Earlier this week, I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to make my calendars talk to each other.
I had my personal Google Calendar, the Baker family calendar in Apple, an Outlook feed from work, and the Mike Baker HQ calendar. Then I decided Mira, the AI assistant I have been building, should give me a daily brief, include birthday reminders, and send Kellie a weekly family summary.
This was a very sophisticated answer to a problem I have had for years.
At some point, I realized the entire project was organized around eight words that have gotten a lot of decent men in trouble:
“Just tell me where I need to be.”
I have said versions of that sentence throughout my marriage. When I say it, I hear cooperation. I hear a husband saying he is willing to show up wherever the family needs him.
The sentence also hands someone else an additional job. She has to know the schedule, protect against conflicts, remember the birthday, account for travel time, and give me the finished plan at the right moment.
That realization bothered me because I do not think of myself as a man who expects someone else to run his life. I lead a complicated healthcare organization. I spend my days making decisions, building systems, and helping other people keep difficult work moving.
I am also a husband with ADHD who has had four calendars and still missed things.
Both belong in an honest picture of me.
The People Closest to Us Have Their Own Evidence
Most of us measure our character from inside our own heads. We know how much we care. We remember what we intended to do and the message we started writing before something else interrupted us.
The people living with us work from another set of facts. They experience our timing, attention, tone, and follow-through. They notice whether we look up from the phone. They know how many reminders it takes before we handle something. They feel what happens in the room when we believe we are being criticized.
That gap does not automatically make us dishonest. It gives us information about ourselves that we will never produce alone.
This is where men like me often get defensive. If I believe I am a good husband, caring father, or thoughtful leader, criticism sounds like an attack on that identity. My brain starts preparing context before the other person has finished speaking.
I was overwhelmed. Work was brutal. I forgot. I was listening even though I was looking at my phone.
Some of that context might be accurate. The explanation still takes attention away from what the other person was trying to tell me.
The Better Man Field Guide uses a shopping cart to describe this. If I roll a grocery cart onto someone’s ankle, my first responsibility is to move it. The person does not need an explanation about the crowded aisle while the wheel is still sitting on their foot.
Relationship conversations fall apart when we reverse that order. Someone says, “That hurt,” and we hear, “You are a terrible person.” The original concern has to wait while the person who raised it reassures us about our character.
I have done versions of that. I have made the explanation so large that the other person ended up caring for my feelings while theirs waited.
ADHD Explains the Friction
My brain does not place information into a calm line and wait for me to retrieve it. A date arrives while I am thinking about a meeting, a song, a healthcare problem, a book, and something I forgot to order for the house.
I build systems because I care. I also have a history of building systems that require me to remember the system, which remains a persistent design flaw.
Understanding my ADHD matters because shame does not make anyone more organized. It adds another layer of pressure to a brain already struggling to move from intention to action.
That explanation does not turn Kellie into my permanent calendar department.
If my brain needs additional support, I need to build that support around it. The person I love should not become the workaround for every system that fails.
That principle reaches beyond calendars. It applies to messages, appointments, household responsibilities, and the small commitments that build trust over time.
Feeling deeply about something does not guarantee I will remember it. Caring does not complete the task. A reliable system helps the people around me experience the care I already feel.
The Moment I Put the Phone Down
I saw a smaller version of this during the work around one of my art shows.
I was answering messages about the gallery and letting other people’s opinions pull me back into my phone. Kellie was telling me something important. I was physically in the room, but she did not have my full attention.
She knew.
People usually know when we are half-present before we admit it. We make listening noises and keep our eyes close enough to their face that we think we deserve partial credit. The other person experiences the phone in our hand and the delay before we respond.
I put the phone down and listened. The moment changed because my attention changed.
I did not solve some enormous marriage problem. I stopped asking Kellie to compete with a screen for a few minutes.
That scene stayed with me because I talk about presence all the time. I believe people deserve to feel seen and heard. Then life gives me an ordinary test of whether the person I love feels seen while she is sitting beside me.
