#134 – Chris Ferdinandi on ADHD, Focus, and Working in Tech

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, ADHD, focus and working in tech.

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So on the podcast today we have Chris Ferdinandi. Chris, a web developer with ADHD, has navigated both the human resources and web development landscapes. He’s here to share his unique experiences and insights on how ADHD has shaped his career and daily life, as well as offer practical strategies for managing ADHD in the workplace and beyond.

We talk about the world of ADHD, exploring the challenges and advantages it brings, especially in a world designed for neuro-typical individuals. Chris talks about the abundance of ideas, risk-taking behaviour, and the lack of impulse control that can present both opportunities and obstacles. He candidly discusses how ADHD affects his ability to focus, regulate attention, and how it impacts emotions and impulse control.

Chris refers to ADHD traits as superpowers, and embraces them whilst also acknowledging the real world difficulties. He discusses how ADHD individuals often struggle with hyper focus, and how interruptions can be particularly detrimental to their workflows. He suggests structuring workdays with blocked off meeting times to maintain focus upon tasks which need doing in the timescales required.

We also touch upon other workplace accommodations, the importance of understanding ADHD subtypes, and navigating disclosure in professional settings. Chris emphasises the strengths that come with ADHD, and offers practical tips like starting small tasks, trying to regulate dopamine and taking breaks.

Towards the end of the podcast, Chris invites listeners to engage with him and explore more resources on his website, which is linked to in the show notes, which you can find at wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

If you’re curious about how ADHD can turn challenges into career strengths, this episode is for you.

And so without further delay, I bring you Chris Ferdinandi.

I am joined on the podcast by Chris Ferdinandi. Hi Chris.

[00:03:21] Chris Ferdinandi: Hey Nathan. Thanks so much for having me.

[00:03:23] Nathan Wrigley: You are very, very welcome. Chris is on the podcast today, we just had a little chat actually about how we connected, and that’s a story in itself. We were going to do a different podcast episode, but we’ve ended up doing this one.

The story today is going to be all about ADHD. I explained to Chris that I know what the acronym means, we’ll have question marks about the acronym’s appropriateness as well. But I actually don’t know how it applies to people’s lives. My knowledge of medicine and all of that is pretty poor in all honesty. So there’s a nice conversation to be had.

Before we begin that conversation, Chris, I’m just wondering if you could just set out the stall, give us your two minute bio, who you are, what your relationship is with web development, and all of that.

[00:04:04] Chris Ferdinandi: Yeah, absolutely. I’m a web developer, I have ADHD. I originally started off my life as a human resource professional, sometimes called personnel, depending on where you’re at. And I had a WordPress blog because I had really strong opinions on how HR worked, and what I liked about it, and what I didn’t, and I wanted to have a little bit more control over look and feel of that. So I taught myself web development, and eventually loved it so much that I made it my job.

So WordPress literally kickstarted my career. But early in my career, I felt like I couldn’t get anything done. I was pretty sure I was going to get fired from my first job, and that kind of sent me down this whole rabbit hole of exploration, and learning about productivity and stuff.

But since then, I’ve discovered a bunch of systems and strategies that work for me, that let me turn my ADHD into a superpower. One of the things I learned is that a lot of productivity advice for neurotypical folks just does not work for ADHD people. And yeah, so I’m here today talk about the joys and struggles of being a developer with ADHD.

[00:05:03] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, it’s really interesting. I’m really pleased that you are willing to talk to me about this, and I do apologise if I put my foot in my mouth at any point. But we’ll try to get through it, and hopefully you’ll be able to educate me as the podcast episode goes on.

My understanding of ADHD, as I said, is incredibly narrow. I really only know what the acronym is, and the broadest brush strokes of what that might mean. We use the term in the UK ADHD, that acronym, but I’ve also heard people say ADD. Do you just want to outline what the acronym stands for? And just flesh out a little bit how it applies to your life, and what it means for you, and how you might be different from somebody without ADHD.

[00:05:42] Chris Ferdinandi: Absolutely. ADHD stands for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. ADD stands for Attention Deficit Disorder. They used to be, like I think around the eighties, nineties, they were considered two different things. These days, in most medical literature, it is all ADHD, and then there’s a few different subtypes. One of them is inattentive, which is what you would normally think of as ADD. The other one is hyperactive, which is what I think most people think of as ADHD.

