Welcome! Everything is fine!

January 22, 2019

There are a million good reasons to fire someone. If you ask one of my first post-college employers, ordering a hot dog over the weekend is chief among them.

One fall weekend after the election in 2016, several local nonprofits, including my then-employer, convened to show people the good they can do in their community. About an hour before the event, our intern told me she couldn’t make it. I was left to spread our message to hundreds of attendees by myself.

I tried to avoid being frustrated—maybe I had missed some key knowledge about her schedule—but the event was tough to handle solo. I wasn’t able to grab breakfast, so the only thing keeping me going was knowing I'd be able to take a break to grab a local staple next door, a bacon-wrapped and jalapeño-covered Sonoran hot dog.

Two days later, my boss asked me how the event went, then flashed me a puzzled look when I said it went well. “Have you been on Facebook recently?” she asked. When I said no, she pulled up a video in which the event coordinator ran from booth to booth, showing every organization that attended.

I chose to grab my tasty meal right before the entirely unannounced recording took place.

“This is embarrassing for us,” she said, adding that if I was hungry then I could have eaten the trail mix in our bag. After firing me, her last words to me were “you’re a good guy, you just need a job with more structure.”

Sure, I could have taken issue with the fact that the only compliment she had ever given me was effectively nothing more than a first-impression formality, but my biggest gripe was with the notion that I needed a job with more structure. That just isn’t how I operate. My ADHD means I need an unstructured environment where I can bounce around tasks as my brain shifts focus. She was trying to change the way I work, which made me force myself to think in a way that wore me down rather than eased my workflow.

No matter how much I believed in our cause, I was working under a manager who never saw me as an employee with my own talents or contributions. Instead, I was a vessel to do the things she couldn’t or didn’t feel like doing, in exactly the same way, and reshape my brain to follow her lead.

Throughout my life, I've tried to find the best ways to use the tools I have around me, like my phone or laptop, to keep my ADHD in line and make my life better. Technology can get too complicated if we let ourselves get bogged down in settings and new methods of keeping our lives in order. A good tool will help you get through your days with a bit more ease, but a bad tool will crush the habits you’ve spent your life building and turn it into an uphill battle.

That's why I'm launching Rebooting, a self-care survival guide for technologists. Whether you're struggling with ADHD or just can't seem to sift through your ever-growing pile of tasks and emails, I'll try to help by sharing ways to use tech to enrich rather than inhibit our lives. Some weeks, that may mean talking about an app that's helped me keep my spacey brain in check. Other weeks I may talk about bigger ideas, like how to cope with content exhaustion. Whatever the topic, I'll always share something new about what it means to be good to yourself without sacrificing the bits of technology that make our lives better.

I’m delighted to have you all on this journey with me. If you have any questions, feedback, or just want to say hello, feel free to drop me a line on Twitter.

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Wonderful!: Every week, Griffin and Rachel McElroy share a couple of their favorite things, and the result is one of most wholesome podcasts around. Sometimes it’s a YouTube Channel that turns everyday items into knives or an ode to 90’s advertisements. You’ll walk away with an appreciation for something new, and may even find something new you love.

My thanks to Daniel Varghese for editing this issue.