The night before an early office day in Amsterdam, I sent my business partner the following message: “Ok I have set a million alarms and turned off silent but JUST IN CASE I somehow sleep through, I am at hotel Abba, room 8.”
That’s me as a grown up professional, voluntarily handing a colleague the information required to have me dragged out of bed by hotel staff. Not because anything was wrong, but because I know my own operating system well enough to know that “a million alarms” is not a guarantee, if I’m jet lagged. When people are relying on you, it’s always good to have contingency.
A brief history of “sorry, slept through alarm”
If you scrolled back through my message history, you would find “Sorry, slept through alarm” appearing embarrassingly regularly. The causes vary: sometimes I was up until stupid o’clock testing a new AI model the moment it released, or maybe I “accidentally” did server work until half two in the morning, which is a sentence only an ADHD brain can produce with a straight face. At some point during one of these apologies I even asked “Why did god make developers nocturnal?”
My brain does not track time; it appears to experience time as a rumour. There is now, and there is not now, and everything in the “not now” bucket has the same emotional weight whether it is in ten minutes or in March. Researchers call this time blindness, and it is one of the most consistent features of ADHD. Layer on top a body clock that runs late by default, so that my natural bedtime sits somewhere the rest of society considers antisocial, and you get a person for whom “just wake up at seven” is roughly as actionable as “just be taller”.
For most of my life I treated this as a character flaw with a simple fix: try harder. Set the alarm. Be serious this time. And every time I slept through one, I woke into a shame spiral before I had even blinked myself awake, because the failure was mine, again, and it was the same failure, again, and what kind of adult cannot do the single most basic adult thing?
Then I started thinking about it like an engineer instead of a disappointed headmaster, and everything changed.
No single point of failure
In my day job building software, there is a principle so fundamental it is practically a religion: never rely on a single point of failure. If one server dying can take down your whole system, you do not have a system, you have a hostage situation. So you add redundancy. Backups, fallbacks, alerts that trigger other alerts. Nobody looks at a server with a backup and says “that server clearly lacks discipline”. Redundancy is not an insult to the machine. It is the mark of someone who takes the outcome seriously.
The million alarms are the first layer and spread across two devices, because a phone that silently updated itself overnight has betrayed me before. They are staggered, because my brain treats a single alarm as a suggestion but finds a rolling barrage genuinely annoying, and annoyance is one of the few things that reliably wakes me. At least one alarm lives across the room, so that dismissing it requires the fatal act of standing up. Silent mode gets turned off the night before, checked twice, because past me has slept peacefully next to a phone lighting up like a distressed fruit machine.
The human failsafe
Handing someone your room number does two things.
First, it converts a character judgement into a logistics problem. If I sleep through everything, the plan is no longer “James has failed as a person, tribunal at nine”. The plan is “ring the front desk, ask for room 8”. My lateness stops being a moral event and becomes an operational one, with a documented recovery procedure, like any other outage.
Second, and this is the part that took me years to learn, it moves the confession to the night before, when it is cheap. Announcing “I might fail, here is what to do if I fail” costs almost nothing at 11pm. Failing silently and being discovered costs everything at 8am. Same failure, wildly different price. The shame I used to feel came less from the oversleeping itself and more from the gap between the person I had implied I was (“of course I’ll be there, no problem”) and the person who actually turned up, flustered and forty minutes late. Pre-announcing the possibility closes that gap in advance with nothing left to be discovered.
There is a vulnerability tax to pay, of course. You have to say, out loud, to someone whose respect you’d quite like to keep, “I cannot fully trust myself with this.” The first time, that sentence tastes awful. But I have found the respect actually goes up, not down, because what colleagues hate is not fallibility, it is surprise. A person who knows exactly where their own system breaks, and briefs you on it in advance, is more reliable than someone who insists nothing will go wrong right up until it does. And for what it’s worth: the morning after that message, I was up, showered and offensively punctual.
Engineering without shame
Building redundancy around your own brain is not defeatism, or “giving in” to patterns of disorder (in my case ADHD). Aeroplanes have three redundant hydraulic systems, because the people who built them respected the stakes enough to assume failure and design past it. So now I engineer. Alarms stacked and staggered. A human failsafe told exactly where I will be and what to do if I go quiet. None of it cures the time blindness, but it means that no one affected is waiting without a course of action either.
I created Focus Frames to address this same issue: sometimes I have work that needs to be done, and I have to guarantee it will begin and be completed. By cutting out the visual noise around me, they let me lock in and do what’s needed. In some cases I still need a person, but if it’s getting the work done, being able to offload to an object helps just as well.
If you recognise yourself in any of this, my honest advice is to stop trying to become someone who doesn’t need the failsafes, and start becoming someone who builds excellent ones. Tell the colleague. Set the million alarms. Hand over the room number. Wear the frames. Just maybe check who is reading the blog before you publish your hotel room.