For both of those, the name is actually bad. And I don’t mean like bad, like you shouldn’t use it, it’s like a bad descriptor of what ADHD actually is. Because people with ADHD don’t have a deficit of attention as the name describes. That’s what it seemed like when it was first identified and labeled, but it’s actually an executive functioning disorder. And so more typically what you find is folks with ADHD have trouble regulating their attention.

We almost have too much of it, not a deficit, and sometimes it’s scattered in a million different directions. Other times it is hyper-focused on just one thing, to the detriment of all the other things around us.

ADHD can manifest in a whole bunch of fun ways. One of them is that you have trouble kind of focusing on the one thing you’re supposed to be doing, either because you’re thinking about a million other things, or you’re thinking about the one thing that has really locked in your attention at that particular moment.

Sometimes, if you have the kind of the hyperactive or impulsive subtype, you have an excess energy, so you might hear things like, oh, you’re a lot. In social situations, people might find you overwhelming, for lack of a better word.

It also has a whole bunch of other seemingly unrelated side effects, that are all related to the way, biologically, an ADHD brain is different from a neurotypical brain.

So my brain does not produce as much dopamine as a typical person’s might. That’s where the difficulty regulating my attention comes from. But it also has some other interesting side effects, like dopamine is related to your ability to perceive time. So a lot of folks with ADHD suffer from something called time blindness, where you literally do not perceive time as it accurately occurs.

You know, that whole like, time flies when you’re having a good time kind of thing, that is an ever present state for someone with ADHD. If you’re having fun, time goes really fast. If you’re not, it goes painfully slow. There is no like regular passage of time. And if you ask me how long something took, or how long something will take, I literally cannot tell you because I cannot accurately perceive time. So that’s really fun.

Also common with ADHD is a difficulty sometimes regulating your emotions. So mild slights, or just like really minor things can feel very big, or you can have emotional responses to things that are outsised for the actual size of the thing that has happened to you. So minor setbacks can feel really big. A slight comment on a performance review can feel like a really big emotional dagger. You know, that can make certain work situations really difficult.

The other, I think, big kind of hallmark for folks with ADHD is a lack of impulse control. There’s a tendency to just say whatever’s on your mind without having that filter first, that stops you from saying, hey, should I say this? Or you’ll get an impulse to do something, and you’ll just go for it without pausing to assess risk, or think through, if I do this, that will happen.

All of these things are both blessings and curses, depending on kind of the situation and how you apply them. And so a big part of what I do professionally now is try to help other ADHD folks understand how to reduce the negative impacts of some of these things, and also pivot some of these things into benefits. It’s like that whole thing where like, every strength a person has can also be a weakness if applied poorly, and vice versa. So yeah, I help folks channel some of these things that challenge them, into things that can really help them in their career.

[00:09:25] Nathan Wrigley: You mentioned there that you obviously have this, but it sounded like you categorised it into two different variants. There was, I can’t remember the exact wording, but you said that there was two.

[00:09:35] Chris Ferdinandi: So there’s technically three subtypes. The first is inattentive, which is what most folks think of as, historically as ADD, where you have trouble regulating your attention, but you don’t have the hyperactivity. There’s hyperactive or impulsive, where you tend to have bad impulse control and a lot of energy, but you’re not necessarily inattentive. You don’t have trouble regulating your attention, you just can’t control your impulses.

And then there’s the most commonly diagnosed type, which is combined, where you have both. And that’s what, historically, was just called ADHD. The thing with the inattentive subtype, so hyperactive or impulsive by itself is relatively uncommon, the inattentive subtype is less commonly diagnosed, but I am increasingly of the belief that it’s not actually less common.

I’m hearing of a lot of people who are diagnosed with that subtype as an adult. And one of the theories is that, because it doesn’t come with the hyperactivity as well, it’s harder to recognise in people and diagnose, especially when they’re children. Historically, it’s been described as more common in women, but I am also learning of a lot of adult males who are being diagnosed with the inattentive subtype.

I have a theory that it’s just, because you don’t have that like hyperactivity that makes it like a little bit more obvious that you are not like everyone else, it’s potentially less commonly diagnosed. To the outside it can appear like the person is just lazy, or not trying hard enough, when really there’s a lot more going on under the hood other than that.

