> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.mikebakerhq.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # One-Thirty in the Morning - URL: https://www.mikebakerhq.com/writing/one-thirty-in-the-morning/ - Published: 2026-08-11T10:06:25.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-14T07:37:35.000Z - Description: ADHD, artificial intelligence, and the quiet hours when everything in my head finally has somewhere to go. - Author: Mike Baker - Tags: Human First It is one-thirty in the morning as I write this. I checked the clock because the detail would sound suspiciously convenient later. I am in my studio in Coeur d’Alene with my laptop open, the iMac glowing beside me, and my phone in my hand while an AI asks me questions about why I am still awake. Gus is asleep in the beanbag across the room, which is the only responsible use of a beanbag at this hour. I have been on a run for the last two nights, building small tools to help organize my life, remember what I promised people, and keep up with a brain that has never shown much interest in moving in a straight line. The house is quiet in a way it never was when our children were young. Kellie went to bed hours ago. Nobody needs an answer from me right now. My email has stopped feeling personal, and tomorrow has not started making demands. I know I should be sleeping. I also know this is the hour when my mind feels most like itself. During the day, I take medication, focus on what is in front of me, and do the work of leading Heritage Health. There are meetings, decisions, difficult conversations, budgets, people who need answers, and people who need someone to listen before anybody starts offering solutions. I spend a lot of time thinking about women’s health, rural communities, employees carrying too much, and patients trying to navigate systems that somehow become more complicated every time we promise to simplify them. The work matters deeply to me. Every operational decision eventually reaches a person, even when that person is buried beneath a spreadsheet, staffing model, or policy discussion. By the time I get home, my brain often feels like it has spent the day holding forty doors shut at once. Some evenings I take a nap, which sounds indulgent until you understand that it functions more like a pit stop. I spend time with Kellie. We talk about the day, our kids, the dogs, and whatever strange thing I have started building now. Then she goes to bed, the house settles, and I come into the studio. That is when the doors open. Some nights I make songs. Other nights I work on a book, rebuild part of this website, create artwork, record ideas for the podcast, or start developing a tool that did not exist an hour earlier. Heritage Health usually comes into the room with me because the work does not leave my head when I leave the building. I might begin with an idea about ADHD and end up working through a healthcare problem. A song connects with a conversation from three weeks ago. Something one of my children said explains a paragraph that has been stuck for a month. From the outside, it looks like I am moving between unrelated projects. Inside my head, they have been talking to one another all day. Night gives me enough quiet to hear what they are saying. ## All the open tabs The easiest way to describe my experience with ADHD is the browser-tab comparison everybody uses, except mine never seems to have fewer than forty open. There is a song in one, a chapter in another, a Heritage Health problem running somewhere in the background, and a conversation I keep replaying because I am wondering whether I missed what the other person was trying to tell me. Somewhere in there is an idea for a tool, something involving one of my kids, and a reminder to tell Kellie something that felt important six hours ago. > Every tab believes it deserves sound. I pay attention during the day. I also collect things while I am paying attention. I notice the moment a conversation changes, even when the words stay polite. I carry stories people tell me about their lives and sometimes understand what they meant long after the meeting ends. A patient experience changes the way I see a policy. An employee says something small that reveals how much pressure they have been carrying. Those moments stay open in the background while I move through everything else. At night, I get to follow them. A healthcare question might connect with something happening in my family and a lyric I wrote months earlier. An idea that looked like a side project suddenly solves a problem inside the work I am supposed to be doing. A chapter that refused to cooperate begins making sense because my brain has quietly been gathering pieces while I was busy living the rest of my life. That moment is one of the best things I know. It has very little to do with productivity. It is the feeling of finally understanding what my mind has been trying to tell me. The connection appears, the energy changes, and I want to follow it as far as it goes. Most of my books and albums have come from nights like this. The idea begins somewhere during the day and keeps gathering pieces until it becomes too large to ignore. Once I see its shape, I move quickly. I stay with it until the chapter is finished or the songs belong