The ADHD API

A lighthearted long form blogpost, written by someone with ADHD, giving opinions on working with (or around) this delightful neurodiversity.

This is for people who have ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), or work in a technical team with people who have ADHD.

The title of this article caught your interest somehow. Maybe neurodiversity — and ADHD in particular — has popped up on your radar more frequently of late, or maybe you just really like Skelton & Pais’ 2019 work Team Topologies and you want to read something with a bit of twist on it. Maybe it was the acronyms. Anyway, you’re here now, and I’m going to tell you about my “ADHD API”. Er, except the first half I won’t talk about the API at all. And there’s always the disclaimer that this is purely my experience, no one else’s. And admittedly, it’s… not a short read. Maybe a Friday afternoon zone-out read, or a toilet-break read, or a commute read. It does get a bit anthropological.

In order to do the title justice, I’ll first explain a bit about ADHD. Consider it a prereqs section that is designed for the benefit of (I hope) everyone here. If you have ADHD, it can be challenging to know what support to ask for if you can’t clearly articulate your struggles — especially if you’ve only recently come to understand that not everyone does struggle with the things you do. For non-ADHD people, I want to put everyone on the same page and dispel some misleading and rather unhelpful stereotypes.

Then, I’ll get to the actual API section. Be aware that this is structured in conversational text, not JSON.

If any of this blog post resonates with you, I’d love to know your feedback. Email me at countlessworlds at proton mail dot com.

Understanding ADHD

Okay. This bit’s important, because it sets the stage for everything else.

I want you to put aside your current understandings of ADHD. This is because popular discourse around ADHD is biased historically (towards presentation in children, not adults, and mostly male children at that), and also has suffered unfortunately at the hands of the media. No one really benefits from these ideas of “little boys pinging off the classroom walls”. The tide on this continually-peddled stereotype being considered the only valid presentation of ADHD is, thankfully, starting to turn.

I’m not aiming to give an exhaustive explanation of ADHD in all people — resources like this already exist and continue to be updated, as representation improves — but as I’m writing specifically for and about “people who work in tech and read English” it makes sense to focus on the common lived experience of working-age people, and give a clear primer of how science and sociology understand ADHD today.

There is more than one type of ADHD

This is my favourite starting point! And the main reason the “little boy who can’t sit still” idea is so off. Your menu, dear reader, actually consists of:

1. Hyperactive type, which can be either physical or mental hyperactivity (usually both)
2. Inattentive type, where you have what’s called high distractability (which could also be called Outstanding Skills In Exploring Fascinating New Rabbitholes)
3. Combined type, where you have both of the above. Some people show a predominance for one type with a dash of the other, other people have a fairly equal spread

All sorts of well-known people have some type of ADHD — Simone Biles, Emma Watson, Richard Branson, Britney Spears, Michael Phelps, Bill Gates, reportedly Leonardo Da Vinci — and a lot of not-well-known people too. ADHD doesn’t affect your intelligence (of which there are different dimensions, but that’s another post entirely) or your physical prowess; it’s a difference in brain structure. I often describe it as a “difference in mental operating system” but please don’t ask me to go further on this analogy as I don’t want to offend anyone by insinuating they’re a dodgy Linux distribution, etc..

If I had to boil it down, I would say: people without ADHD think it’s “getting distracted by shiny objects”. That’s horribly reductive. For instance, they can get distracted by things like the politics surrounding Fermat’s Last Theorem, or rearranging Mensa questions into haikus, or wondering whether in 1000 years there will exist a plant or animal on this planet that is natively, truly, YInMn blue — and all of these thoughts may be happening at once. People with ADHD have a different attention regulation system and the world is absurdly, outrageously, endlessly interesting. Do not conflate ADHD with being vacuous.