[00:11:01] Nathan Wrigley: I want to keep going down this exploration route of what ADHD is, if that’s all right? And there’s a couple of questions around this. The first one is, is it possible to sort of have episodes of ADHD? And what I mean by that is, is this a constant partner in your life? Are you always in this state, or do you have periods of time where it backs away a little bit, and then comes on a little bit?

[00:11:22] Chris Ferdinandi: It’s a great question. So the answer is, yes, it’s ever present, but the degree to which it manifests, or the ways in which it affects my life are variable. So I will have days, weeks, months, where I feel very on, very productive, because remember the issue is not that I don’t have enough attention, it’s that I have trouble regulating it.

So there will be periods where my attention is highly regulated in directions that are professionally or personally beneficial. Really focused on a big coding project I have going on, or we’ve got some big project going around on the house and it’s all I can think about.

There will be other periods of time where I feel like my brain is in a million different directions. Sometimes in the ADHD community, folks will describe this as like I have bees in my head, because it literally just feels like you’ve got like a swarm of stuff bouncing all over the place, like a busy beehive.

Or I will find myself hyperfocused on a thing that’s not the thing that’s most important for me to be thinking about right now. Just as an example, let’s say you were really excited about buying like an RV or a caravan, and if you’re a neurotypical person, that might be a thing you think about and you’re downtime, and you do some research nights and weekends, and you’re really excited about it, right?

But, me, as an ADHD person, I might spend the full eight hours of my working day just obsessing about this. And anytime I try to pivot to doing work, that’ll be the thing I keep coming back to. And I find myself Googling it, and watching YouTube videos, and digging into like caravan, van life, TikTok, and just not able to focus on the other things.

And I use that example because that’s a real thing that happened to me a couple of years ago, where I had a project, and then you end up in this really bad position where now you’re rushing to get a thing done last minute, and you don’t have as much time as you would have, if you had just focused on what you were supposed to, I guess is maybe the right phrase here. But it’s one of those things where your body literally will not let you.

The caveat here is I am also currently not on ADHD medication. I am actively looking into getting some specifically because of stuff like this, because it can be a real hindrance to getting the things done in your life that you need to get done.

[00:13:28] Nathan Wrigley: Can I ask, when did you first have intuitions?

[00:13:32] Chris Ferdinandi: Oh yeah, no, I was diagnosed as a kid. This was in the eighties when the only thing that they really had for treatment was Ritalin. And it was often over-prescribed because it was relatively new, and dosing was this mysterious dance. And they didn’t even really understand why it worked for folks with ADHD. My parents decided not to medicate me.

At the time, the primary thing was just like, oh, this person’s really hyper. That was like the main thing, and there wasn’t as much of an understanding around a lot of the other ways in which it impacts your life. There was also a lot of, both weird stigma, and also denial that it existed, because a lot of times it was predominantly prescribed in boys. There was a lot of folks who were like, oh, they’re just throwing this at any boy who shows a little bit of energy, and that’s just how boys are and, you know, just all the like gender stereotype kind of stuff around it.

So it’s only been in the last five or six years I started digging back into ADHD, and discovered that a lot of things I thought were just weird personal quirks of mine, like responding overly emotionally to things that probably weren’t that big of a deal, or not having any idea how long, how much time had passed. It wasn’t until very recently that I realised, oh, these are ADHD things too, this is not just me. But yeah, so I was diagnosed as a kid, but never really treated for it.

[00:14:46] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And it is a medical diagnosis, I’m guessing. It’s not something that you could ascribe to yourself.

[00:14:51] Chris Ferdinandi: So yes and no. It is a medical diagnosis, and if you ever wanted to explore getting medication for it, it does require an actual diagnosis from a physician. In the United States it requires a psychiatrist, those are psychologists who can actually write medical prescriptions. I know in the UK the process is a little bit different.

It’s a whole thing, but I have found from a lot of folks, because I know, I’ve heard from friends in your region of the world, that it can be kind of a lengthy process to get seen and get diagnosed. In the interim, there are self-assessments that you can do, and I actually have a link to those. If you head over to adhdftw.com/wp-tavern, I put together a whole bunch of resources around stuff we’re going to be talking about in this episode.

And one of those is, do I have ADHD? It’s got a link to two self-assessments, one for people who identify as men, one for people who identify as women. The reason there are two different quizzes is because it often manifests differently in women, and the test for women accounts for that, and make some adjustments to the way it rates certain questions, just to get around that whole women are often underdiagnosed thing.

