Discover the secret rhythms that guide a wandering mind—especially when the “energy goes poof.” In this episode of Rhythms of Focus, Kourosh Dini dives into the emotional undercurrents that make lists and to-dos feel overwhelming, unraveling the real reasons our energy fizzles out and motivation slips away. Rather than rigid productivity, explore why tuning in to the present moment—like adjusting the strings of a well-loved instrument—fosters lasting agency and self-compassion for adults with ADHD and wandering minds.

Listeners will uncover:

• The hidden emotional loops that sabotage progress with to-do lists, and how to break them.
• A practical, mindful approach for tuning choices in real time, empowering daily momentum.

Key Takeaways

• Revitalize your to-do list by updating it as a living tool, not a harsh judge.
• Reframe frustration as the start of a conversation with your past, present, and future selves.
• Treat decisions as “sharpening the ax”—practice tuning your actions to the moment rather than pursuing perfection.

This episode features an original piano composition, “Winnie,” capturing the spark of creative beginnings.

Subscribe to Rhythms of Focus and visit rhythmsoffocus.com to continue your journey toward agency, mindfulness, and a rhythm that’s truly your own.

Keywords

#ADHD #WanderingMinds #MindfulProductivity #Agency #DecisionMaking #ToDoLists #DailyRhythms #SelfCompassion #FocusStrategies #PianoOriginal

Transcript

 The Energy Goes Poof

Up in the morning, ready and raring to go. I don't know what I'll do yet, but I've got the energy.

I know what I'll do. I'll take a look at my list and just start taking things on. Ah, wait. Here we go. Alright. Yeah. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I already did that. I, I forgot about that. Oh my goodness. The deadline for that one's. Oh my goodness. It this long pass. This is coming right up. What does this even mean?

I am horrible at this.

Lemme just go lie down for a second and maybe I'll watch something. It'll come to me. I know. I, I, I'll do something.

The energy we once had has now gone poof. What just happened?

Approaching a List

One of the biggest mistakes in managing our lists, our tasks, is about how we approach them.

There are many task managers out there. I use one myself, OmniFocus, which I've written a book on, it's pretty darn good if I do say so myself. There's things, there's to doist many, many other possibilities including pen and paper, which I also use. All of these promise in some way or another to help you get things done.

And you'd think that this promise is that it's linked to somehow it'll tell you what to do. Just tell me what to do already. You want to look at this thing and just have a way to move forward. Why wouldn't we want that?

Decisions are heavy. Have a listen to episode 18 if you're interested in hearing about quite how heavy they can be.

But of course, we look at that task manager and it never seems to happen. Instead, even when we've poured our heart and soul into some list, hoping, dreaming that we'll be able to focus where we want to or need to, while everything else patiently waits for us to appear at just the right time. Somehow it doesn't work.

We meticulously work on it. We delve into some hyper-focus attention tunnel to make that perfect system itself, this meta productivity of sorts. And once we step away though, there it is falling apart. No matter how well we've curated a list, when we get back to it, there are things on there that are still not done seemingly mocking us. There are things that need to be in a completely different order, uh, things that shouldn't be there until something else happens. The wording of things are somehow wrong.

Where We Lost Touch

What's going on? Is it our past self? That's once again betrayed us?

Is it our present self that's somehow a failure?

Either question is just a way of leading to some more damage of self-esteem by hitting us where we think we should have had it together, but for some mysterious reason, just don't. Whatever motivation we once had is lost.

What's truly throwing us off isn't that the paper is somehow wrong, that the way we've written things is off. It's not even a belief that it should be the same.

It's how we interpret the emotions that happen as we approach that list. When things are different, when some vision is not where we thought it would be, we hit frustration, confusion, among any number of other feelings.

This is the way minds work. Somehow something's appearing differently than we'd hoped, and there's some emotional response to that.

But because of so many of the struggles a wandering mind can go through in life- whether we've forgotten things, we've dropped things, we've lost things we've had to try to force ourselves to make things happen- we take that feeling of frustration, confusion, whatever it is that says that things did not go the way we thought they would go and conflate it with failure.

"It's Not Failure" Is Not Enough

It's not failure, and I can say that, but trying to practice that is another story. The practice is

to recognize that that feeling of frustration is only the beginning of a conversation between ourselves through time, our past, present, and future selves. That is the challenge.

Task systems will not line up with reality. The moment we walk away, regardless of how tuned they are, they decay. They fall apart because reality changes while the list doesn't.

Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly, as much as we may like it to the task system, the list, these will not make our decisions for us. They won't lighten the load that decisions have other than holding them in place. All the list can do is to now show us what we once thought was important to help make our decisions for the now.

Why even have a list?

So what's the point? Why even have a list? It seems like it's a whole lot of work for nothing, and some of us do come to that conclusion and toss the thing, just kind of drift and do what comes to mind. Obviously that has its own share of problems.

But when we work on that thing in front of us, when we think about our decision in the moment, we are tuning it for the moment. We are trying to make it reflect our reality now, what we want to do, what we need to do, making estimates as to how to get information back to us, when and where it might be useful.

In this process, we are in fact doing the work of making an informed decision for this moment.

In this way, it's like tuning a guitar. Every time we come to it. We'll need to make some adjustment. We need to listen to it, consider how the sounds fit together, twist the pegs until they have some harmony that we need to have it. Be there for us to help us do something with it. Certainly, the better we get at it, the less time it takes to tune to the moment.

The more steady the conditions, the more reliably the guitar or the list might even hold its tune over time. Instead of thinking a list or task should be perfect. We can realize instead that of course it needs to be updated. The world has changed.

Our lists are ideas, meaning itself, decays, just like anything else. They're always growing, beginning as seeds, growing and blooming, changing, shifting, adjusting the ecology around it. That realization changes everything.

It may seem daunting. Because it is daunting. Freedom is daunting. Decisions have weight, but we are now free.

Free to make changes. The list doesn't work for you. Fine. Change the list. What about it doesn't work anymore? What's new?

There is a bravery to confronting it because now we see where problems are a little bit more clearly, perhaps. Where have we over promised ourselves? More subtly maybe, we might see where feelings of guilt have resulted in squeezing out things we wanted to do. More positively, we might realize that several ideas can come together into a new single action.

It's all about making that solid decision, for this moment. A solid decision is a powerful foundation on which we can take action. I like the Abraham Lincoln quote. Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I'll spend the first four sharpening the ax. Making that decision is a sharpened ax. Working on the list in the moment is the act of sharpening it.  

"Winnie" and the Magic of a Fresh Idea

There's something magical to the freshness of an idea.

I had this old comic book by Berkeley Bretford, author of Bloom County and his, uh, lovely characters of Opus and Bill the Cat among others. I remember in the forward of one of these books, uh, he included sketches of his characters early, sort of just pencil sketches, and he said much the same as what I'm saying now, that there's something magical to those first sketches, and really, there was something cool about it, something ah, on fire something, a light, something electric. It's when the ideas are brightest. I think that's part of why we often like to dive into something when the muse strikes.

We're not holding onto the words or figures or symbols or images to help us figure out what it is we're talking about.

We have some thing in mind, some feeling already there and some inchoate state. Something that we're trying to put into words and paper and whatever. As an audience, we can more directly feel the origin of those waves when we see those thoughts and the like just crashing onto the paper, as undeveloped as they are.

This piece of music is early in its creation. There are things I'd change and adjust and move this there and make this louder or softer or whatever, but I know that if I did that, whether by practice or through adjustments on the editor, I know the piece would lose something of that magic. So I don't. The piece is called Winnie, and I hope you enjoy it.  

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