My creative life complicates this. An idea arrives and gets loud. A song starts forming late at night. A piece of art becomes a project, and the project creates another reason to check my phone.
I love that part of my brain. Kellie has lived with the part that does not always know how to return to the room.
Some of the qualities people admire in us create a cost at home when we leave them unmanaged. Leadership places demands on the people who share a life with the leader. Creativity needs boundaries when the project begins taking attention from the person beside us.
I want to become more responsible for that transition back.
What Being a Goalie Taught Me About Impact
I have played enough beer-league goalie to know what it feels like when a puck gets past you and you are convinced there should be an asterisk on the scoreboard.
Maybe there was a screen. The puck changed direction. A defenseman missed an assignment. My hip moved like a part that was no longer under warranty.
There is usually context. The red light still comes on.
A goalie who spends the next five minutes arguing with the last goal gives up another one. You look at what happened, learn what is available, and get set for the next shot.
I wish I had brought that discipline home earlier in life.
In relationships, I have sometimes treated context as an appeal. I meant well. I was overwhelmed. My brain dropped the task. Every statement might be accurate, but none removes the consequence that landed on someone else.
Responsibility is steadier than self-hatred. Responsibility says, “That was mine. I need to address it.” Shame turns one mistake into a verdict about who we are, then pulls everyone nearby into managing the collapse.
Ownership gives us somewhere to go. We look at what happened and choose a different response for the next time.
The Life Kellie and I Built
A few weeks ago, Kellie and I had all three kids together on the Oregon Coast. Cameron was home from New Zealand. Sammie had recently graduated. Jacob was there as the big brother he has become.
For a little while, everyone’s separate life gathered back into one place.
I watched Kellie in the middle of it. She gets happy in a deep way when all the kids are together. I looked at her watching them and felt proud of the life we had built.
We have been married since 1999. We were young when we started, and neither of us knew what the years would ask from us.
That pride is honest. Another truth sits beside it. Kellie has carried our family with love in ways other people never see. She has held details together while I was leading a health center, chasing an idea, making music late at night, or trying to remember which calendar had the information I needed.
We built this life together. I have shown up in meaningful ways, and there are places where she had to compensate for me. A mature marriage has enough room to tell the whole truth.
As I watched the kids together near the ocean, I saw the result of years of ordinary work. There were schedules, health scares, difficult conversations, bills, meals, moves, and pieces that never show up in a family photograph.
The question “What is it like to live with me?” does not erase the good life we built. It helps me honor it.
I want Kellie to experience the man I keep saying I want to be. I want my adult kids to feel that growth in the way I listen to them now. I want the people I lead to experience Human First through my behavior.
That requires information I cannot produce by thinking harder about myself.
Ask a Smaller Question
“What is it like to live with me?” might be too large for a first conversation. It invites an entire relationship review when most of us need one honest place to begin.
Try a smaller question:
“What is one ordinary thing I do that makes life heavier for you?”
Ask when you have time to hear the answer. Choose someone with whom you have a safe relationship. Then listen without preparing your explanation.
If the answer involves the calendar, your phone, your tone, or a task that always needs another reminder, stay with that one thing. Repeat what you heard in your own words and thank the person for telling you.
Changed behavior will carry more weight than a promise made during an emotional conversation.
The Better Man Field Guide grew out of this work. I wrote it for men who care, try, and still create consequences they did not intend. I am one of those men.
Growth does not require me to hate the man I have been. It asks me to tell the truth about him and choose what I do next.
Watch or Listen to the Episode
Season 2, Episode 13 of Still Here, Still Trying is available now.
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/G2_ehMCcGlg
Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7dloXLc1ZQSVN2MOiwNIsb
Get The Better Man Field Guide: https://a.co/d/02P4fQKm
A brief safety note: The question in this article is intended for ordinary relationships where people are safe and trying. Violence, threats, intimidation, coercive control, stalking, sexual coercion, or fear require qualified support and full accountability.
If this one landed
Beautifully Unfocused is the long form of what the calendars were really about.
And One-Thirty in the Morning is the same brain at one in the morning, still trying to build its way out.