The reason I mention this is, you can’t get medication with a self-diagnosis, but if you take the quiz and you learn that you might have ADHD, because it won’t say that you do, but it’s say that you might, right, strongly indicates that you might have it. That can at the very least give you some better understanding of who you are as a person.

Like for me, learning all of these other things that I thought were just weird personality quirks were ADHD related, and then learning some tools and strategies that other folks with ADHD have implemented to work with them, made a huge difference for me, both in terms of my understanding of myself, my self-esteem, my ability to be productive and functional.

So yeah, it’s one of those, I would never tell someone you don’t need a medical diagnosis, but I would say that, as a first step, completing a self-diagnosis exam is a great way to kick off this journey if you think you might have ADHD. I can at least point you in the right direction and get you some information about yourself that might be helpful.

[00:17:01] Nathan Wrigley: This is a peculiar question, and if it doesn’t land, I apologise. If I find myself infected with Covid, it’s all bad. I see that as a bad thing. I had days, and days, and days, months, and years without Covid, I got Covid. A period of time where I’m feeling bad. Do you have a relationship with your ADHD where any of it is viewed as positive in your head? Are there bits of it that you think, I’m actually kind of grateful that this is in my life?

Because, for everything that we’ve talked about thus far, it’s easy to dwell on, it’s all negative. But there are aspects of what you described where, I suppose if you’ve got the right framing in your head, you might be able to forgive yourself, and for periods of time at least anyway, think, oh, that worked well for me. And again, I’m sorry if that landed wrong, but I hope you understand the tenor of the question, yeah.

[00:17:46] Chris Ferdinandi: This honestly almost feels like a softball question for me, Nathan. You’re setting up the reason I’m here. I am exceedingly ADHD positive. As I mentioned, my parents did not treat my ADHD as a kid, but I didn’t have a lot of that, oh, you’re so lazy, you just need to apply yourself more. Like I didn’t get a lot of that negative self internalisation that some folks with ADHD often have.

My parents very much encouraged me to just follow my whims, and explore my creative side. And so I firmly believe that, while ADHD absolutely creates some interesting personal challenges, they’re not inherently worse personal challenges than someone neurotypical might have, they’re just different.

Everybody has some things they’re really good at and some things that they absolutely suck at, and a whole bunch of stuff in between. And my set, as an ADHD person, just happens to be different than yours as a neurotypical person. And a lot of the challenges with having ADHD are not specifically related to the ADHD, but related to moving about in a world, in a work environment, that was designed around the preferences of neurotypical folks.

[00:18:52] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I see. Okay.

[00:18:54] Chris Ferdinandi: So, for example, I’m drowning in ideas, I have more ideas than I could ever use in a lifetime. They just come falling out of my head. Some of them are terrible ideas, but I have more ideas than I can explore.

One of the other aspects of the impulse control thing, right? So in certain contexts that can be a very bad thing, but folks with ADHD are also a lot more likely to take risks, not just in a negative way, but in a positive way. They’re a lot more likely to be entrepreneurial. They’re a lot more likely to pursue hard things because they don’t stop to think, oh, this could be really hard and it’s not going to work out for me. And what if this happens, and that happens, and that happens? They just go for it. Sometimes they fail, sometimes they don’t.

The lack of impulse control also means that I am often, usually the most honest person on any team that I’m working on. And in certain contexts that can mean that I put my foot in my mouth, but it also means that my managers, and my clients, and the people that I work with also know I’m the person that they can come to when they want a genuine and honest reaction to something, and not just like a yes man, bs kind of, oh yeah, that sounds great kind of response.

Actually, I wrote an article recently about the whole, if ADHD folks talk to neurotypical folks the way neurotypical folks sometimes talk about ADHD, and I’m not saying you did this Nathan, so please don’t take this personally. Like, we would say things like, oh, it’s so sad that you can’t just live in the moment, that you’re always like thinking about the future, and thinking about consequences for things.