Personally, I’ve always thought it’s a bit naff that it’s called “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder” when:

1. Not everyone diagnosed with ADHD has the Hyperactivity element (physical or mental) — I have many friends who are purely Inattentive type
2. Like everyone with ADHD, I don’t have a deficit of attention. I have attention for everything. What I have a deficit of is the regulation of my attention, as my brain is wired to find different things rewarding to neurotypical people, and how my brain prioritises things being important is different to neurotypical people
3. The difference in brain type is largely only a problem because I live in a world created both for and by neurotypicals. It’s like I’ve gone to the ice rink with roller blades. I get by, but it’s not ideal

ADHD seems to be named to reflect the things that are the most annoying for people who don’t have it (attention “deficiency” and “hyper” activity), rather than actual elements of the lived experience. I don’t think it’s a terribly accurate name. (If you’re interested, there’s a push to rename it VAST, but I think we can also come up with a better name than that, too). Don’t be misled; the acronym covers a lot of differences in lived experience. As Michael Nygard neatly put it (quoted in Team Topologies!), “a concept may appear to be atomic just because we have a single word to cover it. Look hard enough and you will find seams where you can fracture that concept.”

Let’s have a closer look at the ADHD operating system.

We are genuinely wired differently

My previous career, pre-tech, was an Occupational Therapist (occupation here means “anything that a human does”, not just work). For some of this time, I worked in the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery and wrote my MSc thesis on a particular area of stroke rehab. Brains are really very cool and interesting.

The specific site of a brain injury dictates what kind of function is affected — different areas of the brain are responsible for different things. For instance, when people have a stroke (a clot or a bleed) or TBI (traumatic brain injury) in the prefrontal cortex, it means their executive functioning (EF) is affected. EF is anything to do with planning or problem-solving or making decisions or generally being aware and responsive to what’s going on around us. It covers so many things: getting dressed, following a recipe, changing the channel on the TV, making a cup of tea, being able to remember you put something in the oven five minutes ago that needs to come out in half an hour, so not starting a massive task right now. I would loosely describe it as the set of brain functions for “keeping your shit together and on track”.

The prefrontal cortex and its circuitry play a key role in regulating attention, behaviour, and emotion. It is, you guessed it, one of the primary areas where the (hardware and) operating system for people with ADHD is significantly different to that of people without ADHD — albeit they have been born like that, rather than acquired it through illness or injury. (There are also a few other areas of the brain involved in ADHD, I encourage you to research further if you’re interested!).

A few years ago, I had a lightbulb moment. I was trying to explain what I felt was a chronic lack of consistency; a complete inability to just… finish tasks, despite being hardworking, diligent, and occasionally capable of enough of a degree of intellectualism to gain me a university degree or something. This was pre-ADHD diagnosis and I felt like a complete failure in most ways:

“I’ll decide I want a cup of tea as I can’t concentrate at my desk because I have too many thoughts going on in my head, so I head to the kitchen to put the kettle on. While I’m filling it up with water, I notice I’ve left a few bits of cutlery in the sink. I put the kettle down, and pick up the cutlery so I can just quickly pop them in the dishwasher. When I open the dishwasher, I discover it’s still half full — I must have only half emptied it last night. I put the dirty cutlery down, and start to put the clean dishes away. I get to the plates cupboard and realise the handle on it is still broken (I keep forgetting to fix it). I put the plates down, and go off on a hunt to find the superglue. This happens all day, with everything I do, unless I’m working on something I’m deeply interested in — then, there’s no getting me out of it, unless you interrupt me and I sometimes go a bit apeshit if I’m taken out of that flow state, which I then get deeply embarrassed about. It’s impossible to concentrate on things I’m not engaged with or find enough of a challenge, yet I have this constant motor-driven urge to do or learn or explore things all the time.”

The story would continue ad nauseam. At any point, the kettle has not been put on to boil. The cutlery is still dirty. The dishwasher is still half full. What I am doing now has entirely eclipsed what I was doing just before. At all points, I am thinking about 2 or 3 other things. This was, I have to say, peak undiagnosed ADHD and very stressful, and was my life on a daily basis for 30+ years until I realised… I had seen behaviour like this before. This was what (some) stroke patients I’d worked with were like. I wasn’t stupid, or lazy, or crazy: this was executive dysfunction, and in that context it actually made sense — even moreso when I started joining the ADHD dots. My brain was literally wired to operate this way and I had to work really hard to get it to stay on track. If you don’t have this kind of brain, I don’t know if you can fully appreciate how much extra effort this is, and how shit it can make you feel.

