How I Turned My ADHD From a Liability to an Asset

I have always been a restless person. From the outside looking in, I commit too much and dabble in a million things instead of focusing on just one. I learned to sit tight with my antsiness and impatience over time, but I tend to make very quick decisions based on emotions and impulse.

I am an attorney in my day job at a big law firm, and prior to becoming an attorney, I was a special education teacher for six years in Baltimore. Outside of my career, I am a marathon runner who is trying to run a time good enough to qualify for the Olympic Trials in 2028, and I have also been a writer for the past 10 years and edit for a mental health publication with over 100,000 followers.

Instead of dabbling, I actually think spreading out my efforts and having my eggs in a lot of baskets allows me to go all in, since it allows me to shift my focus whenever overstimulated by one part of my life and focus on another. In 2021, I was diagnosed with ADHD, which affirmed many of the struggles I have had in life. I am easily distracted and struggle to sit still. I lose and misplace items all the time. I vacillate between hyperfocus and not being able to focus at all. I struggle to manage my energy at times, particularly when doing something I deem boring.

When I was a kid, I used to give up easily if things didn’t go the way I wanted. If I did badly on a test or didn’t get a concept in math, I often just took it as a sign I wasn’t smart enough. I excelled at math classes in elementary, middle, and high school. Algebra, geometry, and trigonometry all came very easily to me, and I would kick myself over small mistakes I made in calculations (pre-calculator).

Instead of being a liability, ADHD has been an asset. That was not always the case, but over time, I gradually tinkered my lifestyle and routines to adapt to ADHD rather than fighting it.

What works for me might not work for a lot of people. Four years ago, I was diagnosed with a selective norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor (SNRI), Strattera. It’s a kind of ADHD medication that is non-stimulant and not what people generally think about in amphetamines. I took it for two months before stopping.

It made me nauseous and gave me gastrointestinal issues, and seemed to not really do anything for my focus besides some placebo effect of me thinking it should work a few hours after taking it, so, in consultation with my prescriber, I stopped. Instead, over the years, I developed a plethora of strategies to manage my symptoms that did not automatically make me a different person, but helped me adapt to general barriers ADHD has presented in my life and harness some of the impulsivity and restlessness for good.

Routines and systems

My most problematic ADHD symptom has always been losing items. Misplacing my phone, wallet, and keys is a somewhat regular occurrence, even around the house. When I go to new and unfamiliar areas, this tendency tends to get even worse.

When I first started my new commute from Baltimore to Washington D.C. with my first legal job three months ago, I was testing a new route to D.C. one morning. In my rush, I left my wallet on the train, and did not realize until two minutes later. I was bailed out of my mistake by a stranger who found me on LinkedIn and coordinated getting my wallet back to me at a train station 30 minutes later, but the lesson was still clear: I lost my wallet with my ID and my credit cards and it could have been really, really bad if someone had less benevolent intent.

That being said, I took it as a new transition to a new routine, and a rude awakening that I needed to build a system to avoid ever leaving my wallet, keys, or phone on the train again. Given this was three months ago, it’s another reminder that I still lose things. However, these are systems I have put in place over the year to manage this tendency:

Ensure I have the same location for the same items. I usually have my phone in my right pocket, and keys, wallet, and AirPods in my left. This unequal distribution of weight is sometimes an issue if it’s a smaller pocket, but sticking with this system has been better than not since I’m so used to it.
Putting items in the same location at home. Usually, after coming home, the only item I need is my phone. Thus, I have a designated location for my wallet, keys, and AirPods.
A tracker for my phone, wallet, and keys. My wife gifted me a Tile five or six years ago for my wallet and keys. This links to my phone, and if I ever cannot find my wallet or keys around the house or in my car, I use the Tile app on my phone and it will make an annoying ringing sound from my wallet or keys that helps me find them.
When getting out of the car or off the train, I check all my pockets and check the seat to make sure I remembered all of my valuables.

Tangentially, one lesson I took away from being a marathon runner is that I needed to run every day to maintain consistency. I believed this back in college, but since then, I have learned that what I do in a week or a month is much more important long-term than just one day. As such, I have found a balance — I can take one day off. But if I take two days off, that’s when the wheels start falling off, and I get into trouble.