If you embrace it, there can be a real freeness that comes with ADHD. It absolutely can create challenges. And even if the world was structured around my preferences, and not neurotypical folks preferences, I still exist in a society with other humans, right? And like I do things that irritate the heck out of my partner and she’s neurotypical. But even if she wasn’t, I am certain some of my ADHD quirks would also irritate her. Because I have some students who are ADHD with ADHD partners, and their ADHDness sometimes gets on each other’s nerves too. So I’m not trying to say it’s all sunshine and roses, but every challenge that ADHD presents, there is a subsequent strength that you can tap into.

[00:21:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think on the website you describe it as superpowers, which we’ll get into in a minute. But the analogy that’s coming into my head, and this may be terrible, but this is what I’m thinking of, so I believe that I don’t have ADHD, my attention and my energy levels can kind of be regulated in the same way that, if I go to a, we call it a tap, I think you call it a faucet. I can regulate that, I can turn it whichever way I like, whereas it feels to me, maybe yours is kind of more like really full on, or maybe switched off, it’s less granular. That’s the way I’m imagining it in my head.

[00:21:33] Chris Ferdinandi: That feels very accurate for me, yes. And the other thing too is like, so to belabour this analogy, if I turn on the tap and I don’t want to, it tends to be like a really old and corroded tap, you need to turn extra hard to get going, and it’ll start as just a little bit of a trickle, and you need to like really wrench it and then it turns into a torrent.

I don’t want to make it sound like, if you have stuff to do when you don’t want to do it, you can never do it, it’s just it’s substantially harder. And most folks with ADHD who function have learned tips and tricks that they use to get themselves doing things that they’re not particularly interested in.

[00:22:11] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I think that’s where we should go next. So you’ve obviously, throughout your life, you’ve encountered a variety of different problems, and perhaps it has been compounded by ADHD. And so the second part of this podcast, beginning now I guess, is to go through some of those. I can’t really ask questions around this because I don’t know what the things would be worth exploring.

So what I’ll do is just say, tell us, just give us your wisdom, tell us some of the things that you’ve discovered over the years, and how they might fit into the work life of somebody that would be listening to this podcast. They’re probably at a desk, they’re probably on a computer, you know, they’re coding away, or they’re creating plugins, blocks, themes, those kind of things. And yeah, I’ll just unleash you and say, tell us what you’ve discovered.

[00:22:50] Chris Ferdinandi: Yeah, so there’s a handful of things. The big thing with any sort of creative work, whether it’s coding, design, the arts of any sort is that, getting into a flow is really important. I think anybody who’s done deep coding work, or design work can recall that feeling, where you are really focused on the thing you’re doing and time seems to be zipping by, and you’re in a really productive state, you feel like all cylinders are hitting.

For ADHD folks, that tends to manifest as our hyper focus, where we are extremely fixated on that one thing. Getting into it can either be really easy, if it’s a thing you’re very passionate about, to the point that you literally, you cannot help yourself, or it can be really challenging.

Even if it’s something you’re interested in, sometimes your body just doesn’t want to cooperate. I think the game, or the end goal, if you’re someone who’s doing creative professional work as a person with ADHD, is to get into that hyper focus around meaningful work.

And if you’re having a day where that just clicks, it’s awesome, but if you’re not, there are a few things that are acutely, well, there’s a few things you can do, but there’s also a few things that can really ruin that for you, even if you’re naturally in that state. For example, because ADHD brains have trouble regulating their attention, interruptions are much more costly and painful for us than they are for neurotypical folks.

I think a lot of folks who have been in the flow before know that feeling of getting broken out of it, and how like frustrating they can feel, and how it can take a little bit to get back into it. Much worse for someone with ADHD. So like midday meetings, for example, open offices where someone can just randomly pop over to your desk. Those are really, really detrimental.

I wrote an article over at ADHDftw/wptavern. But I wrote this article on what I call the temporal dead zone, which is this period where, you’ve just finished a task and you have a meeting that’s starting sometime in the next 30 to 60 minutes, a lot of ADHDers will just avoid starting any additional work before that meeting, because if they do and they get into a hyper focus, they’re going to get interrupted. And that’s either going to be really painful, or you’re going to forget entirely about the meeting, and you’re just going to not show up.

And then the meeting ends, and then there’s this other lengthy period of you getting refocused into your work . And so like midday meetings can just completely ruin a day for someone with ADHD.

So I like to structure my days where I have meeting days and completely blocked out, please don’t book my time, kind of days, because it’s absolutely destructive. I will pause for a second, Nathan, just in case you have questions because I will ramble without stopping.

