Exobrain

Introduction

As a creative software engineer it is my job to supply information to people, more specific to supply the right information at the right time to the right person. This i something i can confidently say i am good at. At the other side of the coin is my own private / personal live. I often struggle, with all the things life is throwing at me so at a certain point, about a year ago, i decided to structurally devote some of my time to write code that benefits me directly. I can hire a professional to clean my house, a professional to do my finances, a medic to look at both my physical and my mental health an spend my valuable time with all these professionals to make them do things that at first glance may seem unrelated but which certainly are, or i can try to automate the hell out of it, safe my self some time in the long run and sit back and relax once all of this would be setup, which is quite a bit of work and of course never finished. So the goal is to become a service engineer of my own automated life.

So what can you automate and why would you?

Background

In 2019 went trough some personal difficulties and when i went to see my doctor i asked him if it could be that i have ADHD, he replied with "pfff obvious" and that was it, i went back home with my new superpower.

This was of course not really how it went but to keep it short let's assume it was. Now when "interesting" things occur in my life i tend to get a bit obsessed about them, comes with the (ADHD) package i guess. So in this specific case i wanted to know at least double of what my doctor knows.

So, i went to the online bookstore, purchased a pile of books, watched every video i could get my hands on, listened to podcasts, signed in at a bunch of forums and so on. While the diagnosis it self is more a sad thing than a cheerful moment, when i received the diagnosis, a hidden door to a massive library on seemingly custom tailored books about me, my personality and potential caveats suddenly opened up. Reading these books often gave me the joy and as often the misery of recognition but self knowledge is the beginning of self improvement is what i kept in mind and i am a strong believer of the fact that, with the right attitude you can usually turn any handicap into a strength.

In my specific case, i must be honest, this ADHD is certainly a handicap that has and almost certainly always will make certain portions of my life more challenging while in the same time i also consider it to be my superpower and i would not want to trade with anyone. When i became a father approximately two years ago and with the second a year later, things started to get more complicated however. The breakup with the mother of my kids made things even worse.

I have always been very well capable of diverting my weaknesses, often not even being aware of them, by compensation but I could not do this any longer while carrying the responsibility of two very young children so while i was on this road of gathering and processing all this newly gathered self knowledge (ADHD is one of best-researched disorders and the amount of useful and practical resources is enormous), i was perforce required to put all of this into practice immediately, which of course led to several problems, most profoundly a deterioration of my performance on other portions of my life which also desired and deserved my full focus and attention.

A necessity for some metaphorical wheelbarrow entries and support structures for this handicap which, in my case is not visible to the naked eye but none the less certainly is present became needed. Not all of the utilities that i made are still in use, some have served their purpose and could be disposed later on as i internalized the coping mechanisms that they provided while using them.

Beat them at their own game

"If you beat someone at their own game, you use the same methods that they have used, but more successfully, so that you gain an advantage over them."

People with ADHD tent to learn a bit slower, which has nothing to do with their mental capabilities, there is nothing wrong with their intelligence or memory, they have an abnormality (society calls this a disorder) in their executive functions which, among other things, usually leads to being less capable of controlling what to focus on, which in current day society of course can become quite problematic.

When you cut off a branch of a tree, other branches will start to grow faster. You loose the portion of the tree that you cut off but the overall pace of growing will not be compromised by much more then the portion of the tree that you cut off as the rest of the tree will start to grow slightly faster due to the fact that the available resources are now divided by less branches. It is my personal conviction that the same holds true for us human. By often failing school and having less success in other fields of life then people deem to see fit for your level of intelligence, other traits start to evolve faster, simply because the have to in order for you to compensate for the things you are doing wrong in the eyes of your teachers, parents, friends, relatives etc.

In my case, but i think this holds true for most adults and even kids with ADHD, perseverance, willpower, empathy, creativity, having a thick skin and self-mockery have almost certainly evolved to higher levels then they would have without the mental condition. For me this is clear as a bell, there is even a stigma on people with ADHD that they usually are very creative and i think this is a not due to their mental condition (any 4 year old kid has the ability to be an innovative creative mastermind) but the fact that they have become hardened in failing and their creativity was required to many times to find solutions for their own fuck ups that they became good at it.

So what is the deal with "Beating them at their own game" you may ask. Well, i believe many of the things that people with ADHD tend to perform poorly at compared to their neurotypical counterparts are, sorry, boring things that can for the most part be done by computers or at least the difficulties can be mitigated with a little help, the wheelchair entries and support systems that i mentioned before.

The goal is to outperform the neurotypical at the things they are typically better at and doing so with ease.

Interface

The word "automation" implies that things happen automatically so when something is automated well there is no need for an interface. I want to be a service engineer and not an employee of my own life so to accomplish this most things are implemented as services that run in the background with pre predetermined handlers for respond to any situation where exceptional situations are forwarded to a centralized inbox where they are combined and prioritized with all the other taks that i need to complete.

Telegram bot

When the system requires my input and the input is as simple as a yes / no choice or with a limited set of options, the system may reach to me via a Telegram bot. The Telegram API offers a nifty feature that allow you to send a custom keyboard along with a message so when for instance you want to ask the question "How are you doing?" you can just send along only a thumbs up and a thumbs down icon which is really useful when the answer to the question has to be interpreted by a piece of code.

Context aware

Three separate schedulers make it possible execute predefined tasks based on the rules i come up with, in some cases they are combined. When an entry is added to my calendar because the kids arrive at a specific day another task is scheduled that adds a checklist to my todo list for the day prior to their arrival of things that i by default want to have ready before they arrive. This may sound exaggerated but trust me if you are me and you are raising a baby and a toddler alone, you better be prepared.

Time driven

Used to automatically create tasks for me that need to be done at regular intervals, most commonly things like household chores, visits to the dentist etc.

Event driven

Triggers based on things that happen, for instance when a transaction on my bank account is made or a specific task is completed or somebody send me an email.

Geo location based

Triggers when i am at a specific location, for instance i receive a link to my groceries list the moment i walk into the supermarket.

A listening ear (interpreter)

Whenever i want to tell something to the system i also use Telegram for this. The Telegram bot acts a bit like a Linux command line with a very limited and basic set of features. Sending just a question mark will return all the commands that i have programmed it to respond to. A question mark followed by any command returns the arguments that the command requires and the format the arguments should be written in.

Commands that create commands

I can add commands trough commands so when for instance i would like to create a new diary on a specific subject i would type "add-diary: hottub" now from this moment on i can send "hottub: Painting the glassfibre mold" or send a photo to the newly created diary by tagging it with #hottub. The collected data is then easy to use for publication or to create some sort of timeline on any specific subject that i run into. I use this for instance to create a timeline for the life of each of my kids with funny moments and photo's of our activities.

Components

The list of utilities is constantly growing and most of them, i think deserve some documentation of their own. Below is a list containing some of the more important tools that Exobrain currently has.

@genda: Agenda for the dimension space.
CashFlow: If this then that for my bank account.
MyThings: Adds organisation to chaos without affecting the chaos.
Coparenting: A plan tool for Coparenting that keeps into account the points of interest of all participants and measures important indicators. The tool automatically adjusts a shared calendar and allows for manual changes to be made by implementing hooks that trigger the system whenever any of the participants makes a change in their own private agenda that is if influence to the other people involved.
Reflect: Keeps track of data points about my self that allow me to recognize patterns and make conscious and well-considered decisions.
Vat: A series of scripts that generate my quarterly VAT declarations.