The most staggering thing is realising that this isn’t the “usual” experience. Sure, life has its challenges for everyone, but most people don’t go through life having to be really, really harsh on themselves or have adaptive coping mechanisms just to get basic routines done every morning. For the first 30 years of my life I thought everyone had a brain like mine, but I was just really bad at managing it. You, or people in your teams, may feel the same. I’m a strong believer that almost no one goes to work to be a jerk; most people just want to get by. If someone’s ADHD behaviour is winding you up, I am 99% certain they are not trying to be this way on purpose. Please be patient with them and recognise it’s not a character flaw: this is neurodiversity in the real world.

What it comes down to, in terms of real-world presentation, is motivation. Neurotypical people have what’s described as an importance-based nervous system. They use importance to determine their focus and motivation:

1. Importance: “this thing is important to me”
2. Secondary importance: “this thing is important to my boss/teacher/coworker/parent”
3. Rewards/consequences: “there is a reward or consequence associated with this thing”

ADHD folks can understand these things, but that doesn’t translate into action or even motivation. We don’t have a choice in the matter; we have an interest-based nervous system:

1. Interest: “this thing is fun or fascinating”
2. Challenge or competition: “this thing is hard and I want to complete it”
3. Novelty or creativity: “this thing is a new routine, or allows me to explore creativity”
4. Urgency: “this thing is time-pressured or an emergency”
5. Passion: “this thing aligns with my values and main goals in life”

The trick is to sculpt a work life that engages you in one (or more) of these ways to ensure you keep the ADHD motivation engine running, and harness that amazing energy, otherwise you will flounder and it will not be enjoyable. Once again, I’ll lift from the unexpectedly relevant Team Topologies:

“A computer will perform the same whether it is placed in Room A or Room B, but an engineer placed on Team A may perform very differently than is placed on Team B.”

ADHD is neither just a disability or a superpower

As an Occupational Therapist with an anthropology background, I enjoyed looking at humans doing their thing. It doesn’t take much to notice very quickly that they’re all different. “Normal” is nothing but either the modal average, or the position of those with the biggest wedge of privilege — even then, normal is a highly, highly relative and flexible term. Then, if you take another step back, and start considering the epistemological position of how am I understanding these people in the world? you realise you’ve probably been brought up with, and subconsciously accepted without argument, the paradigm that disabled people are “like normal people, but a bit broken”.

If that sentence made you slightly uncomfortable, congratulations. That way of thinking is called the medical model, and is thankfully increasingly outdated in contemporary healthcare. It posits that, basically, the problem is the disabled person: they need help and carers, or they are housebound, or they are confined to a wheelchair, or they can’t see or hear, or they can’t get up the stairs.

The social model of disability, by contrast, challenges this. It’s the idea that the problem is the disabling world, and it’s completely in our reach as a global society (and the most advanced human civilisation on record) to fix. The “problems” in this model are things like poorly-designed buildings, or infrastructure that isolates families, or inaccessible transport, or discrimination.

In the social model, someone’s activities are limited, not by the impairment or condition, but by the environment. These barriers are consequences of a lack of social organisation and respect for the multiplicity of the human experience. If we can put people on the moon, I’m pretty sure we can provide better, more equitable experiences for a range of people. It is, truly, not rocket science.

These days, I’m pretty familiar with spotting the gap between the ADHD lived experience and the neurotypical expectations of what’s expected at work. In particular scenarios (like a sprint planning meeting, or writing documentation for a feature the team is trying to get live, or in a company all hands meeting), I can spot where I’m going to need to request reasonable adjustments — a phrase we should be taught as children — or re-scope the activity so it doesn’t disable me. No one likes feeling that they’re stupid or lazy or broken just because their brain isn’t wired to do the activity in front of them the “expected” way. I can tell you with confidence that every single ADHD person I’ve met, ever, has been both hardworking and creative. We have to be. It’s part of working around the ADHD, even if we don’t know that it’s called that. It doesn’t necessarily make it easier.

