ADHD at work

Surrender to time

Too late to attend the organising classes

For adults with ADHD, organising your time can feel like an impossible task. Missed deadlines, prioritising, and forgotten appointments are common struggles. But are these problems really due to an inability to organise? After coaching hundreds of intelligent and sometimes highly accomplished business professionals with ADHD, it is apparent that it isn’t really an organising problem at all. It isn’t a skills issue, we didn’t simply fail to pay attention to organising classes at school. For most of us with ADHD, a large part of our disorganisation comes from a psychological rebellion against structure and constraint. Yes we don’t like the dull tasks of planning and scheduling, and we don’t remember the future that well either but it’s far more than that. We don’t want to be organised, even by ourselves.

Times tyranny

Following through on a plan feels restricting. It represents a form of control, tyranny, an externally imposed structure. So conscious or unconscious resistance arises. Running late, missing deadlines, and seeking distraction become forms of rebellion against the tyranny of organisation.

Surrender to time

The answer is acceptance, even surrender. You may well be fantastic at “winging” it, working without a plan at all, but deep down you know how much better off you would be if you planned and kept an accurate calendar. You may have pulled many “rabbits out of hats”, but this in no way compensates for the lateness, stress, disappointment, upset and chaos that impacts not just you but your work colleagues and bosses too. Of course it’s important to develop and use an efficient organising system: a to do list, a calendar, a helpful app, and a routine to get yourself organised but until you surrender and accept that you cannot beat time, it just won’t work.

March of time

Time marches on relentlessly. Accept that lost time is lost forever, accept the harsh reality and commit to organising yourself. The tools used to organise yourself don’t really matter, the commitment to organise yourself does. Your results will definitely improve. Find something else, something more practical to rebel against than time itself...

Andrew Lewis

Andrew Lewis is an ADHD Coach, writer and founder of SimplyWellbeing. He has over 10,000 hours and 15 years of experience in coaching hundreds of ADHD executives, business professionals and creatives, and previously running a large ADHD support group and an ADHD diagnostic clinic. His business expertise comes from a twenty years career in software, from programming, through marketing, sales and running a few start-ups. His ADHD insight is personal, with decades understanding his own ADHD experience and in bringing up his ADHD daughter. He has published his writing primarily via this website, with interactive ADHD courses in development.