I get by by pushing as much of the time-related stuff as possible off onto the computer. Then I can dismiss the issue until it’s time, so I can concentrate.

In UNIX/Linux systems (Macintosh OSX is BSD UNIX underneath the GUI), there’s cron. Windows machines have a crude equivalent in System Agent. In both cases, this is a scheduler, and you can add stuff to that schedule, and the computer will do it at the time you’ve set. For more complex things than simple one-line commands, there are scripting languages; I use Perl, which is open-source and free for the download (and is probably already installed on your Linux system). It’s easy to learn enough Perl to get by for this; you don’t have to know the whole language to use it.

In my house, the main computer turns on lights and plays wake-up noises in the morning; at night it turns off lights the kids have left on (with X-10 modules). I have it play WAV files to announce when to get kids out the door for school in the morning, and when to get up and fix dinner in the evening. It’s simple to set up a cron-driven reminder to pay a bill on a given day of the month. You can even use at on UNIX/Linux to play a WAV chime as a kind of kitchen timer, to tell you when to pull stuff out of the oven.

I get crowded or distracted and forget; the computer doesn’t. With a little setup, you can use that too.

If you have a spare computer to put it on, there’s an open-source home-automation project called Mister House, which takes this offload the time-distraction onto the computer idea about as far as it will go.

In my opinion, that’s because it’s bad for the regimented lecture-hall style of educator business used in American schools.

I have a son who is diagnosed-and-medicated ADHD, and another who is diagnosed-and-assisted ADD. Though I’ve not been diagnosed as such, I’ve been advised by a practitioner that I’m most likely ADD myself; the characteristics in the psychological profile done on me in my high school days (in the Sixties) match up pretty well with Pete’s “10 Positives” list.

None of us do well in conventional classroom settings, where the teacher spews from a book and the students listen and then regurgitate into tests. Where our learning is confined to this assembly-line method, we drag their percentages down. When we try to learn at our own often-faster but always-asynchronous pace in such a setting, we cause distraction and disruption problems. When we give a creative answer to a rote question (which happens often while we’re learning the skill of balancing creativity and memorization), the instructor has to stop and think, and that throws them off their rehearsed delivery performance rhythm. When we give up trying and our attention wanders, it’s obvious.

We’re visible faults in a flawed business method.