Part of “not feeling disabled by our environment at work” is sociological. The more our teams understand about the ADHD lived experience, its strengths and challenges, the more culturally acceptable it is to work in a different way, achieve using different methods, etc. — once again, this is what neurodiversity in the real world looks like. Education is a huge part of inclusivity.

I understand that it’s easy to reach for stock cognitive blocks like “ADHD people can’t sit still” or “ADHD people can’t concentrate” but in my mind, it’s more like one of those character-building screens in The Sims:

Personality stats that ADHD folks may not automatically score highly on might be things like “Can sustain attention on any single task, even if uninterested”, “Can keep track of time reliably”, “Sit calmly on a video call”.

However, there are some stats that people with ADHD are already provably much higher than average in, by default— “Creative or divergent thinker”, “Self-directed worker”, “Works extremely efficiently under time constraint, or in an emergency situation”, (NB this is NOT an endorsement of stupidly stressful timelines; very rarely is an SLA breach genuinely life-threatening).

In addition, it’s entirely possible to boost those lower stats with insight and adaptive techniques — those “reasonable adjustments” I mentioned before. I’ll give you some examples once we get to the API section. I do have the ability to do things like “Concentrate on tasks” and “Sit still without fidgeting”, but they’re not my strength because of my neurology, especially if they’re not done in an ADHD-friendly way. In my opinion, I don’t have a disability, I got a different brain starter kit, and I am sometimes disabled by my environment.

These days, I often say to people that without my adaptive strategies, I’m basically colourblind when it comes to prioritisation. It’s slightly dramatic, and I’m in no way trying to demean the experience of sight loss, but using this visual and descriptive analogy seems to help people understand that — just as with sight loss — it wasn’t a character flaw, stupidity, or laziness when I used to have trouble working out what the most important thing on my To Do list actually was. There will be people on your teams who are like this too. We’ve been trying all our lives to just function “normally” and it’s harder than it looks. We’ve often been told that we “just need to concentrate harder” or “stop being lazy”.

If it’s not seen as a moral failing that I need glasses to read a sign that’s more than 10 metres away, it shouldn’t be seen as such that my neurology is physically and chemically predisposed to find some types of executive functioning more challenging. I’ll say it again: this is neurodiversity in the real world. The good news is we can adapt the world.

Next, the “superpower”. This particular narrative always makes me cringe a bit. Don’t get me wrong — my different brain gives me some cool strengths, sure, and I’m super proud of them. But I’d rather the narrative shifted away from superpowers and more towards “being human is an amazing, kaleidoscopic spectrum, and we are all interesting in our own ways”. I’m not against people celebrating the positives of ADHD; I will fiercely defend them. But it’s also totally fine to just be happy and a regular person who has ADHD. If it makes you feel good then go for it (I wouldn’t dream of stopping you!) but please remember you don’t need to have any “superpowers” to be worthy.

There is a nuance to this conversation that doesn’t escape me: on the one hand, I’m telling you ADHD is a disability but where the emphasis is more on differences and being disabled by the environment. At the same time, I’m saying that people like me struggle with certain things and need specific, additional support. Isn’t that a bit contradictory? Well, I don’t think so. I think everyone needs “reasonable adjustments” at work; some of those are currently culturally acceptable, and some are much newer. That’s fine; humans are constantly evolving, and the pace at which we do so currently is probably the fastest we’ve ever done it.

