Living and Working With ADHD: What It's Like for Me

I have ADHD, combined type, which means I get both the attention side and the hyperactive, impulsive side. Working with ADHD, for me, means huge focus on anything that interests me and a real struggle with anything that doesn’t. I’ve spent nearly twenty years in tech like this.

This is only my experience. I’m not an expert and I don’t have a degree of any kind, so what I have is my own life and a lot of reading. Other people with ADHD will tell you something different.

What ADHD is

People often treat ADHD as a mental health issue. It’s a neurodevelopmental condition, which means my brain developed differently from early childhood. Since my diagnosis, I’ve come to see how much it has shaped my personality and my working life.

What working with ADHD gives me

Give me an interesting problem and I can hyperfocus on it, which means it takes up all of my attention until it’s done. I love this work, and that excitement is what makes me driven and fast. I build first versions quickly, I come up with a lot of ideas and I go looking for things I can fix, even when they aren’t my responsibility.

I’m also calm in a crisis. When things go wrong I can take in a lot of information, pick out what matters most, make a plan and act on it.

AI tools changed things again. I wrote about this in June: for years my brain ran ahead of what my tools could keep up with, and now I run six to twelve windows at once and give each one precise instructions. Finally, my output can keep up with my brain.

What it costs me

If something is out of sight, it can stop existing for me. I might read your message, get distracted and forget it was ever there. I don’t always feel time passing either, which is known as time blindness, so I can be five minutes late without noticing.

I struggle to hold long lists of spoken instructions in my head.

The hardest part of working with ADHD is work that doesn’t interest me. I really struggle with admin. In the past, if I went quiet for a while, I was probably stuck on something I had no interest in and too ashamed to ask for help. These days I ask without any shame, and I make sure neither I nor anyone I lead is blocked or missing the right information. I’ve also spent whole weeks spiralling on one issue, trying hard every single day and still getting very little done.

Small, unexpected changes to my routine can upset me more than a real emergency does. Criticism can land far harder than anyone meant it to, which has a name, rejection sensitivity, and in new or uncomfortable situations I tend to withdraw. Feedback is different, because I can act on it. If I can’t act on it, it isn’t feedback, it’s just criticism. Sometimes I read people wrong in the other direction too. I’ve been in conversations where I thought we were joking, right up until the tone crossed a line that even I couldn’t miss.

What masking costs

Masking means hiding how your brain works so you fit in with everyone else. I wrote about it at length in A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats, because “communicate better” on a performance review often means exactly that. Doing it all day is like having two jobs: the one you were hired for, and managing how you come across while you do it.

How I work around my limits

Trying harder only gets me so far, so I set up my work so the limits matter less.

Anything I might forget lives outside my head. GitHub holds my ideas, changes and context, so people can read them when it suits them and I don’t have to remember to tell them. After a meeting I ask for a DM with what we agreed and what I need to do, and AI meeting notes catch the rest. If I miss a message or a meeting, a gentle nudge fixes it, and I say so up front in my user manual so nobody has to guess.

I keep boring work small. Process and admin stay as light as the job allows, and AI helps keep my tools up to date.

I also protect my focus. I ask for long blocks of time with nobody interrupting me, and when a deadline is close, I set up a short check-in first thing each morning. Over the years I’ve kept moving towards the parts of tech I find interesting, so the focus shows up for the work I’m paid to do.

Because I can’t hold much in my head, I break problems down and write exact specs. Nearly twenty years of that is why precise instructions to an AI model come easily to me.

Where a team has guidelines, I follow them (to the best of my knowledge), because working inside sensible rules gives me an opportunity to discover improvements where possible. I’m more careful than I used to be with my drive for progress, but as they say, “we’re all a work in progress.”

What that has done for my career

I went from junior to head of engineering, with some CTO responsibilities, faster than most people expected, including me. I’ve stepped back from that path twice by choice, once to commute less and once when my kids were born.

I placed the first independent hotel search aggregator on TripAdvisor’s self-service integration, which until then had been reserved for major chains.

At Deepgram I pushed to start our developer community. Someone in leadership disagreed with me about its chances of success and what it would cost in resources. We were cutting our support team’s work from all customers and potential customers down to enterprise customers only. Who was everyone else meant to get support from, if it wasn’t us? Our competitors also hadn’t reached AI developer communities yet, so we could get there first. I committed to it and owned the result. We reached millions of developers and grew that community to tens of thousands. In my opinion, that move led to the fast growth and saved us from a lot of unhappy customers. If it hadn’t worked, we’d have failed fast and tried something else.

Former reports still tell me I was the best manager they ever had, which I put down to something simple: knowing how it feels to be misunderstood, I made the effort to understand each of them and then championed them. I wrote down how I lead too.

How to work with someone who has ADHD

Ask them. Most “how to manage employees with ADHD” articles get it wrong, and the person in front of you knows far more about their own brain. These are the things that work for me:

• Listen the first time. Asking someone to repeat themselves, after they’ve worked hard to stay focused on what you said, can feel like rejection.
• Break instructions into simple steps and write them down.
• Tell me about changes early, even small ones.
• Let people work in the way that suits them. For some that’s remote work and control over their routine. For others it’s being in a room with the team.
• Give feedback that’s clear and specific, about something I can actually do differently.
• Celebrate the wins out loud, because I’m far more likely to celebrate yours than notice mine.

My brain isn’t going to change, so I build my working life around it.