“Oh,” I thought to myself, I bet it’s the v1 I demoted to tool pouch when I got a v2.

Turns out I had it backwards: The first pouch I found and wrote about was a v1, and the one I’d just found was a v2.

“Huh. Well, I bet it’s better!” so I started the process of moving things over from the v1 to the v2.

It also turns out that the v2 moved backwards in a few ways that are important to me:

• There are storage pouches in the main storage area and they’re more shallow.
• There are more pouches in the zip area, but they’re even more shallow and narrow, fit for little more than memory cards.

The problem with the former is that the main pouches in the v2 are too shallow to clip in a multitool or flashlight. They barely work with my tiny Space Pen and they definitely won’t hold my Magsafe battery. From the color stitching, it’s clear they’re meant for camera batteries.

The problem with the latter is that what extra partitions there are won’t help with anything I’d put in them.

It seems likely Peak Design decided to push the Field Pouch in the direction of a more narrow photography use case. Maybe, with the advent of the Tech Pouch, it made sense to specialize it a little more. I don’t know.

Anyhow, I would not recommend the Field Pouch v2 as an EDC bag.

North St. alternatives

But, you know, never identify a problem without having a solution on hand, so I’ll happily offer an alternative: The North St. Pioneer with a few accessories.

North St. is a bag company here in Portland. They make a lot of bicycle-forward stuff, and they make a line of hip packs that come in 8, 9, and 12-inch-wide sizes. The nine- and twelve-inch models can accommodate small, velcro-backed waterproof zipper pockets with internal pouches.

The Pioneer 8 is a little too small for my tastes, and the shoulder/waist strap is sewn on. That doesn’t work for my own use case of wanting something I can carry standalone or drop into a bigger bag of some kind. If you just wanted to carry a battery, a tool, and a few other small things it could work really well.

The Pioneer 12 is a little large to fit in a backpack gracefully, but it can hold a lot.

The Pioneer 9 hits the sweet spot. It is about the size of the Peak Design Field Pouch and is only a little more thick, so anywhere you’d put the Field Pouch you can put the Pioneer 9. You can order it in a waterproof material and it has a rain-sealed main zipper. You can also order a handlebar carrier or shoulder strap for it. It also has a front pocket that’s great for stowing a few things you want to get at quickly without rummaging. I put my Machine Era wallet in it.

Walking around with them you can use them as a waist pack, a cross-body bag, or a tiny sling, and with one strap you can flip between those modes easily. The clips for the assorted straps and carrying attachments are fiddly, but one solution for that is to add small ‘biners or Peak Design anchors to the strap eyes.

I still give the Peak Design Field Pouch v1 a bigger nod:

• It seems more durable.
• Its internal storage suits my tastes.
• It’s more expandable.

But the North St. Pioneer can be ordered in nicer colors and has more versatile carry options.

Either way, I’d stay away from the Peak Design Field Pouch v2. I love Peak Design and I’ve bought more of their v2 stuff than is seemly, but the second generation Field Pouch was a rare regression.

I spent a bunch of time online trying to find an “EDC” carrying … pouch? baglet? case? … and I ended up going with the thing that fell on my foot after I gave up and decided to get a scarf out of the closet.

I put “EDC” in scare quotes because the entire product category is a drop-ship grifter’s paradise of overpriced junk and product shot VSCO filter abuse marketed to operator culture tacti-cool wannabes and preppers who have decided to burn all fiat currency one Amazon order at a time.

But it has also become shorthand for a whole category of useful things that have existed forever on the edge of diverse markets: surplus stores, outdoor stores (both middle class peddlers like REI and high prole outlets like Sportsman’s Warehouse), and even book stores. So any search for things in this category must eventually include punting and tossing “EDC” into your search terms.

Anyhow, I was looking for some kind of pouch or carrying case for a set of things I both want to have on me if I go out, and want in one place when I am home:

• Leatherman Skeletool
• Wired earbuds
• Lens wipes
• Spare camera batteries
• Spare SD cards
• A mask
• Small flashlight
• Pocket notebook
• Space Pen
• MagSafe phone charger
• Glasses case

(EDC influencer conventions dictate that I lay all this stuff out in a neat grid, preferably on a rustic wooden surface, and take a top-down picture. They also dictate that every single one of those things be an Amazon affiliate link. I am going my own way here.)

