I have ADHD. I have known for a while. But it took me years to stop fighting it and start working with it.
The standard workday assumes your energy is the green line. A steady climb from morning to evening. You show up, you produce, you go home. Eight hours, roughly equal output throughout. That is how offices are built. That is how meetings are scheduled. That is what “being professional” looks like.
My energy is the red line. Flat for a while. Then a spike. Then flat again. Then another spike. The total output might be the same by the end of the day. But the shape is completely different. For a long time I thought I was not made for “being professional” as my work style wasn’t the green line and I tried hard to get to it.
On a good day I am genuinely high-performing for about three hours. Not eight. Three. The rest of the time I am doing something that looks like work but is not really work. Reorganizing my inbox. Reading Slack threads I already read. Staring at an empty document for two hours and then writing the whole thing in 45 minutes. If you watched me from the outside you would think I wasted most of my day. And then suddenly produced a week’s worth of output before dinner.
That is not laziness. That is how ADHD works. The dopamine is not there until it is. And when it arrives, everything clicks. The ideas connect, the words flow, the decisions are obvious. Then it leaves again. And you are back to staring at the screen wondering why you cannot do the thing you did effortlessly an hour ago.
I have learned a few things that help me work with this instead of against it.
I keep multiple projects going at the same time. Not because I love multitasking. Because when I hit a wall on one thing, I can switch to another where someone else is the bottleneck anyway. Context switching is supposed to be bad. For me it is survival. Waiting for a reply on project A is the perfect time for my brain to suddenly care about project B.
I keep a list of low-brain tasks available at all times. Formatting a document. Cleaning up a spreadsheet. Answering a straightforward email. These are not important tasks. They are landing pads. When my brain refuses to engage with the hard problem, I do not force it. I do something small and mechanical. Sometimes that is enough to restart the engine. Sometimes it is not and the hard problem waits until tomorrow. Both are fine.
I stopped pretending that presence equals productivity. Sitting at my desk for eight hours does not mean I worked for eight hours. Accepting that was harder than it should have been. Years of school and early career trained me to perform busyness. Looking focused. Having documents open. Being in the meeting even when I have nothing to add. All of that is theater. It produces nothing.
Now, about AI. I use it daily. It is genuinely helpful. But here is the trap I almost fell into: using AI to fill the gaps and become high-performing for eight straight hours. It works for a week. Maybe two. Then you crash. Because you did not actually have eight hours of energy. You had three hours of energy and five hours of AI-assisted pretending. Your brain still ran out. You just noticed later because the output kept coming.
AI is better used as a grounding tool. When my brain is scattered, I dump my thoughts into it and let it organize them. When I am in a productive spike, I use it to move faster so I get more done in the three hours I actually have. When I am in a low phase, I use it for the mechanical stuff so I do not have to spend my limited focus on formatting.
The key is to use AI to work smarter during your peaks. Not to fake eight hours of peak performance. Your body keeps score even when your calendar does not.
If any of this sounds familiar: accept your waves. Sprint when the dopamine shows up. Have low-brain tasks ready for when it does not. Stop measuring yourself against the green line. Your red line gets you to the same place. It just looks different on the way there.
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