together. Hours stop registering as hours. The work feels less like creating something from nothing and more like catching up with something that has already been forming inside me. That intensity is one of the parts of ADHD I love. It is also one of the parts that gets me into trouble. The energy arrives, and stopping feels almost painful. I worry that the idea will disappear if I sleep. I convince myself that finishing the thing is responsible because leaving it open will follow me into tomorrow anyway. Morning has paid for many of those decisions. I am learning that an idea does not always require every remaining hour of the night. I am learning to leave enough of a trail that I trust myself to find it again. That sounds simple. For a brain that has lost more thoughts than it remembers having, it feels like a major change. ## The Health Access Team I was diagnosed with ADHD in high school, though having the name and knowing how to live with it were two different parts of my life. I went through school and a long stretch of my early career without medication or much of a system for managing my attention. High school was kind of a joke that way. I knew I was capable. There were subjects that held me for hours, and there were assignments I needed to finish while my attention wandered almost anywhere else. I started a lot. I finished far less than I should have. That inconsistency gets inside you after a while. People see what you produce when your attention locks in, which makes the unfinished work harder to explain. Teachers wonder why you are not applying yourself. Other people see carelessness. You start wondering whether the problem is effort, discipline, or some flaw everybody else has noticed and you have been trying to hide. I cared deeply. I often worked harder than people knew. Caring did not always give me access to the part of my brain required to finish the task in front of me. One of my first big leadership jobs was running the Health Access Team in Ogden, Utah. We called it HAT, and it was amazing. HAT came out of a new grant, and we were building something that mattered. We helped people connect with healthcare and worked across systems that had grown comfortable sending people from one place to another without anyone taking responsibility for whether they ever received what they needed. I was young, full of energy, and beginning to understand what leadership could mean when the work stayed close to real people. HAT showed me that access to care is rarely one problem. Transportation matters. Money matters. Trust matters. Someone’s job, children, housing, and past experiences with healthcare all enter the room with them. The system sees an appointment. The person is trying to hold together an entire life. Our office was inside a house across the street from the clinic. My office was upstairs, and I loved that place. During the day, the house was alive with conversation and movement. Questions came up the stairs. People walked in and out. The team was building something new, and the energy made the work feel possible. I also had grants to write, and grants require a kind of sustained concentration that did not arrive easily for me in the middle of a busy office. A deadline does not care that your attention has found six other things more interesting. I would sit down, make a little progress, get interrupted, and struggle to recover the full thread. So I started going back at night. I would climb the stairs into the empty office and put on classical music, usually piano or quiet acoustic guitar. The building felt completely different after everyone left. The clinic across the street had gone dark. The phone stopped ringing. Nobody came through the door asking whether I had a minute, which has never meant a minute in the history of leadership. Something about being alone in that old house with beautiful piano playing settled me. The music gave my attention somewhere soft to rest. The noise inside my head began to loosen, and the work that felt impossible at two in the afternoon started moving at midnight. I could see the whole grant. I understood how the pieces fit together, and I found the language to explain why the work mattered. I loved those nights because I loved HAT. It was one of my first opportunities to lead something significant, and it shaped the way I have thought about healthcare ever since. People live whole lives. Systems divide those lives into programs, diagnoses, funding streams, eligibility rules, and appointments. Community health often begins in the space between the person and all the places where the system stopped seeing them. Those nights also taught me something about my own brain. I was capable of deep focus. The conditions mattered. Meaningful work mattered. Quiet helped. Music helped. Being trusted with something that could improve another person’s life helped most of all. > I became a night owl because nighttime was when the work came. Somewhere along the way, I started loving the hour too. ## The hours at the end of the day Life filled up quickly after that. I became a CEO, a husband carrying more responsibility, and a dad trying to build a good life for three children. People relied on me at work, and the people I loved relied on me at home. I felt both responsibilities