This more flexible rule applies in other areas. There are many skills I am trying to maintain and learn — Chess, reading for fun, and learning Spanish on Duolingo. These are five-minute activities that I devote 10 minutes to before I go to sleep. I can miss a day here or there, but I still try to practice every day, and gradually, that has made a big difference.

As a lawyer, if I have a project due in two months, I will try to apply the same principle. I will apply 10 minutes to the task every day. Sometimes, I barely get anything done and barely make a dent, but just looking at the task helps me get more done the next day and eliminates some of that cognitive barrier and fear that leads to procrastination. When it gets closer to the deadline, those 10 minutes becomes 20, then 30, then it can become hours when it becomes a lot more urgent, but the small, incremental steps early in the process might not seem like they’re that helpful in the moment, but become much more helpful down the line for my brain to lighten the mental load.

Other than that, it’s just about the routine. I have heard the maxim that “it takes 21 days [of doing something] to build a habit.” I don’t know about that — it usually takes me much longer than 21 days. Ever since I had to get my last crown from the dentist, I have tried to floss every day, which I don’t always do when really tired at night. But I will, like other things, floss at least every other day, which is better than what I was doing before, and I floss more often than I don’t.

Until I can build these habits to become more systematic and automatic, I use lists and need reminders, to my wife’s chagrin. But without routines and systems, I’m the type of person who can turn on the PlayStation or PC and waste the whole day away.

Time Blocking

I break up my day into chunks, constantly jumping from one urgent task to another. This used to be a hard and fast rule when I adhered very strictly to the Pomodoro Technique in college, which is to set a timer for 25 minutes and take a break for 5.

But I have adapted it since. Sometimes, the chunks are 10 minutes if it’s something I really don’t want to do but just have to start, and sometimes they’re 45 minutes for a more urgent project or engaging activity. If I just need to get started on a sink full of dishes, it’s something that I’ll devote 10 minutes to, so it doesn’t feel so daunting when I come back later.

I will then switch to another task, and I will read my mood and the urgency of different tasks on my internal to-do list to see what’s next. Most of my day is separated into these chunks. I often have thoughts like.

“I only need to work on this report until 10:30.”
“I can listen to this podcast on my run until 6:30.”
“I can watch this TV show until 7:30 p.m., and then I need to clean the bathroom.”
“I can eat lunch until 12:30, and then I need to get back to work.”

This sounds very regimented, but I make sure to allow it to be flexible if it becomes too suffocating. If I am in a really engaging dinner or lunch conversation with friends or colleagues, I don’t need to suddenly cut it short. If I find the podcast really engaging, I don’t need to just turn it off — I can listen until the end.

With work-related tasks and writing, time blocking has been helpful because I have certain blocks of time spent writing, and other blocks of time spent editing. I expect things to flow and be perfect the first time around way too often. Time blocking allows me to, for lack of a better term, just it, even if I’m not in a flow state and if it’s more of a struggle than being in the zone.

It allows me to surrender control and let time pass. It allows me to break up a 24 mile long run into segments where I am listening to podcast, music, or taking a phone call. Just knowing I only need to do something “until 20 minutes from now” lets me focus a lot more for that short time period. I just need to make an incremental dent so I can make another incremental dent somewhere down the line.

Back in 2018 or 2019 or 2020, I would have waited for the motivation to do something before starting. This motivation may not have come until two hours before the deadline. When I was in middle school, I would need to feel inspired before I could do homework I didn’t want to do. I would watch inspirational video after inspirational video on YouTube to motivate myself to get started. When this inspiration never came, I would play video games and then never get around to the homework until maybe the next morning, then panic 10–15 minutes before class started. This could drag on for hours on a weekday after school, and on the weekend, the whole day.

Now, I acknowledge that there are times this motivation and inspiration will never come. Maybe this is just growing up, but even something I love and do almost every day, like running, is sometimes an arduous task that I don’t feel like doing. Time blocking and chunking my day has helped me navigate the art of doing things I don’t want to do. And my perspective on these “things I don’t want to do” list has changed — just because I don’t want to wash the dishes now doesn’t mean I won’t get something rewarding out of it, like the satisfaction of being done or the satisfaction of a clean kitchen later.

