What tools and techniques do you use to preserve the flow (e.g. work around interruptions), lean in on your monotropic self, and mitigate challenges brought about by co-occurring bits (mood, anxiety, etc.)?

Here’s a first one to get us started: I find it takes a lot of emotional and mental energy to set up meetings. And it’s one of those things which comes at you interrupts flow and requires setup each time. And the consequence of this was that it was taking ages for me to jump in and get stuff organised even for simple one-to-ones. So I started using an online scheduling tool (first calendly.com then cal.com when calendly jacked up prices and went in a non-open direction). I created profiles for my time (e.g. when I don’t want to be interrupted, and also consolidating certain types of conversation so I can get in the flow with a series of meetings).

Using the tool had a learning curve – there were a few months where I had twice as many meetings as I could really handle in a particular interval and I had to tweak. I also found that I needed to create “public” style meeting options and “private” ones, so that friends could book in really any time they wanted with a much less restricted set of options, and certain less exciting work tasks could be put in a very specific bin. It has made a huge difference for my workflow and energy levels each week. I’ve also been pleasantly surprised to see how many (some neurodivergent) friends, colleagues and students were also really grateful to have a low-friction way of setting something up.

Cal.com opens up a website for people to click on date and time to set things up, and then automatically puts it on my digital calendar along with any special information I’ve asked for (which is very useful for one-to-one meetings with students so I don’t forget what they want to talk about). It can also do automatic reminders to people so they don’t forget the meeting and then it’s a robot nagging them and not me which is also nice.

At our University IT services migrated to a new off-premise exchange server setup last year and in the space of a week turned off all access to our calendars for external tools without warning or consultation (at least not any that I’d seen – and I would have provided a response if I’d been asked!). My attempts to explain what a severe impact this had on me fell on deaf ears. So I had three months where my diary and life were in total disarray last Spring. So I don’t use exchange for my calendar anymore. I’ve got another one offsite I use (on my own server if you’re curious). I put a message in my diary for every day of the year which warns people that I don’t use outlook for my diary. The downside is that it’s a pain for colleagues doing meeting requests in exchange. Upside is that I don’t have to worry about IT changing policies on me without consultation in the future, which I’m sure they will do.