deeply, though I did not always give them the right amount of me. When the kids were young, I worked all day and came home to a house full of noise, homework, hunger, and whatever crisis had become urgent in the ten minutes before I walked through the door. I wanted those evenings with them. I wanted time with Kellie too. She has always gone to bed earlier than I do, so the house would eventually settle and a few unused hours appeared at the end of the day. I filled them with work and creative projects because the ideas were running anyway. I could lie in bed listening to them circle, or I could go somewhere and let them become something. That rhythm helped me build a career and create a great deal of work. It also cost the people I love more than I understood at the time. There were seasons when Kellie carried too much because I believed a problem at work required all of me. Our children knew their dad cared deeply about serving people, though there were evenings when the people closest to me received whatever attention remained after I had given the best of it away. I am proud of what I have helped build. I also know productivity has not always been innocent in my life. Creating feels good. Solving problems feels good. Being needed has often felt good, especially when I was not paying enough attention to whether I was helping people or holding onto control. Ambition sometimes borrowed the language of service and convinced me that staying up longer meant I cared more. At 50, I understand that a full life requires knowing when to come home completely. That is part of why I am building these tools now. For most of my life, the problem was never a lack of ideas. It was holding onto them. A thought would appear with enough force that I was certain I would remember it. Another idea arrived, the day moved forward, and the first one disappeared. Sometimes I remembered that it had been good without remembering what it was. I tried notebooks, folders, task apps, voice memos, and systems that looked impressive for a week before becoming another place where unfinished thoughts went to wait. They worked well after I had organized the idea. They did very little during the messy part when I knew something mattered but had not figured out what it wanted to become. Artificial intelligence changed that part of my life. I speak an idea while it is alive, work through it before the energy fades, and return later without rebuilding the entire path that led me there. I move between projects while preserving the context that used to disappear whenever my attention shifted. That is how the twelve books happened. It is how the albums, artwork, website, and many of the tools I am building moved out of my head and into the world. My brain has always generated more material than I had time or skill to capture. Now I have help holding onto it. People sometimes assume the tools are doing the creating. I understand why it looks that way from the outside. The experience feels far more personal from inside the work. AI did not live the life underneath any of it. It did not watch my mom live with Alzheimer’s, love Kellie through nearly three decades of marriage, raise our children, lose Mark, lead HAT, build Heritage Health, or watch women I love fight to be believed by the healthcare system. The tools help me stay with those experiences long enough to understand what they changed in me. They help me hold the material, question it, shape it, and find language for things that lived inside me for years without a clear place to go. I remain responsible for whether the work is honest. I decide what sounds like me, what feels polished and empty, what needs more time, and what should stay private. I decide whether a story belongs to me to tell. I remain responsible for treating the people inside it with care. The speed matters too. Creating more does not make every idea worth finishing. I have to ask whether a project gives something back to the life I am taking time from. I want the tools to help me become more present with people. I want them to return time rather than fill every hour I have left. I want to capture an idea, trust that it will still be there tomorrow, and walk back into the house without feeling like I left half my brain running in the studio. I am getting better at that. Tonight is questionable evidence. ## A hotel lobby in Farmington Some of the hardest work has happened far from this studio. At Christmas in 2025, our family was staying in a hotel in Farmington, Utah. The trip had been stressful, and by the end of one particular day I had worked myself into the kind of emotional hole where every disappointment starts confirming a much larger story. Everyone eventually went upstairs, but I was nowhere close to sleeping, so I took my laptop down to the lobby and found a place to sit. The hotel had mostly gone quiet. A few people passed through carrying drinks or dragging luggage toward the elevators, but nobody paid much attention to the man sitting alone with headphones and a computer late at night. I had been creating a lot of music. The songs held parts of me I did not always express well in conversation, and I wanted the people closest to me to care about them with the same intensity I did. My family loved me. They did not often ask many