It’s a healthy amount of small but varied stuff, and keeping it all in a single, predictable place is an ADHD adaptation:

When things find their way out of the collection, as they will, I know where they go the second I spot them a day or two later on a bookshelf, or the bedside table, or the kitchen counter, and I can rally my executive function to grab them and head straight for whatever I’m keeping them in.

Some people just keep this stuff in a single bag that goes with them everywhere. I admire these people, but that doesn’t work for me. Too many “out of the house” scenarios: Everything from “five mile round-trip walk for groceries in Woodstock” to “bike ride to northeast for lunch” to “weekend camping trip” (when the Garmin InReach gets clipped to a loop) to “ten mile longboard ride down the Springwater,” to “backroads motorcycle ride out to Estacada.”

And there’s Portland weather, too. The best, most stout waterproof bag is okay in winter but bulky and sweaty in summer. As a result I’ve slowly accreted a collection of bags and backpacks over the years: A smallish REI daypack, a selection of Peak Design slings and backpacks, a Kavu rope sling, a North Street hip bag, a Tom Bihn cross-body satchel, and a Banjo Brothers bike backpack. Moving my collection back and forth between those things is kind of a drag.

So I spent a bunch of time searching. I read through review sites, watched a video or two, followed shopping results links, searched on retailer sites, and just generally poked around, and couldn’t find the sweet spot:

• Can hold all my stuff.
• Can close tightly enough to keep things from jumbling around or rattling.
• Can fit in my bags and slings and leave room for them to perform their main purpose.
• Can provide enough internal organization that opening it up and finding the thing I need won’t involve rummaging and can probably be done by touch in the dark.
• Has enough room to add a specialty tool. I don’t, for instance, always want to carry my skate tool, but do like to have it toward the start of the longboarding season so I can adjust the trucks while I get my balance back.

At a certain point there are some things in my bag/sling collection that have to be excluded from consideration. My 5l Peak Design Everyday Sling, for instance, could accommodate this collection all on its own, with a little room left over to fit an iPad mini and maybe my Ricoh GR3x, but it is bulky and doesn’t have great internal organization, so it’d swallow too much of the space of anything I carried it in.

After looking around long enough, I just gave up.

Most stuff in the “EDC pouch/case/whatever” category was too small:

Enough room for the holy trinity of multitool, pen, and flashlight plus a few small incidentals. That doesn’t feel like enough to actually bother. I’d solve that with a valet tray in a central location I could sweep into a side pocket.

There are some handy bigger things that were a little too big. The Peak Design Tech Pouch is nice and I have one stowed in the trailer for a collection of adapters, cables, and other camping incidentals during the season, but it’s basically a redesigned toiletry bag. It’d work great for backpack-sized things, but not slings or satchels.

I also looked at tool rolls, but didn’t like the ergonomics of getting things out of one.

Stuff in the bicycling category tends to assume you want to stick the kit in your back jersey pocket or maybe a wedge pack, and tends to be focused on repairs plus one or two doses of energy goop of some kind.

There is a massive amount of tacti-cool operator culture stuff, but it is usually overbuilt and bulky. The ratio of surface area to useful storage space is poor, and by the time you add all the little molle attachments and mounting points it’s going to snag anything else you put in the bag with it.

The last time I went at this problem I even considered going Full Nerd on it with a Scott-E-Vest, but a. no and b. they have solved the seasonal problem in a way that excludes Oregon’s climate and involves paying them north of $1000 before they’re done with you. Plus no amount of artful product photography can hide the fact that if you used that stuff for real you would look like you were hiding a raging case of cuboid Borg tumors under your khaki vest.

Can we just pause. Go hit that link, look at the product photography and the models, and ask yourself how deep-seated your fear of being seen carrying a bag must be if wearing an inside-out fishing vest even in summer is the answer to having too much shit.

Years ago I came across the insight that “carrying a lot of stuff around” is an inverse economic privilege marker. The idea was that a middle class person’s thought process about the possibility of rain in the afternoon involves a shrug and walking out of the house hands-free because they can always duck in and buy an umbrella if it does start raining. The Scott-E-Vest company disagrees and will sell you a vest with 26 pockets that can, they want you to know, hold an umbrella, for ~$184.

Actually, someone in the Scott-E-Vest marketing department must have read the same article, because the brass telescope stand in the background reads as almost reassuring.

So like I said, I just gave up and found a little basket where I could keep that stuff, and selectively add or take things away from whatever bag I was going to head out with.