[00:25:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I do actually have a question there, and it doesn’t necessarily relate to that, but I do take the point that you’re making. You’re sort of portioning up your week a little bit so that you allow yourself to be, I don’t know, in a day where interruptions can happen, or in a day where you just, I cannot be interrupted and I know that that will work better for me.

But there was something that you said there, which I just wrote down. I scribbled it down as you were saying it, you said, so you were talking about this 60 minute, or 30 minute window where you wouldn’t want to start something, and you said, because the interruption would be painful. And I wondered what you meant by that. And what I’m meaning is, I’m associating pain with an actual, physical harm. Does it manifest on that kind of level? Is it a almost like a pain, or is it just extreme discomfort? What did you mean?

[00:26:13] Chris Ferdinandi: Yeah, it’s a cognitive pain that, I’m trying to think of a good analogy here. The best way I can describe it is, if you’ve ever felt like an intense longing for something, or someone that you couldn’t have, it feels a lot like that. If I’m deeply focused on a thing, and then you rip me away from that thing, my brain will remain focused on that thing, frustrated that it can’t do anything with that thing.

Especially if you couple that with challenges regulating your emotions, it can even, in certain contexts, cause like irritability, or like being short with people when you don’t mean to. Yeah, so it can be a real challenge, and a lot of ADHD folks will kind of avoid putting themselves in that position, they know what’s going to happen, right? Like you’ll just start to ramp up into the work, and then you’ll get ripped away from it.

[00:27:03] Nathan Wrigley: So it’s almost like you’ve been deprived of something that you are absolutely keen to get on with. So for me, a task given to me by anybody, I could put it down, pick it up, put it down, pick it up, I’d probably feel, on some level, a little bit frustrated if I was in the zone, as I describe it to myself.

But this is a more intense feeling of longing, and then that longing gets broken, and so you feel deprived, and possibly a bit annoyed. Again, I’m not trying to put words in your mouth but, am I about in the right ballpark?

[00:27:30] Chris Ferdinandi: Yeah, definitely.

[00:27:31] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Gosh, that’s fascinating. Okay, so we’ve talked about the portioning up of the week. Was there anything else that you wanted to cover?

[00:27:38] Chris Ferdinandi: Yeah, so I talk about this concept of kind of following your ADHD flow, or working with your natural state a fair bit with some of the folks that I work with around this. And you’re going to have weeks, you’re going to have days where you’re a bit more like on than others.

So you will have days where you’re just naturally, deeply focused and phenomenally productive. And then you’re going to have days where you’re not, getting yourself into the flow of work is a little bit harder than others.

And I’ve had fellow ADHDers, and I’ve also been guilty of this myself, describe these days where you sit in front of the computer trying to will yourself to work, and then eight hours later you feel like you’ve gotten almost nothing done, but you’ve also been at a desk the entire time. And so it just feels like a complete waste of a day because you didn’t do any work work, you didn’t do any not work work, you did nothing, and it’s a really bad feeling.

Depending on your life history, your experiences with ADHD up to this point, any other life trauma you have, it can even start to create this really like negative internal feelings of self for some people. You know, especially if you’re one of those folks that grew up undiagnosed and were just told that you’re lazy, and this shouldn’t be that hard, and see how easy that was, it can really make you feel terrible inside.

And so one of the things I’ve learned is that trying to fight that is a path to failure. When you’re in that kind of mood, no amount of just staring at a screen is going to work for you. So there’s a few different things you can do that will help.

One of them is, a lot of traditional productivity advice talks about picking your biggest task first, so you get it out of the way, or like eating the large frog first is how I’ve sometimes heard this described, which is disgusting analogy. It’s what I’ve heard. And because ADHD brains have a lot of inertia, right, getting you moving, the big task will just overwhelm you, you won’t get anything done.

So what I often tell people is pick the smallest, easiest, most insignificant task first. Doesn’t even necessarily have to be work related, right? So it could be like, I have this phone call I’ve been putting off, it’s only going to take 15 minutes, just make it. Let me respond to some emails, to talk coding stuff for a second, right? There’s this thing I need to fix, it’s literally just one line of CSS. Let me go in and make that change, and push it, so that I’ve done something. That creates a spike of dopamine that gets your brain moving in the right direction. And the next task that you do, that can be a little bit bigger, or another small task, kind of furthers that. So that can help you.

