5 ADHD Productivity Hacks That Keep Me Going at My 9–5
These are my life-saving productivity habits as an unmedicated ADHDer working a regular office job
Eight hours at a computer is a nightmare scenario for people with ADHD. Yet this is the work environment I’ve been in for about two years now. I am peak neurodivergent: I can’t sit still, I get bored or fatigued easily, have no sense of time, I get distracted every five minutes, and, when a task doesn’t appeal to me, I freeze.
How have I survived a regular 9–5 for so long then? I am a communications officer in a British university. My job is both corporate and fun. I don’t always spend my days in an office (or at home), working at a computer. I get to go to events, interview people, meet external partners and film fun TikToks when I get the urge.
I’m pretty lucky. My job is flexible and allows a good amount of creativity. But its main downfall for someone with ADHD is that it can get very busy very quickly. I have weeks when I can’t afford to lose an hour, and I have to stay focused on the work. Which, as the ADHD vicious cycle goes, makes my executive dysfunction even stronger, leaving me unable to initiate most tasks, ending up doing too much at the last minute, and probably not to my best efforts.
After a lot of frustration, shame, overwhelm, and anxiety, I’ve developed a few habits and processes that make my life easier as an unmedicated ADHDer working an office job. These are some of the best ones.
1. Weekly protected time
The nature of my job makes it very hard to keep track of all my tasks and responsibilities. This is difficult for my neurotypical colleagues too, but especially tricky for me. It’s challenging to keep accurate foresight of all the projects I’m working on, so this practice really saves me from the shame of forgetting about certain tasks, which has happened to me a few times in the past.
I have now set up a weekly slot in my work calendar, which I dedicate to planning ahead. I call this my protected time, meaning I don’t allow anything to side-track me from that process. As a champion at getting distracted, this is a task in itself. But what I do to prevent that is close my email window and put my work phone away while I spend some quality time on setting my priorities for the week.
I write these down on paper, so I can easily revisit them if I’m lost. Pen and paper are in themselves a productivity hack — my online documents are pure chaos, so for important reminders I always go for writing in a notebook.
2. Going on Do Not Disturb
I have a very messy work flow — jumping from one task to another like a bee in a flower garden. To do lists hardly ever work for me. This is a common misconception about ADHDers. People think lists make sense to us. But how can you list a logical set of tasks when they’re all tangled up in your head?
The image below is a good representation of how it feels to navigate through my brain when I have to make a list. It’s like untangling a lot of messy threads and getting lost in the process.
Even if I start my day with a to do list (which only ever happens on very good days), the way I work doesn’t abide to the list at all. I will start with the first task, get side-tracked, remember something that’s not on the list, go and do that, then I receive an email, so I’ll get distracted again. Two hours later, I’ll still be on my first task.
This leads to a lot of shame and frustration. Can I not stick to my immediate priorities? Can I not fight the urge to get distracted? The reality of living with ADHD is that, more often than not, I can’t.
So, every time I want to be productive and have some pressing tasks to complete, I go on do not disturb. I close my email tab, and put all other means of communication on hold while I do my work. I have learned to accept that not answering an email as soon as I receive it isn’t the end of the world. Thankfully, my work place enables and even encourages going on DND, and it genuinely saves me on particularly busy days.
3. Saying no
This may sound counter-intuitive. My ground-breaking productivity hack is to…refuse tasks?
Hear me out. My job has the wonderful ability to become unmanageable extremely quickly. All it takes is answering every email with the promise of accomplishing that request. We are a small team working for an entire university. It’s impossible to say yes to everything.
Yet, as my people pleasing habit goes, I used to always do that. ADHDers suffer from something called rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD), the debilitating fear of disappointing others. It doesn’t matter who those people are. They can be your loved ones, or they can be people you’ll never talk to again. The anxiety is still just as intense.