Then we decided to go to a movie this weekend and it was cold outside. Ben bought me a nice scarf for Christmas I’ve been meaning to wear, so I went upstairs to my closet to pull it down. Something came off the top shelf with it and landed on my foot:

A Peak Design field pouch I bought when I first learned about the brand, six or seven years ago.

This is a product shot from Peak Design showing one stuffed to the gills:

I had used it on and off for long weekends, mostly as a way to carry batteries, charger, and small camera bits, then stopped using it much and put it on the top shelf of the closet. It had a certain “a little big for how I was using it, too small to use for carrying anything extra” quality I never got over.

It turns out that it is the perfect size for all my stuff. There’s a zipper pocket inside, a few stretchy internal pouches, a pair of stiff pouches on the back wall, and a main storage area that’s generous enough for the basics plus an extra thing or two. It’s enough to keep everything organized and findable by touch.

When I fold it down it’s held shut by strong velcro. There’s a belt passthrough on the back for strapping it to the outside of a bigger pack. I had previously put two Peak Design anchor links on it, so I can even use it as a small bag on its own, but quickly convert it back to just being a carrying pouch I can toss in something else without having the clutter of a strap.

Theoretically you can stick a Peak Design Capture on it and use it for camera carry. I’ve never warmed up that particular use case for any of their stuff: I use the Capture on my backpacks for when I need to scramble over rocks or logs and don’t want my camera hanging loose from its strap. That’s owing to a 15-years-past trauma that involved my camera achieving a perfect, lens-first pendulum motion into a jagged rock. (Always buy a UV filter, kids.) But for carrying a camera around, I’ll just live with having a strap for my bag and a strap for my camera.

In terms of size, it’s a little large: It’s about the width of a trade paperback and maybe a little longer, but only three fingers thick at its widest with all my stuff in it.

It also ticks the weather resistance box: It folds down tight and is made of the usual Peak Design materials, so it’s thick and could survive in a non-weather-resistant bag in a sudden downpour.

• With my Peak Design Messenger, it fits fine in one of the foldable compartments, leaving room for body and lens or two lenses in the other compartments.

• With my daypacks, it fits neatly on the bottom, or could rest on top of whatever cargo ends up in there by the end of the day.

• With my Kavu Rope Sling it fits in the secondary zipped compartment as if made for it, leaving room in the main for a few books, etc.

• With my Tom Bihn satchel it easily fits in the back-side pocket, leaving room in the front for a book or two, an iPad mini, etc.

• At home, it just sits on a small shelf on the hall tree by the front door, close to my battery chargers, looking unobtrusive.

So, we’ll see? It looks good on paper? I won’t really know until this time next year, when it has been through all the seasons.

So, I’ve got ADHD. Before going much further, and so the terms are established, when I say “ADHD” I’m going by the DSM-IV’s definition, which does not distinguish between “ADHD,” “ADD,” and “Adult ADD,” but rather puts everything under “ADHD” then breaks that down into three classes:

1. Combined Type: symptoms related to both inattention and impulsivity are present
2. Predominantly Inattentive Type
3. Predominantly Hyperactive-Impulsive Type

I’ve never manifested symptoms of hyperactivity, I’ve periodically manifested impulsivity, and I’ve always–for as long as I can remember–consistently displayed most of the nine symptoms of inattentiveness. I’m clarifying terms because people have conflicting ideas about ADHD, who can have it and what people who have ADHD act like. It’s entirely possible to be externally placid and have ADHD. It’s also entirely possible to demonstrate a capacity for extended periods of intense concentration and have ADHD. I also think it’s worth noting that I don’t look at ADHD as some sort of sickness I need to “cure.” It does create its share of issues which have to be addressed, but it also confers some advantages I wouldn’t trade away. My experiences with ADHD medication helped me realize the ways in which I’ve benefitted from being out on my end of the attentional spectrum.

That’s my way of hinting that I don’t need to be encouraged or reassured, thanks.

Adaptation

People with ADHD learn all sorts of ways to cope with their inattentiveness or impulsivity.

