ADHDo

Most productivity tools are built for brains that can hold a queue. If you can’t — if the queue collapses the moment something shiny crosses your peripheral vision — those tools don’t fail gracefully. They fail judgmentally. Missed reminders become evidence. Incomplete lists become character flaws. Every notification is a tiny court verdict, and the software keeps adjourning against you.

ADHDo is my counter-verdict. Not a todo list with encouragement bolted on — a cognitive scaffold that treats executive function as a variable, not a constant. The premise is simple enough to be radical: the machine adapts to the shape of the day, not the other way around.

The pipeline has three stages. A state gatherer reads what the day is actually like — medication windows, how long I’ve been sitting, the task backlog, energy levels. A reasoning engine with confidence gating decides what to do about it, and declines to act when it doesn’t understand the situation: a discipline most assistants don’t have. Then a tools executor does something — focus music, timers, ambient nudges, environment controls.

The speed budget is written into the config, and it’s set by the physics of ADHD attention: one second for an ordinary interaction, a hundred milliseconds for anything that smells like crisis. If the scaffold hesitates, the brain has already wandered off, so the scaffold lives in the room rather than behind a screen — Google Nest speakers, not another tab. A Jellyfin-backed focus music library sorts tracks by mood, because sometimes the right frequency is the only executive function that works on me.

The interesting part is what it listens for. Crisis detection watches for the four horsemen of a bad ADHD hour — repetitive questions, frustrated language, task-switching chaos, negative self-talk — and intervenes with de-escalation, not platitudes. Hyperfocus management notices the session that ran four hours past its own good sense and suggests a break without breaking flow. Both rest on the same bet: the failure mode isn’t laziness, it’s state — and state can be read, and answered.

No shame. No guilt. No disappointed notification tone. The system’s only job is to meet the day where it is — which is all most of us were ever asking of the software in the first place.