Welcome to Emajon

When my son was struggling in elementary school and his teacher suggested testing for ADHD, I didn't expect the diagnosis to be so revealing for my own life. Most people with ADHD have one or more parents who also have it, and it was immediately obvious where he had inherited his.

In hindsight, the fact that I have attention problems seems obvious, but it was masked by a successful career in technology and as an executive. That success came from an amazing support network made up of managers, team members, admins and others that encouraged and helped me professionally. But when it came to my own personal projects — like the one you're reading right now — I struggled to achieve the same success. Most of the time I struggled to even get started.

I have been thinking about creating Emajon for decades. The name comes from my children's names, Emma and John, and a play on the words imagine and imagination. I first secured the domain name over 20 years ago. I filed for the trademark a decade ago. I have written this welcome and created this site at least a dozen times before and somehow never managed to stay the course and fully launch.

If you are reading this, the site finally exists. And that fact alone is a testament to the challenges many people face when trying to bring to life the things they imagine.

What We're Building

Emajon has always been about setting goals and achieving dreams. Before I knew I had ADHD, I realized that achieving your goals required help with the basics — managing time, planning, organizing, and staying focused. These are executive functions: the mental skills that enable goal-directed behavior. Building these core skills and tools is the foundation for everything else.

On top of that foundation, I believe that a meaningful life is built on three pillars:

• Connections and relationships
• Physical and mental health, and
• Financial strength.

The same ADHD that kept me from launching Emajon also made me forget to call my best friend for months, skip workouts for weeks at a time, and let financial paperwork pile up until it felt insurmountable. These aren't separate problems. They're the same problem showing up in different parts of life.

Finally, we come back to our personal goals and dreams. What are the purposeful things we want to achieve as individuals, as families, organizations, or companies — and how do we build from this foundation to achieve them? It is difficult to invest in personal dreams and goals, if we don't have our health, a community to encourage and support us, and our basic economic needs of things like food and shelter covered.

Why Now

I can't really explain why this has taken 20+ years to get started. I can honestly say, the time has not all been wasted. I bring experiences and perspective with me now that the younger version of me who originally envisioned this work lacked. That said, time is maybe the most valuable thing we have, and we learn through doing.

Fred Brooks in his seminal 1975 work, The Mythical Man-Month, wrote, "How does a project get to be a year late? One day at a time." I would add that years can slip by just as easily. It's never one big failure. It's a thousand small ones — each day you meant to call but didn't, each week that slipped by without a workout, each month where the savings account stayed the same. What your health, friendships, and finance all have in common is that time matters - and investing compounds over time.

The goal of Emajon is to provide information and tools to help you not let time slip away unintentionally and to help make investments that grow with time. This is not a time management system. I am not trying to squeeze and optimize every moment of life. There is great value in a lazy afternoon nap or a vacation or in countless other activities that strict time optimization focused systems seem to devalue. Where this all begins is with awareness of time.

And for me, the most urgent place to apply that awareness is to the people in my life. How long has it been since I called my friend in Wales? When did I last really talk to my daughter — not logistics, but actually talk? Time slips away from relationships just as easily as it slips away from projects. Emajon starts there — with the people who matter most.

This blog is where I'll share what I'm learning as I build — about ADHD, about relationships, about the tools and ideas that help us stay connected to the people and things that matter. If any of that resonates, I'd love for you to follow along.