To recap, what I’d like you to have got out of this section is that:

1. ADHD brains truly are different to non-ADHD brains, and no amount of “trying really hard” is going to change that
2. It doesn’t have to be confusing, or a negative — changing the environment to be more ADHD-friendly, tweaking some communications, and just being more informed are all fantastic ways to take some of the friction out of the workplace for ADHD folks. Having ADHD is only a problem at work if the workplace isn’t ADHD-friendly

Workplace ADHD bingo

Ten questions plus one bonus. Mark as a YES if you’ve experienced any before, even if you’ve found ways to manage them well these days:

• Sensory overload in the office — things like too many people talking simultaneously, or receiving a looooad of emails at once and realising you haven’t eaten in 5 hours, and you’re feeling horrendous
• Missing meetings and deadlines, or procrastinating even though you desperately want to work on the thing in front of you
• Out of sight, out of mind: once the call ends you have no memory of what the actions were, unless by some stroke of luck you wrote them down
• Only two modes: be virtually unable to get anything done, or get 40 hours of work done in 8 hours because the deadline is tomorrow
• Prioritisation issues: “everything on this list is important or interesting in some way, I’ll just do all of them”
• Forgetting verbal instructions, or forgetting to reply to an email — aka the ol’ “I’ll get to that in a minute… shit, it’s been 8 months”
• Overwhelming transitions between tasks — takes 45 minutes to get into “the zone” and being interrupted makes you want to flip a table
• An unbearable feeling (far worse than boredom) from tasks that are understimulating
• Indomitable desire to research a new project as soon as you’ve thought if it
• “I wonder how this works… Let me do some research on it” aka spending all day on sidequests instead of progressing the main story
• Bonus: Having 50+ tabs open

Remember: these behaviours feel natural to ADHD people. This is what our brain wants to do and that is ok — it has some evolutionary advantages! Importantly, you are not lazy for not being able to consistently tame this extraordinary power — I am certain you frequently exercise the full extent of your free will in trying to coerce your behaviour to be more “normal”. But I agree with Ted Chiang that free will is a spectrum, and there are sometimes limits or variables that need to be accounted for. There are also external adjustments that can be made to make life easier for you.

Enter stage left: Team Topologies

In 2019, Manuel Pais and Matthew Skelton published a book called “Team Topologies: Organizing business and technology teams for fast flow”. It outlines a model for how to organise your software teams for maximum efficiency and, importantly, “make work more humane for everyone” (always a green flag, that). As far as I know, it became something of a seminal text in software organisational operating & delivery models, and though not everyone adopted it, it continues to be discussed and used. Models like this can never accurately describe or be relevant to every company, but their application (and joy) lies more in their relevance and efficacy than their ubiquity.

Around that time, I was trying hard not to feel wholly inadequate as a junior developer when a senior DevOps colleague (and friend) mentioned it to me. I might not be — or have an interest in being — an engineering lead or team manager but, as someone with a lifelong fascination for systems, paradigms, and theoretical approaches, found Team Topologies really accessible. In a nutshell, as Martin Fowler so clearly summarises it, the model “defines […] four types of teams and three modes of team interactions. The model encourages healthy interactions that allow business-capability centric teams to flourish in their task of providing a steady flow of valuable software.” Skelton and Pais have some lovely, very easy-to-follow infographics on the TT site.

Aside: if you want to see my personal tl;dr of Team Topologies, check out this file on GitHub, and learn more about how I store excerpts from books in my digital commonplace book.

Anyway, I’m not going to go into great depth about the Team Topologies model. I’m going to pick up on one element of it, and drag it into another realm for my own enjoyment: the Team API.

What’s a Team API?

In the authors’ own words, a Team API is “a description and specification that a team can define that tells others how to interact with that team.” They’ve even got a handy GitHub file with a template you can copy.

Similar to a normal API, it defines the interface and parameters for the most effective communication for both parties, where one party requests something of the other. This can be helpful for everyone, not just neurodiverse people who might find “normal” (read: neurotypical) styles of communication unpredictable or not totally clear.

I like that Skelton & Pais also identify two further benefits: improving the team’s clarity of purpose, and helping other groups understand how that team fits into the broader organisation. They reference a great MacCormack & team phrase for keeping things team-sized — “an architecture for participation” — that I want to build on.