This is why, all my life, I put myself second to other people’s needs and expectations of me. I’m not just an average people pleaser. My RSD makes me physically unable to say no. Everywhere I worked or studied, I created a reputation for myself of always being reliable, responsible, and hard working. And while I like to think these are some key personality traits for me, the truth is a lot of it is due to my RSD.
If someone emails me asking me to write an article, the thought of saying no makes me sick. I’m terrified that person will get upset, or worse, bad mouth me to the whole university, making everyone think I can’t do my job. Of course this is unrealistic and of course nothing like that will happen. But that won’t stop me from overthinking.
Like any job goes, there are priorities and there are extras. I’m lucky to have a manager who supports me and empowers me to say no, delegate tasks, or offer easier, less time-consuming solutions. It was this manager who pointed out that I always take on tasks despite not having the time.
He advised me that every time I feel the urge to say yes to a task, I should ask myself: am I volunteering because I think I have the time/can bring a valuable contribution, or am I volunteering because I think it’s what’s expected of me?
And that really changed the game. I’m now better at setting my own boundaries, skipping meetings I know won’t add value to my work, passing on tasks to colleagues with more capacity, or simply saying no and providing an informed argument as to why it’s not possible to pick up that task at that time.
4. Associating days with types of tasks
Ok, fellow ADHDers, if you’re still with me and haven’t yet gone off to do something else, buckle up for possibly the best productivity tip ever.
We are notorious for not being able to do tasks in a logical order, based on priorities. Our executive dysfunction doesn’t get motivated by anything other than urgency or passion. If I love a project, I will do it immaculately, and out of sheer free will. If something’s due in two days, I will go on autopilot and get it done.
But what of the more flexible tasks with wider timeframes? For someone who has no sense of time, it can get tricky to juggle everything. About 90% of my daily work is like that. Nothing concrete, nothing particularly urgent. So it’s very hard to be productive when everything floats around in my head with no particular purpose.
This is why I’ve developed a system of assigning different types of tasks to days of the week. Fridays are usually when I do reports, and any data-based tasks, as well as updating some of the web pages. By the end of the week, I’m usually exhausted, so anything that doesn’t require much creativity or brain power is welcome.
Mondays are for planning and protected time. This is when I initiate the most urgent tasks for the week and organise my days a little bit. Planning is very difficult for me, and I often find myself splitting hairs and spending too much time on it — before giving up in frustration. But Mondays are my dedicated day for organising and setting myself up for a less chaotic week.
Tuesdays and Wednesdays are for creativity. This is when all the fun work happens. This is when I interview, write articles, create and research for different campaigns, and do social media. And Thursdays are my corporate days. This is when I check in with my team, and dedicate time for the more tedious, but still important, corporate tasks, like award entries, design briefs, or guides.
5. Intuitive functioning
And the last one is the one I use the most. I have learned to embrace my ADHD and work with it, not against it. Usual productivity hacks have never worked for me, making me realise how unable I am to function ‘normally’.
So instead of giving voice to the shame and frustration that comes with ADHD, I’m now focusing on how my ADHD makes me good at what I do. Just like eating a certain way only made me develop a toxic relationship with food, working and thinking like neurotypical people has fuelled my self-hatred. In order to put an end to that, I have embraced intuitive functioning.
This simply means tapping into my brain and trying to work with it to make my 9–5 more productive, less stressful, and less chaotic. I now go wherever my brain takes me and try not to force myself into a set work flow. If I have an idea for a campaign, I’ll go with the dopamine and make the most of it. If I crash in fatigue, which happens a lot more often to people with brains like mine, then I’ll take 10 minutes away from my work and do something else, like make a cup of tea or knit.
Although this endorses the chaotic energy I kept condemning at the beginning, it also means I accept the way my brain works and trust myself to still do a good job without respecting a certain process. Even if I have days when I accomplish virtually nothing, I now stopped being angry at myself and accepted that one less productive day doesn’t mean failure.
Eliza Lita is a freelance writer based in the UK. She covers books and reading, ADHD and health, fitness, and lifestyle. For more of her stories, please consider signing up for a Medium membership through her referral link.
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