All of what ADHD management comes down to is really dopamine regulation, right? You could do things like consume some caffeine, coffee, tea, soda. If you have a prescription for ADHD medication, and you take it intermittently, that would probably be a good day to take your ADHD medication, because the whole point of ADHD medication is to increase dopamine production, or stop your brain from absorbing what it does make, so that more of it floats around in your head.

One other thing that works really well for me personally is doing physical tasks. So exercise will spike your dopamine, and being outside in the sun will as well. So if you can exercise outdoors, you get the double whammy. I’ve decided in old age I’m going to start gardening. That’s become my midlife crisis, and for me that usually involves moving lots of heavy rocks around and ripping out weeds and doing stuff like that. So I get a two for one, which is great. And then my yard looks nice, so it’s a win, win, win. Or even just doing like rote, zen-like tasks around the house, like folding laundry, doing dishes, vacuuming. Anything where you turn your brain off for a little bit can be really, really, helpful.

But the idea is you want to step away from the thing that you’re not able to do, because you’re not, staring at it for X number of hours isn’t going to get it done. You need to go do something completely different. It’s almost like turning your brain off and back on again, right? Like the old, like the computer thing. It’s just continuing to try to work through the pinwheel, isn’t going to do it for you.

[00:31:27] Nathan Wrigley: A question following on from that is, if you are in an environment like I am, where I’m a freelancer, I’ve got real autonomy over my day, so should I wish to go and garden, that’s fine. I can do that and I can make it all up. But if I’m sitting in an environment where I have a boss, and I say to the boss, I just got to do something else for a bit. In a neurotypical world that’s, no, no, no, you are here, you arrive at nine o’clock, you punch in the card, and you are going at five, and in between those hours you’re there, that’s your desk and these are your tasks, now carry on.

So I presume there’d have to be some relationship there. An explanation to the employer would be a good idea. I don’t know what I’m trying to get to there, but do you understand what I’m meaning?

[00:32:10] Chris Ferdinandi: Absolutely, yeah. There’s a few different paths you can take here. So, work from home, remote work has been a huge boon for a lot of folks with ADHD and other neurodivergent kind of conditions, because it lets you work when, where, and how works best for you. Sometimes, I know employers have been really keen on spyware on computers and stuff, to track when you’re at your desk and that sort of thing.

But setting that aside for a minute, there’s two paths you can take. One of them is you make your own accommodations and you ask for forgiveness, not permission. In certain employer contexts I have done that, and my feeling on that is that, if you’re getting the work done, or you’re taking accommodations for yourself that allow you to be more productive and function better as an employee, and you’re not messing up anybody else’s work output, I have no moral or ethical issue with that.

For example, if taking 20 minutes away from your desk means that you can come back and be more productive throughout the day, that’s actually better than not doing that. The other option, one that I have also done very successfully at different employers, is to disclose that I have ADHD and ask for different accommodations at work.

The UK has laws around this, the US has laws around this. In many countries, employers are allowed to, are required rather, to provide a reasonable, quote unquote, reasonable accommodations for, or I think in the UK they call it reasonable adjustments, for workers with disabilities or health conditions. In America this is guided by the Americans with Disabilities Act.

So it’s helpful if you have a professional diagnosis. In some countries it may be required. In the US it’s actually not because we have medical disclosure laws that prohibit an employer from requiring an official doctor’s note to say, you have to do this. So you can ask for accommodations without the official diagnosis. That is the employer’s discretion if they’re reasonable, it’s a whole complicated system.

But there are like a bunch of things you can ask for that potentially help you. For example, you could ask for a work from home, or partial work from home arrangement, so that you can avoid the distractions of an office. You could ask for a private, quiet space to work in, if you’re in an open office environment. You could ask for meeting free days, or asynchronous standups to avoid interrupting you mid hyper focus or midday.

Some folks find that they don’t work best nine to five. Like for me, my peak performance happens between ten and two, and six and ten. And so I schedule my work around those buckets of productivity. And depending on how your employer is set up, you might be able to ask for irregular work hours.

If there’s particular types of work you find interesting, you could ask to have more autonomy over the tasks that you choose to work on, or shorter meetings, or fewer meetings, or more frequent breaks. Again, over at a ADHD FTW, I have a whole bunch of information on asking for accommodations at work, including suggestions of things you could ask for, and stuff you can do if you don’t feel ready to do that.