I’ve seen companies do something a bit like an individual API before — a “How to work with me” that you put in your Slack profile or in the company wiki page about you. It covers things like:

• My usual working hours and location
• My communication preferences (email/DM/video call/audio call/other)
• The kinds of things I work on
• What I can help you with
• Good To Know™

This last one isn’t always present, but I find it a useful catch-all for things like:

• “I’m on the spectrum so might not recognise sarcasm in conversation — I take things very literally”
• “I’m quite socially anxious, so if I don’t always make eye contact when we chat, it’s absolutely nothing personal”
• “I live with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) so having more than 2 video calls in a day is challenging for me — please be patient if I need to reschedule our call”

It’s everyone’s job, including people with organisational capital (i.e. people in positions of power, of which there are many types), to create a workplace environment that provides the psychological safety to have these things as normal, ambient conversations. Don’t make it unusual for people to have to bring these things up. We’re all people, and we do our “best work” in different environments:

“As members of the technology teams managing these interfaces, we must shift our thinking from treating teams as collections of interchangable individuals that will succeed as long as they follow the “right” process and use the “right” tools, to treating humans and technology as a single human/computer carbon/silicon sociotechnical ecosystem. At the same time, we need to ensure that teams are intrinsically motivated and are given a real chance of doing their best work within such a system.” — Team Topologies

Consider the ADHD API a basic template for anyone with this flavour of neurospicy brain to use as a starting point. Each API section, like the Team API template, has a title followed by a more detailed explanation of what should be included in that section.

The ADHD API

Date

Though the document can, and should, persist, what you capture on it will only ever be a snapshot in time (just as the original Team API template highlights). Everyone’s different, and people change.

Name

How you like to be named/called, pronouns, name pronunciation.

My role and what I do

The two are often not synonymous. This is a great place to explain the nuance or complexity of what you actually do day-to-day versus the name it happens to be given within the company. This is also an opportunity to be really accurate and specific in communication, which many types of neurodiverse people (not just ADHD) prefer. It also starts to set expectations on what your remit covers. Pais and Skelton call this out themselves in Team Topologies:

“Behavioural studies suggest that humans work best with others when we can predict their behaviour. As humans, we can build trust by providing consistent experiences for others in the organization. Clear roles and responsibilities help this by defining expected behaviour and avoiding what some refer to as “invisible electric fences”.”

What I’m working on right now

This one is particularly useful for people who have joined the company recently, and are reading your API page. It gives them a tangible starting point for your work at this point in time, and potentially a conversation item to get to know you and work better with you in future! It does not matter that this information will become deprecated. You only use flatpack furniture instructions once, but they are still essential at the time.

Working hours and core routines

I like this one because it lays out the non-negotiables. Please be respectful of (as in, do not fuck with, at all) the working hours and core routines of anyone, but especially people with ADHD.

Two consultant psychiatrists, Hallowell and Ratey, wrote a book in 2021 that changed my life. They have ADHD themselves and they wrote a super accessible, digestible handbook on understanding what goes on under the hood of an ADHD brain, and advised some central tenets to immediate make a very positive impact.

One of most important of these is daily structure.

Creating and sticking to routines is inherently extremely challenging for people with ADHD. It’s not a matter of “willpower”; a lot of what people term “willpower” is actually just dopamine regulation. If ADHD means your dopamine regulation is a bit weird, your “willpower” will look different to other people’s. ADHD people can do the same thing every day for 6 months, but if the routine is interrupted, it’s like the whiteboard is completely wiped clean. Getting back into the swing of things is a nightmare.

I often recall Kate Mosse’s revealing statement, “left to my own devices, I’d survive on Marmite toast and baked potatoes. The occasional grape. There are other things I’d rather be doing.” The sheer drudgery of having to make multiple meals every day of my life when there are INFINITELY more interesting things my brain wants to do can be tough. Not to mention, if I’m doing something fascinating, I may forget to eat multiple meals in a row. As you can imagine, it’s easy for brains to go haywire and ADHD to get “worse” if your blood sugar and blood fat have to deal with these massive random fluctuations. Please don’t book over someone’s lunchtime calendar block. Assuming they can “just push it back by half an hour” is not cool. It’s at that time for a reason.