questions about the music or understand how much of myself I had placed inside it. Nobody experiences a creative project the way the person making it does. The person creating it remembers where every line came from and what it cost to say. Everyone else encounters the finished thing while carrying a full life of their own. I understood all of that. I was still hurt. Sitting in that hotel lobby, I started wondering why I kept making so much when so little seemed to come back. The question underneath it was larger than whether people liked the songs. I was wondering whether my presence carried weight beyond the roles I filled for everyone else. I was a husband, a dad, a CEO, and the person people called when something needed to be solved. I wanted to know whether anyone saw the person underneath those roles and whether anything I made stayed with them after I stopped talking about it. I was having an impressive pity party, so I turned it into an EP. ![Album art for A Song Nobody Hears — a black, white, and red painted portrait of a man in headphones with his eyes closed.](https://www.mikebakerhq.com/content/images/site/onethirty/a-song-nobody-hears.jpg) Album art for *A Song Nobody Hears*, written in a hotel lobby in Farmington, Utah, at Christmas 2025. I wrote *A Song Nobody Hears* that night in the lobby of a hotel in Farmington. One of the songs was “Who Would Notice,” and it came from a part of me I rarely admitted existed. I wrote, “The songs echo back, but nobody sings. I drop them like coins into a well. No sound. No splash. Just digital air swallowing my name.” That was exactly how creating felt to me that night. I kept placing personal pieces of myself into the world and waiting for evidence that they had landed. When the response was quiet, my brain filled the silence with the cruelest explanation available. > I just want to feel like my weight shifts something. That line gets closest to the truth. I wanted my life to leave evidence. I wanted to believe someone would remember a conversation, replay a song, or feel the empty space if I stopped showing up. Writing the EP did not answer the question. It gave me somewhere honest to put it. By the time the hotel began waking up, the feelings had become songs. I was tired and still a little embarrassed by the size of my own pity party, but I understood myself better than I had when I sat down. That is one of the gifts creativity has given me. I take something painful, unfair, frightened, or difficult to admit and place it outside myself. Once it is there, I see it more clearly. The song holds the feeling without requiring the people I love to repair every insecure part of me. Sometimes an answer arrives much later. I was driving through Coeur d’Alene on a beautiful sunny day when I heard music coming from another car. The song sounded familiar before I understood why. Then I recognized it. The driver was listening to “The Voice Is Mine,” bobbing his head while he drove, completely unaware that the person who wrote it was sitting nearby. I watched for the few seconds traffic gave us. He did not know the story behind the song. He had no idea I was there and no reason to perform a reaction for me. The music had found its way into his life and become part of an ordinary drive through town. I remember thinking, holy shit, this matters. Then traffic moved, and we went in different directions. That moment stayed with me because creators rarely know where their work goes. Most people who listen to a song never contact the person who made it. Readers finish books without sending a message. Someone might look at an image and feel understood while the creator hears nothing. Silence tells us very little about what happened after the work left our hands. Earlier this year, I saw that again at an art show featuring images I created with artificial intelligence. Some people in the community had decided what the work meant before seeing it. They dismissed the images because of the tools involved, and I understand part of that reaction. Artists have serious questions about ownership, compensation, labor, training data, and the power of companies moving faster than public understanding. Those questions deserve honest attention. I also know what happened in the room. One man stopped in front of a piece I had created during one of the worst nights of my life. The image held pain I did not know how to describe when I made it. I had placed part of that night there because I needed somewhere for it to exist outside me. The man began to cry. He pointed at the image and said, “That’s my son. That’s my son in rehab.” Then he looked toward another piece nearby, an image of a strong woman wearing a cape after surviving more than anyone around her understood. He said, “That’s my daughter.” I stood beside him while he saw his children inside something that had started with my own pain. The tools involved did not make his grief less real. They did not diminish the love he carried for his children or the recognition happening between us. The image gave him a place to say something that had already been living inside him. That moment did not resolve every question about AI. It reminded me why I keep creating. I want to make work that reaches places ordinary conversation sometimes misses. I want someone