This is what I actually do all day.

There is a question I get asked more often than almost any other.

It is usually some version of: now that you know you have ADHD, what do you actually do differently? What does your working day look like? How do you not collapse into the same patterns that brought you to burnout the first time?

I am going to answer that here. Not as a checklist of tips, but as a description of how I actually work now – what I have learned, what I have built around myself, and what changed when I understood the brain I was working with.

Before I describe what I do, I want to name what I am working with – because the changes I have made are not productivity hacks. They are accommodations for a specific set of cognitive functions that work differently in my brain.

Executive functions are the brain's management system. They cover things like working memory (holding information in mind long enough to act on it), task initiation (starting things), sustained attention (staying with something), cognitive flexibility (shifting between tasks or ideas), self-monitoring (noticing what you are doing and how it is going), and emotional regulation (managing the intensity of your responses).

In ADHD brains, these functions are under-resourced. Not absent. Not broken. Just consistently more expensive to run than in neurotypical brains. This means the working day for an ADHD adult is not a level playing field with neurotypical colleagues – it is the same field with a steeper incline, and the cost of climbing it accumulates by the hour.

Once I understood that, my working day stopped being about willpower and started being about design.

Here is what working with my brain looks like in practice. Not as a prescription – your brain is your own – but as a worked example of someone who has stopped fighting her neurology.

I start late. My first peak focus window is roughly between 10am to 1pm, and trying to do deep work before then costs me twice as much energy for half the output. So I do not. The morning is for movement, daylight, and the things my brain can do on autopilot (this morning I cleaned the bathroom and did my laundry before 9am). I often have another one later in the evening. So the hard work waits for the window when it can actually happen.

I work in 30 or 60-minute blocks, then stop. ADHD brains can do astonishing things when they are engaged – but they do not sustain. I learned this the hard way. So now I take small breaks when that timer goes off: a stretch, a little dance break, or making a cup of tea. The most important thing is: always away from screens. And the result is that I feel sharper than it would have felt if I had pushed through.

I externalise everything. My working memory is unreliable, and pretending otherwise costs me hours every week. So I write everything down immediately. I am a verbal processor, so voice notes are the most useful. Also, once it’s out of my head, there is one less thing flying around in an already noisy brain.

I schedule transitions. One of the hardest things for me is not the work itself; it is the starting of and switching between tasks. So I build deliberate transition rituals: a short walk between deep work blocks, a written note of where I left off before any meeting, the next task's first step written down before I close the laptop. Other times it is smaller: a glass of water, a few slow breaths with my eyes closed, or saying out loud "that's done" before moving on. Each ritual saves me from losing the next hour to a transition that never quite happened.

I batch similar tasks. Context-switching is metabolically expensive for ADHD brains, so I schedule my coaching calls usually from Tuesdays to Fridays and protect Mondays for the kind of work that actually needs deep focus, like business development, content generation and marketing.

I work alongside other people deliberately. Body doubling – the act of working in the presence of another person – is one of the most underrated interventions for ADHD focus. The other person does not have to be doing anything related to your work. They just have to be there. Their nervous system regulates yours, their presence makes starting easier, the freeze response that usually surrounds difficult tasks tends to dissolve. This is why I offer body doubling as part of my coaching program and it is amazing to see what we all get done in just one hour together.

I have learned to recognise the warning signs. The version of me that pushes through tiredness, ignores the drop in focus, skips lunch, and powers on until the day is over is the version of me that burned out. So when I notice the signs – the foggy thinking, the increasing irritability, the urge to multitask in unproductive ways – I stop. The thing I would have produced by powering through is not worth the cost of producing it.

I stop at the end of the day. This sounds obvious. It is the hardest one. ADHD brains can get caught in cycles of hyperfocus or anxious continuation long after the actual working day should have ended, and the gradual erosion of recovery time is one of the main routes back into burnout. So I have a closing ritual: I write tomorrow's three priorities, close my laptop, and physically leave the room I work in. The day ends because I end it.

I want to flag two things this list is not.

It is not a perfect system. Some weeks I follow all of it. Some weeks I follow half of it. Some weeks something goes wrong – a poor night's sleep, some difficult news, a hormonal week – and the whole structure wobbles. That is fine. The goal is not perfection. The goal is having something to come back to when things slip.

These are the accommodations that suit my brain, my role, my life. Yours may look different in every way and be equally well-designed. The work is not to copy mine; it is to know your own brain well enough to build yours.

When women come to me for coaching, this is broadly the kind of work we do together. Not me telling them what to do. The two of us, mapping their executive function profile, identifying where the daily costs are highest, and slowly building accommodations that fit the specific brain they actually have.

We use real-time body doubling sessions to work on the tasks that have been impossible to start alone. We talk about what is working and what is not. We adjust as their understanding of themselves deepens. And we treat the whole process with the seriousness and care that decades of self-criticism deserve.

If you recognised yourself in any of this – I'm glad you're here.

Until next Wednesday!

Warmly,