The one caveat here that I just, I really want to acknowledge, I am a cisgendered, heterosexual white man, and I feel like I have an immense amount of professional privilege that means, when I say to my employer, hey, I have ADHD, and it would be really helpful if. I don’t feel like I have a bunch of other stuff that puts me under scrutiny already from my employer.

I have talked to friends and students who are in the LGBTQ community, or are in a minority, or are women, and they have told me that they feel less comfortable sometimes disclosing their ADHD at work. Because they already feel like they’re under more scrutiny from their employer, and they don’t want something else that causes the employer to look at their work with more scrutiny than the employer might their peers.

So I just want to put that out there as like the, I understand the privilege of being able to just say, hey, I have this thing that makes it harder for me to work sometime, and I want to tell you about it, person who pays me to do work. There’s obviously a bit of a, depending on your work culture and your work environment, there can be a risk there.

I generally recommend, if you’re going to disclose, like I’ve even seen some job applications that ask if you have a disability, and I recommend not disclosing that ahead of time. Let them interview you, let them determine if you would be a good fit first, and then tell them, and ask for accommodations. Because every work environment is going to be a little different, and the accommodations I need in one office environment are very different from the accommodations I might need in another, depending on the work culture there. I don’t think it benefits you to pre disclose that information.

That said, I did once do that. I was in an interview where the interviewer asked me if I, when working on a big project, if I preferred to have multiple, throughout the day check-ins, or if I’d like to go off and do work for a few days, and then come back and like reconvene. And, Nathan, it probably won’t surprise you to learn that I favour the latter, because interruptions are very bad for me.

In the context of saying that, I didn’t want to seem like I was a hermit who didn’t like talking to my coworkers. So I was like, I have ADHD and interruptions affect me badly. And the interviewer, she was like, oh, I have ADHD too, and so does our coworker Josh, and so does Mike, the guy who’s the manager for this role, we all have it, we all work that way, that’s great. And I got a job offer like three days later. So that time it worked out really well.

So like a lot of this is trusting your gut, playing things by ear, assessing your personal needs and your work environment in their own context, because it’s one of those things too where ADHD symptoms are a bit of a spectrum. Not everyone has all of the symptoms, not everyone has all of the symptoms all the time. And so your individual ADHD experience, and needs, are almost certainly likely to be different from mine.

[00:37:45] Nathan Wrigley: I think I’ve probably asked all of the different questions that I wanted to ask, but it’s been really fascinating just, first of all, learning about what it is because, as I said at the top, I really did have a great big void there. So I’ve got an inkling that I’ve a better understanding, so thank you for that. But also, during the second part, a much greater understanding of what might be remedial things that you can do to introduce productivity if you like, or enhancements to your life, should you have ADHD.

Before we go, Chris, I wonder if you have a moment just to tell us a URL, I mean, I know you’ve mentioned a few so far already, and we’ll put those in the show notes. But, you know, if somebody wanted to contact you, I don’t know if you’re comfortable sharing email addresses, or Twitter handles, or whatever it might be. So over to you with that.

[00:38:28] Chris Ferdinandi: Yeah, absolutely. So if you go to ADHDFTW.com/wptavern, with or without dashes, you can spell it like eight different ways, it’ll all get you there. I have put together a whole bunch of additional articles and resources that dig deeper into some of the stuff we talked about. I feel like we went pretty deep, but you can go so much deeper on some of this stuff. So I’ve got a whole bunch of additional resources for folks. If they want it, you can also find my contact information, my email address is [email protected], but you can find that and my social media handles over at the website as well.

If you think you have ADHD, you do have ADHD, and you want to talk about that, or kind of explore some of the challenges, some of the things you feel are working really well for you, you just want to talk about it, I’m always happy to chat ADHD stuff with folks. So please do feel free to get in touch and reach out. And I also publish every weekday a short email with a tip, or trick, or idea that can help you unlock your ADHD superpowers. So you can sign up for that over at ADHDFTW.com as well.

[00:39:29] Nathan Wrigley: Chris Ferdinandi, thank you so much for chatting to me about this really, genuinely interesting subject. I really appreciate it.

[00:39:36] Chris Ferdinandi: Thanks for having me, Nathan. This was great.

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