As hard as it might be to believe, this picture is not staged. Unfortunately, it's what my desk looked like when I swiveled around to take a pic. I was trying to show the notebook that I used for my last article's hero image, but neglected to think about the fact that many days of misuse and abuse of horizontal spaces were just on prime display.
Tbh this is what it looks like a lot of the time. I spilled coffee while on a call because of some over exaggerated wild gesticulations and cleaned it up with a kleenex (I couldn't be bothered to go downstairs to get something better) and then just never threw the kleenex away because my trash can was downstairs from me cleaning it out and I forgot to bring it upstairs. My keyboard died on Friday and I can't find the USB nugget to plug the charger into so it is still, today, as I type this, sitting on my desk. The D&D stuff from our last session is still out despite there being a drawer in my literal desk just for that. There is a tiny toothpaste from a glamping trip two weeks ago and I do not know what to do with it so it's still just there.
The thing that is hard to explain to people who don't have ADHD is that none of this is visible to me. I'm not choosing to ignore it. It literally does not register until something makes me look at it, and then I'm embarrassed and I clean it, and then a week later it's back. That has been true my entire life.
ADHD and neurodivergence are so core to who I am and how I work that I think it's worth writing about openly - both what the problems actually look like day to day (because I think a lot more people deal with this than say so) and the handful of things I've found that actually help me work with it.
It is a lot of us
Based on some CDC research from last year, about 6% of US adults, which is roughly 15.5 million people, have a current ADHD diagnosis, and a little over half of them were diagnosed as adults. So there are a lot of people out there who made it through school and a first job and most of a career before finding out why things felt harder than they seemed to be for everyone else.
If you run a business it's even more. A study in Small Business Economics surveyed 242 entrepreneurs and 29% of them reported having ADHD, and nearly half reported some kind of mental health condition, both markedly higher than the comparison group. Anyone who has spent time in a room full of founders is probably not shocked by this, you have to be a certain type of person to take on that level of stress.
There's also a paper in the Journal of Business Venturing that tried to figure out why, and the finding that stuck with me is that the hyperactive side of ADHD pushes people toward starting things while the inattentive side pulls them away from it. Isn't it ironic?
Infinitely optimistic, finite in capability
The actual issue with ADHD, for me, is that I am infinitely optimistic and finite in my capability. I am so excited to try so many different things. I want to learn every tool, read every book, build every app, say yes to every person who reaches out. And I truly believe I can do all of it, every single time. But there is a hard limit on how much I'm actually able to get done, and the distance between those two things is where most of my stress comes from.
Sometimes that shows up as my cluttered desk desk. Sometimes it shows up as committing to four things in a week that I only have room for two of, and being surprised about it on Thursday (again).
What I do about it
I don't want to paint any of this as overwhelmingly negative, because it isn't, and most of what helps me is pretty simple. It all comes down to routine and ritual. I am not a disciplined person, so I build the day in a way where the right thing happens whether or not I feel like deciding to do it.
I get 20 minutes on the treadmill every morning to get moving before the day starts. There's real research behind this one - a meta-analysis from earlier this year pooled 14 trials of adults with ADHD and found that physical activity improves inhibitory control, which is the clinical term for being able to not do the shiny thing, and even a single session made a measurable difference. So the treadmill is less about fitness and more about getting my brain to a place where it will cooperate with me for a few hours.
I absolutely HAVE TO wake up before the kids. This is non-negotiable in my house. If I wake up into someone already needing something from me, I spend the entire day in damn near paralysis. I need that first 30-60 minutes to straighten out my own brain before I start taking care of anybody else's.
I use a custom to-do list obsessively, because I know my brain is a liar and won't actually remember things. It will tell me with total confidence that it's got it, and it absolutely does not got it. So everything goes in the list and I do what the list says.
And I use Wispr Flow to keep a log of everything I say and type. I talk constantly - to clients, to my kids, to myself - and having all of it searchable means that when I know I told somebody something important on Tuesday, I can actually go find it instead of hoping it comes back to me.
None of this is a productivity hack, it's just me taking decisions away from the part of my brain that is bad at making them.
The good part
There are several good parts, despite my ramblings here.
* I am constantly interested in learning new things.
* I am passionate and excited about basically everything I touch, and clients can feel that, and I think it's a big part of why they stick around.
* I am able to dive deep on any topic (for a time) and come back up with something I can actually use. Last week I wrote about taste coming from everywhere the tools aren't, and ADHD is a big part of the reason I end up everywhere.
The same brain that can't see the kleenex is the one that taught itself to build apps, that notices the weird thing in a client's data nobody else was looking at, and that gets really, truly invested in a small brand's ad account like it's my own.
I wouldn't trade it for the world.
So if your desk looks like mine, I get it, and you're in good company. Good luck, stay organized, and hydrate, my friends ❤️
- Logan