Another of these tenets is exercise. In fact, Hallowell and Ratey cite exercise as “one of the most powerful non-medical tools we have and an important first line of defense”, especially with helping the brain create the right conditions for maintaining focus. There is, in particular, “hard science behind strengthening the balance and coordination of those with attention issues” as the cerebellum is another important ADHD brain area. Sorry, but employee wellness is more important than your call. Don’t book over peoples’ workouts.

Another tenet is sleep consistency and quality. It has a huge impact on ADHD. So this is a reminder for distributed teams: don’t ask your people to join calls that are outside their working hours. Get better at remote & async working. You have no excuse.

How I’d like to be given feedback

Time for another acronym: Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD). Explaining RSD to people is another thing that makes me cringe a bit, because it sounds so lame, and it’s easy to misunderstand. RSD is not a “fear of rejection”. I’m pretty blase about rejection (many ADHD people follow the “fuck around and find out” school of life which leads to a LOT of what I will gracefully term “learning opportunities”) — I’m not going to cry if I get rejected from a job, or someone doesn’t like my Powerpoint presentation. I’m not made of tissue paper. RSD is self-directed anxiety and occasionally shame, sometimes not triggered by anything that anyone else has done, that hits you when you’re feeling vulnerable. It feels very physical and is annoyingly irrational, but it does hurt. It’s not about what other people do to you; it’s about how your brain wants to “protect” itself by assuming the worst. It is, I hate to say it, a You problem at heart. However, with practice, it can be recognised, named, and moved on from a little easier each time.

Additionally, receiving feedback is an incredible gift. If someone cares enough to give you genuine feedback, they will care that it lands well and doesn’t make you want to literally crawl into a hole in the earth and never burden anyone with your existence again.

Technical teams often have retros. Please follow the general rule of “praise in public, give feedback in private” and respect that someone may need additional processing time for your feedback, as emotional dysregulation (in the form of Big Emotional Responses To Things At First) is a hallmark ADHD trait. Some people really, genuinely prefer to have feedback in written form.

Interacting with me

Example subheadings:

• My work means I currently interact with these teams/individuals:
• My communication preferences (email/DM/video call/audio call/other):
• What helps me process information better:

One of the prime examples of the neurotypical workplace hegemony is the “camera always on” mandate. It is vile. Video calls should not be the default communication mode, and are antithetical to good async practices. Many neurodiverse people find that doodling, fidgeting, using sensory or stim toys, or generally just moving about or re-adjusting in their chair to be absolutely necessary. If you’re having to “look like you’re paying attention” in the expected, neurotypical way, or are anxious about people seeing the “unmasked” you, it adds a layer of additional fuzz and noise over your already-taxed cognitive abilities. (Personally, I think everyone benefits from having a little bit of extra time to process and think about their response, which isn’t possible on video calls).

Once again: creating an environment in which there is enough psychological safety to be comfortably unmasked (either wholly or partially) is everyone’s job. It’s not just about the neurodiverse person being a bit brave and stating their specific boundaries clearly; the onus is not entirely on the individual, but also on the organisation culture to expect and foster diversity. As Naomi Stanford (in Organisational Design and referenced here in Team Topologies) puts it, “people and organizations benefit from a diverse workforce where differences spark positive energy.”

Lastly, on communication styles in particular, working memory is one of the core areas of executive function affected in ADHD brain types. Please, for the sake of all that is good in this world, write things down for people with ADHD. Put it in the Jira ticket, or the Slack message, or the email. Please write it down.

What I can help you with

ADHD people are often called “divergent thinkers”. They are extremely creative, and their brain is often filled with ideas. This can be fabulous for innovation, and collaboration should be encouraged. At the same time, it’s important to remember that ADHD brains aren’t necessarily wired to drive projects to completion, or to stay on track without support. As engineering guru Will Larson puts it, “to make progress, above all else, you must ensure that some of your projects finish.”

