Welcome
This is a deeply personal project space for my “Not Degree”.
I have a mind which does nothing so much as wiggle.
This is a story about working with that rather than against it.
The landscape
My ADHD + bipolar + command resistance = one hell of an energy management challenge
(More about command resistance soon.)
I fail at formal education - badly.
I wanted to be an autodidact but somehow also failed at that.
So much failure. So many times. In so many ways.
Humiliated
I didn’t understand how things could be this way.
I am the offspring of two school teachers.
But all was not lost.
I kept trying. For decades.
I kept borrowing library books and returning them (mostly) unread.
I didn’t give up on myself.
What’s a Not Degree?
I typed into ChatGPT “How many hours would an average australian degree take to complete”
The answer was lots! 7500 hours if I wanted to get all the way up to a PhD.
On hearing the numbers I typed
“I am imagining a degrees worth of free range study over 10 years”
It’s a beautiful idea.
To embody it I’ve needed to chase deep self insight…
The three pieces of the energy puzzle
Piece Number One: ADHD
One day in my early 40s a library book that I actually did read ambushed me.
It was the “The Ghost in My Brain: How a Concussion Stole My Life and How the New Science of Brain Plasticity Helped me get it back” by Clark Elliot.
One week after alarm bells started ringing. I’d never had a concussion but the author described having some attentional difficulties prior to his concussion.
It took me the longest six weeks of waiting of my life to confirm that I have (Inattentive) ADHD from a Psychiatrist.
In theory ADHD students are driven by interest more than most - but I still couldn’t seem to do things quite right.
This is what I consider to be piece one of the puzzle.
Piece Number Two: Bipolar
The next piece arrived some years later and complicated my energy management challenges further.
I over-extended myself and became very unwell. This episode tipped into bipolar disorder.
Piece number three: Command resistance
This is a self-coined term for something that presents internally.
(I used to call it sub-clinical demand resistance.)
It describes something that I experience frequently every day.
Take for example a standard work day. You have tasks to do. These tasks can be seen as a long list of tasks you complete one thing after another.
Each mini-task in my experience uses up a little bit of energy - is a tiny command being followed, so to speak. At the end of a workday I am frequently exhausted.
Often the steps to cook dinner after work fills me with revulsion so I end up getting take-away. Even when the commands come from inside me they are still commands.
It also extends to hobbies. Even things you might want to do become inaccessible after work because of command resistance.
Note that one can of course push through and do a kind of self-bullying to get something done when exhausted. Doing so however, feels awful and is a kind of borrowing from tommorrow.
I’ve taken to describing my depleted state where it is hard to initiate and sustain tasks because of exhaustion as one where I lack “Command juice” - the energy required to comfortably do a task.
I am well aware that my Command Resistance idea provides an alternative way of describing aspects of what would be described in psychology as Executive Function challenges.
My symptoms also seem to cross over into territory that would be legitimately recognised by those with demand resistance as that. They include that I can come up with an idea that I think is brilliant one day, and the very next day I can’t bring myself to execute any steps towards the idea.
Like my ADHD these hidden mechanisms explain much that went under the radar for a long time.
What this all amounts to is that I have a very specific profile when it comes to my energy management needs while learning things.
The combination of ADHD and command resistance with some demand resistance also helps explain why just knowing I had ADHD didn’t allow me to be as functional as I’ve hoped. This includes my challenges with trying to be an autodiadact.
How to make it happen
Tl;dr I make some bone headedly simple logging tools which punch above their weight in helping me.
(Note that I don’t log fiction reading. Though I do see fiction as not degree adjacent as it beautifully builds attention. Those that don’t mind blue language might enjoy my My Reader’s manifesto)
Creating my logger
Immediately in that ChatGPT chat I started designing my Loggers tools.
In the end I vibe coded a simple time logger system in Python that was separate from an activity logger which simply included each activity description as one per log file line.
This separation was quietly psychologically important to me - I expressly didn’t want to log how long I spent at each activity.
I also didn’t care if I forgot to log an activity description.
All of this was designed to sit very lightly on my shoulders largely to work as best with my demand resistance as possible.
I actually loaded up these simple python scripts on my laptop, but also on my android phone using Termux an Android Terminal from which I could run Python.
That way my not degree hours could be counted when I was doing things away from my computer.
The Importance of Sandboxes
I discovered though a rather wiggly path that simplified, clean learning environments are the spaces I can best use my time and are really important for me.
For more on this see The Importance of Sandboxes and What colour is my sandbox?
When it started. How it’s going.
I started logging on 9 January 2026. It’s now April the 5th. I have done 169 hours towards my Not Degree in that time.
Given my life history in both education and self-education that’s beyond unbelievable.
I keep returning and returning again to work on it.
Where once effort felt like it was droplets of water evaporating immediately on a hot frying pan now there is mounting evidence that I am not a learning failure.
An end to the old boom and bust cycle
Before even the bipolar occurred (which makes the situation worse) the ADHD set me up for boom and bust cycles where I’d try really hard on a project for a week, or a month, or six weeks and end up in an exhausted mess.
I’d then have to recover for a month or two, sometimes longer.
My Not Degree has been a revelation and is not following this energy pattern, and has very much locked onto a sustainable energy expenditure.