Depending on the type of impulsivity you’re talking about, I’ve been pretty successful in cultivating habits to curb that. They aren’t always the most socially adaptive, because they involve a sort of delaying check loop that can come off as reticence. They can also be sort of off-putting, because I tend to hold my fire in impersonal communications–e-mail, IM, bulletin boards, talkbacks–until I feel like I’ve checked my initial assumptions adequately. That can result in a barrage of fact-checked data out of proportion to the rest of the conversation. nerdmeyr once referred to me fixing my “Sauron-like gaze” on problems I’m out to solve, and I think she was picking up on a combination of that check loop and hyperfocus–another adaptation people with ADHD tend to come up with. An imperative to make sure I’m about to say or do the right thing in combination with a need to turn off big chunks of my external awareness to get through the process of thinking something through can make for some seemingly monomaniacal excess sometimes.

Another way to cope is, of course, medication, which I tried for a while. The meds I was on were spiking my blood pressure, ruining my sleep and making me feel depressed. I don’t want better focus because it’ll make me a better worker … I want better focus because the quality of what happens in my head matters to me, and I want it to continue to matter to me until I’m dead. I do not, however, want to drag a hand-written prescription down to the pharmacist once a month until I am dead, and I suspect that something that pushes my systolic blood pressure from its unmedicated 95-100 up to 135-140 will probably make me dead that much faster. (If you’re curious, the medication in question was Adderall, which is tightly regulated because it’s a time-release amphetamine.)

The thing is, if I’ve cultivated habits of thought and behavior that have helped me curb the impulsive elements of ADHD, it stands to reason that I can curb the inattentive elements, too. In the absence of medication, personal research and professional opinion suggest a few categories I can improve on to rein in my brain:

• Diet: Studies have shown improvement in people with ADHD who avoid carbohyrdates and take in more protein.

• Supplements: Fish oil and iron are supposed to help. There are a number of other recommended vitamin supplements, depending on the type of ADHD one has.

• Sleep: Consistent and adequate

• Exercise: Vigorous and often

Life coaches who work with people who have ADHD also recommend establishing a routine for all sorts of things, ranging from when the work day starts and stops to where keys, watch and wallet are deposited at the end of the day. But because I’ve spent years approaching most activity as a matter of spontaneous interest, the focus on diet, exercise and routine changes the way time works.

Time Is Different in Here

ADHD can manifest as serious procrastination–islands of intense activity in a sea of unstructured, unmarked time. Procrastination is o.k. in some contexts and for some people, but it becomes less adaptive as complexity is introduced. If all you do is get up at the last minute, rush through the morning, sprint off to work then sit around reading MetaFilter until 3 p.m. then guiltily sprint through work before calling it quits and going home to do whatever seems shiniest until you’re too tired to stay awake, procrastination works. Add exercise first thing in the morning, adequate time to prepare good meals, planning to get the groceries and supplements, care to go to bed early enough to rest well before getting up in time to exercise, and procrastination becomes problematic. Especially if you’re inattentive enough to miss details as you rush through whatever.

To people who do not have ADHD, all of that must seem like the commonest of common sense, but to someone used to living in a kind of time flow that’s not reflective or regulated–where there’s a seemingly limitless pool of unstructured time–it requires some shifts in thinking and behavior. Time has to become finite and each activity has to evaluated in the context of a matrix of activities. These patterns of thinking have to be learned by everybody, but some people are cognitively equipped to learn them passively, while some of us have to learn them actively, and maybe after years of frustration that we don’t share some common understanding other people have.

The process of evaluating how time gets spent looms large in a lot of ADHD literature. ADHD coaches encourage their charges to make sure they keep lists, engage in daily planning sessions, be more mindful of the passage of time and find ways to break out of extended periods of hyperfocus before a single task consumes all their time. Having dabbled with self-hypnosis and having been through a course of cognitive behavioral therapy, I perceive two levels of purpose with all that time tracking and focus marshaling:

1. People with ADHD need the help timers, lists and reminders provide on a practical level.
2. There's value in constant, syllogistic repetition of a goal.

My experience with ADHD medication showed me that the issue isn’t one of a “medicine” somehow “curing” a condition. What it did do was provide a way to hold a thought just a bit longer. When my thoughts centered around ways to self-organize, the medication was beneficial. When they didn’t, the medication generally seemed to intensify the sort of hyperfocus ADHD people cultivate. So a big part of dealing with ADHD’s harmful symptoms involves cultivation of a second, persistent level of awareness; a soundtrack that more or less continuously says things like “I’m putting this off because I want to move on to something else, but that’s something I do because I have ADHD. I should stop putting it off or I won’t have time to do it well,” or “I know I promised to do that chore, but I’m rationalizing not doing it for a while longer. I know I don’t often make very realistic estimates of how I use my time, so I should stop and reassess my estimate in this case,” and on and on.