Having a clear list of “what I can help you with” can be a useful way to ringfence any areas that you’re definitely happy to help out in, without making you too distracted too frequently. It also helps with channeling questions or requests to the right person, which saves everyone’s time.

About me/Beyond my role, talk to me about…

I chose to put this at the end, rather than at the beginning, so we get the role-related aspects out of the way, and leave just the fun stuff! I think it’s easier to write it this way because, let’s be honest, who has (or enjoys writing) an elevator pitch about themselves?! But everyone has things they’re interested in. “Special interest areas” and being able to “infodump” to someone who shares them is a wonderful, very special neurodiverse experience.

Additionally, it’s been proven that (perhaps because of the disproportionate and negative impacts of RSD, and also the difference in dopamine regulation) rewards work much better for the ADHD mind than consequences. Understanding an ADHD brain and its motivations can be such a helpful, humane insight.

Final thoughts if this resonated with you

People with ADHD are different in the types of lifestyle they have and the characteristics that manifest most strongly, but also many people are at different stages of awareness or diagnosis. I’ve met some people who don’t want a diagnosis because they feel it singles them out, and others who are struggling at work but not aware they display a lot of ADHD hallmark behaviours, and yet more who are actively seeking diagnosis and support and still learning a lot about it. I’m far from an expert, but I’ve put a lot of time into understanding ADHD as a lived experience, and I hope (if you’ve made it this far) this has provided you with a feeling of solidarity.

Getting a diagnosis isn’t something everyone wants to do, or can do quickly — the waiting lists for assessment on the NHS are years at the moment. However, I’ve always found “hahaha wow this ADHD meme account sure is relatable” (prime example: ADHD Meme Therapy on Instagram) to be a reliable if informal self-diagnosis process. Laughing about the fact you can’t have one single thought end-to-end without also simultaneously thinking “I wonder if Ea-Nasir had a nickname” and “why do some dogs’ coats go frizzy in the rain” and “I really want to finish that rubik’s cube book” (this is all a true story from writing the last paragraph) is healthy and necessary. As is finding people like you, and reading as many resources as you can: “once you develop a good understanding of how your ADHD brain actually works, your entire life will start to make sense” — ADHD Boss. It is so important to know that you are not a weird horse, you are a zebra, and there are others like you. Many studies have shown that “charismatic mentors — not grades, study habits, where [you] go to school, or IQ — make the biggest difference in kids with ADHD” (Hallowell and Ratey).

Helpful resources can be these other people, memes, instagram or tiktok hashtags, books. Even though I do sometimes think to myself “dear gods, must I really live with this brain for the rest of my life 🥲” it happens very rarely these days. I’ve learnt to really enjoy what Marianne Eloise describes as the Scalextric track in the cavern of her skull, “the electric car […] loaded by an invisible force beyond my control with ideas, phrases and images [and] without an exit ramp they swoop endlessly through the abyss in my head.” It’s never dull, I’ll give you that.

I saw these affirmation-style reframes recently (again, from an ADHD instagram account) and thought they were really positive:

Thanks for reading.

Resources

• #1 RESOURCE!!!! ADHD 2.0: New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction — From Childhood Through Adulthood by Edward Hallowell and John Ratey
• A really helpful visual explainer (though potentially not that accessible to screenreaders?) on how ADHD medication works, at a glance
• Marianne Eloise, “Obsessive, Intrusive, Magical Thinking”
• This booklet which is FASCINATING and includes information on how hormonal cycles impact ADHD symptoms — written by someone with ADHD
• This podcast from Harvard Business Review on ADHD in women
• This diagram because there are specific overlaps between ADHD and autism and I find this a really helpful visual tool:

Thanks

• To Tal, who is basically my ADHD Elder/sire/mentor and gave me my first “soooo how much do you know about ADHD” conversation
• To James, Tal, Tom W, Tom DM, Alex, and Ben for giving me insights into types of lived experiences I’m not familiar with
• My ADHD Coach, Charlotte, who I found through ADHD Works and received 10 sessions of coaching with, funded by the Access To Work scheme