to find part of their life inside a song, a book, or an image and feel less alone with it. I know artificial intelligence is involved. I remain responsible for what I do with it. Plenty of people are using these tools carelessly, and some are using them to deceive or exploit others. I am trying to use them in ways that make more room for people. That intention does not excuse mistakes. It gives me a standard to keep working toward. ## Beautifully unfocused I still listen to my own music, which feels like a confession even though I am not sure why. The songs are records of where I was when I made them. They hold emotions I needed to process, questions I had not answered, and versions of myself I sometimes need to hear from again. *Beautifully Unfocused*, the album and the book, came from trying to explain what it feels like to live inside this brain. My newer album, *SideQuest*, continues that story because some of the most meaningful parts of my life have appeared slightly outside the route I thought I was following. Sometimes one of my own lyrics reaches me at the exact moment I need it. Time has changed the person listening, and I hear the younger version of myself trying to understand what he was living through. The books and artwork do the same thing. They have become a record of questions I carried through different seasons of my life. For years, I worried that the range of my interests meant I lacked focus. Healthcare, music, writing, art, technology, and advocacy did not fit inside a clean professional identity. I thought I needed to choose one lane and become easier to explain. I care less about that now. All of this belongs together because it comes from the same part of me. I want people to feel seen. I want healthcare to recognize the full life surrounding an appointment. I want women to receive care that begins with belief. I want leaders to remember that their decisions follow people home. I want someone sitting alone during a hard night to hear a song and feel another person nearby. Music reaches places a strategic plan never will. A book lets me sit beside someone I might never meet. Art sometimes helps a father say what he has been carrying about his children. Healthcare gives those same values a practical place to matter in people’s lives. The form changes because the work keeps asking different things from me. Part of what I am building is a record for my children. They have lived beside many versions of their dad. They knew the young father trying to build a career while learning how to raise three kids. They lived through the years when Heritage Health grew and the work occupied more of our family than it should have. They have watched projects appear from nowhere, heard music coming from the studio, and learned that asking what I am working on sometimes leads to an answer much longer than they expected. Someday, they will have the books, songs, and artwork without me standing nearby to explain them. They will know what mattered to me, where I struggled, and how often I doubted myself while pretending I had everything under control. I want them to know about HAT and those nights in the upstairs office. I want them to understand how much I loved that work and how deeply it shaped the leader I became. I want them to know what their grandmother taught me through Alzheimer’s, what their lives taught me about being a dad, and how much of who I became happened because Kellie loved me enough to stay close while telling me the truth. I also know that creating a record does not replace being present. A book does not recover an evening when my mind stayed at work after my body came home. A song does not repay Kellie for the seasons when my ambition filled too much of our life. The people I love deserve me while I am here. That is the unfinished part of this story. I am still figuring out how to honor the mind that made all this work possible without allowing it to consume every open space. I want tools that help me hold onto an idea without holding me hostage to it. I want to trust that the thought will survive until tomorrow. I want to close the laptop, walk back into the house, and know I have not lost anything important. It is past two now. Kellie is asleep. Gus has not moved. The house remains quiet, and several new ideas appeared while I wrote this. I saved enough of them to find my way back. For most of my life, nighttime was the place where all the pieces had room to meet. It gave me HAT, books, songs, and parts of myself I might never have known otherwise. I still love these hours. I also want morning to receive more than whatever remains of me after I have chased every open tab. The work will still be here tomorrow. The people I love are here tonight. I am closing the laptop. --- **If this one landed** [The Human Voice in AI Work](https://www.mikebakerhq.com/writing/the-human-voice-in-ai-work/) is the daylight version of the same argument. Less beanbag, more about where I think the line belongs. And if the brain that will not sit still is the part you recognized, [Beautifully Unfocused](https://www.mikebakerhq.com/books/beautifully-unfocused/) is the long form of it. There is an [album by the same name](https://www.mikebakerhq.com/beautifully-unfocused-album/) if you would rather listen than read.