I don’t think about this stuff because I’m desperate to fit in with all the monochrons, but because there are only so many hours in the day, and unwise use of them leads to lots of things being done poorly instead of perhaps fewer things being done well. As I noted earlier, this isn’t just about housework or chores. It’s about sustaining all sorts of endeavors – creative, interpersonal, cognitive, physical and spiritual endeavors.

Self-Coaching

On the workaday level, I’ve used a small inventory of things to help me rein in my attention:

Timers

I have a digital egg timer, but I’ve been using the Mac application Minuteur for several years. It used to be free, but it now costs 8€, Its advantage over an egg timer is that it can be set to blank the display when it goes off, providing +5 or +10 snooze buttons. It can also save a list of common time periods, so it’s easy to set up labeled time lists.

Another timer app I own and use sporadically is Red Sweater’s FlexTime, which makes it easy to create timed routines. Each block of a routine can start or end by playing a sound, displaying a message on screen or running a script. I’ve set up routines for things like “an hour of work,” so I can get prompts to do ten or fifteen minute bursts before cooling down for a few minutes. My initial temptation was to program my entire workday routine, but that sort of rigidity makes it hard to get back on track when the inevitable disruption comes along, and then the whole thing falls apart.

I use timers for a few things:

• to break up time during the work day. It's easier to stop procrastination when work is broken up into chunks then interrupted by design for small periods of time.
• if I absolutely cannot abide the thought of keeping at what I'm doing, a timer helps me put limits on off-task time.
• to remind me of things I'd otherwise forget about: stuff like the time my tea has been steeping or my coffee has been sitting in the french press. I also set timers for the tea pot, even though my tea pot whistles. Sometimes its whistle doesn't get through the perceptual wall.

Right now my most used fixed time alarm is one I’ve set for 10:15 each night. It reminds me to wrap up what I’m doing and start winding down. I use my iPhone for alarms, since it allows me to save alarms for repeat use.

Note Cards & Sticky Notes, Lists

Keeping a pad of these handy helps me deal with external interruptions. Stuff that happens when I’m absorbed in a task is easy to forget despite my best intentions. I’ve found myself using the Mac’s “Stickies” app the most, just because it’s right there and it’s persistent between restarts. Paper often disappears in the clutter or stacks up.

I also keep beginning- and end-of-the-day inventories: Keeping a simple log or journal that’s distinct from my calendar or main to-do list helps me reinforce what I hope to accomplish or need to remember for the day.

Observation and Reflection

Which brings me partially back to the matter of charting what I’m reading.

Before I started reflecting on what it meant to have ADHD, my feed reader was pretty busy. At the peak of things, I was tracking close to 200 feeds along with a few mailing lists, whatever books I was reading at the moment and a pretty healthy movie-watching jones. A lot of factors combined to slow me down–having a kid makes for less ambivalence about holding a job, or willingness to suck at it. I still wasn’t being very selective. I had a giant pool of inputs, and even if I couldn’t absorb quite as much of it I was still approaching it as an undifferentiated mass of interesting things.

Medicated, I still didn’t do much thinking about what I was taking in. My thinking wasn’t really centered on behavioral optimization so much as it was about doing everything I was supposed to then luxuriating in unstructured time as I earned it.

A few months ago I made it a point to drastically scale back commitments so I could free up the space to contemplate what I was doing and why I was doing it. The whole apple run-in was sort of helpful, because it further wrecked my routine and caused me to forget about my medication for a few days, which is how I learned just how high my blood pressure was running.

I was pretty nervous going into the holidays. All the things that must be done combined with a lot of socializing makes for a pretty enervating time of year. I dropped the medication, though, and decided to see what happened.

Curiously, my mood got a lot better. I was half-fearing some sort of Flowers for Algernon-like descent into fog, but that isn’t the first thing I noticed. Rather, I noticed it was easier to get to sleep at night and I felt a lot more loose in social contexts. It was noticing that the medication had seemingly buttoned me down further than I was comfortable with that encouraged me to think about adaptive behaviors I’d already cultivated before medication, and how if I had self-corrected issues of impulsivity, it was probably in my power to self-correct issues of inattentiveness.