need to think of these numbers as people and respect the loss.

The poppy can’t continue to be used as a symbol of respect. We need something to represent peace, a symbol that illustrates the devastation of these conflicts. It should serve as a lesson to us all rather than just a mark of our gratitude to our fallen soldiers. We shouldn’t let more people die as a result of these wars. We don’t need a poppy, we need a sign that is relevant in a global context. One that encompasses all loss of life in senseless violence, mandated by people who never see it. You wonder what would happen if, instead of shaking hands with a recovered veteran for a quick photo op or meeting a couple of the meagre number of refugees we allow into the country, our politicians had to be there as the veteran’s leg was blown off by an IED, or watch the refugee’s town get decimated by a screaming missile emblazoned with a massive union jack whilst children run screaming. Maybe if our politicians had some context of what war is really like, they wouldn’t be so eager to jump into them. Or maybe that’s naïve, and I’m projecting compassion onto our political grotesques in much the same way that Mayans projected intent onto the sun.

The poppy was inspired by a war poem, written by a war poet. World War I was an age of mandatory service. These days the global super powers mostly employ a mercenary army, paying private military contractors and security firms millions and sometimes even billions. The private military trade has seen an exponential increase since the “war on terror”, and the largest private security company, G4S, is based in the UK. Thanks to these private armies, you don’t get war poets anymore. The soldiers know of the horrors they are headed toward, there is none of the WWI naivety that led young men to the front line in droves. The poppy is a relic of a bygone age.

References:

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/john-wight/the-poppy-and-remembrance_b_12767246.html

https://airwars.org/civilian-casualty-claims/

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-syria-iraq-air-strikes-civilians-killed-injured-casualties-children-mosul-offensive-latest-war-a7771146.html

Non-Fiction

Disciplining creativity

Hey, guys

True Free-form Storytelling

The Poppy