Because my day is so chunked and segmented, it may seem like I struggle when something is super urgent and I need to delve into a task for a very long period of time. However, when I need to flip the switch and stay completely focused on something for hours, I can — it’s just not a switch I have all the time and must come in conjunction with high real-life stakes.

Leveraging High Pressure Situations

Sometimes, I know that I will be in a state of hyperfocus given there is a major, high-stakes deadline at some point later that day.

This can be unproductive when it leads to procrastination. But with time blocking, sometimes I can get 30% of a major project done until the day it’s due. Then, the day it’s due, that 30% is a major head start to finish the last 70%. I don’t do this with papers I have to write for school or major assignments at work because I like to be a lot more proactive and encounter problems that might arise a lot sooner.

However, whenever I am given an assignment, I always ask for a deadline if it is not specified. If I know the deadline, then that tailors my strategy to managing that task, breaking up my time, and triaging it in my list of priorities. If it is due later, I can do a small amount of it on a given day, but know that I can’t completely put the project on the back burner. If the task needs to be done on an “as soon as possible” basis, I will move it to the top of my list of priorities.

I also know I can hyperfocus on tasks when they are near completion and I am almost at the finish line. There is a certain rush I will get from being near the end. Whether this is the joy I get from the last episode of any TV show, the end of a book, or even washing the last dish in the sink, the end is a much more enjoyable part of the process than the start or middle.

As a runner, in high school, I used to have trouble finishing races well. I would run a very fast and strong first half of the race, then slow down and crater at the finish, where other people tended to have a strong finish, or “kick.” Now, no matter how bad I feel in a race, I almost always have a strong finish in the last 400 meters. No matter how bad any run feels on days I am feeling lousy, I always feel much better on the last mile. This gets me into trouble, but on interval workouts, I know I will be fine on the last rep, and have a lot of temptation to run a lot faster and sprint at the end, even when I shouldn’t.

I don’t know where the adrenaline comes from. Perhaps it is the satisfaction of knowing how much I have toiled, or maybe it is a cognitive “completion bias” and the dopamine rush we get. Whatever it is, my distractability suddenly goes away the closer I am to the finish, and the momentum from finishing something significant can give me confidence for tasks that are more burdensome.

Periods of high adrenaline hyper focus are great, but they’re usually accompanied by some sort of crash. Last night, I was messaged by a colleague in California to work on refining a court filing before the deadline. It was an all hands on deck effort. I did my best to help out, and then I needed to just sit around, not do anything cognitively demanding for the next hour or so to decompress before going to sleep.

So being driven by adrenaline and hyperfocus is great, but over the years, I’ve realized it’s not a state I could sustainably be in all the time.

Breaks

One accommodation that was frequently recommended for students I taught with ADHD was “frequent breaks.” It is unsurprising that the same accommodation works well for me. I take breaks during long-term, non-urgent assignments where I find it hard to concentrate. After I have had about five or six 25–30 minute sessions of work, sometimes my brain will be fried.

Sometimes I need ten minutes to not be productive and respond to messages. Sometimes I need a break from devices in general, and I might walk around or (if home), clean the house for about 15 minutes. It is funny that I generally don’t like cleaning the house, doing the dishes, handling maintenance work, etc. However, if I am cleaning or doing yard work as an escape from three to four straight hours where I have been looking at spreadsheets on my laptop, then it is a welcome alternative for at least 15 minutes.

I have a long commute home. Sometimes, I work or read through this commute, which are both cognitively demanding exercises. But other times, I will take a nap. This break, when needed, allows me to not be completely zapped when I get home and want to spend time with my wife.

There are times I put breaks to the side. In high-stakes meetings or a pending deadline in an hour, I tend to be in the zone and not need a break. I am not going to walk around the office when I am in a stage where I am almost done. The breaks are more necessary when struggling to get in the zone and lacking motivation.

Sleeping when I’m tired

Sleeping after lunch or getting home at 6:30 p.m. is not a luxury not a lot of poeple have, or even one that I have a lot of the time. But I will largely sleep when I am tired. If I need a 10–15 nap after lunch to be able to tackle the afternoon, I try to take it. I used to be insecure about people walking by my office and seeing my head down, but I’m not in the type of job where people micromanage the fact that I am working the whole workday anymore.

Instead, my work productivity is more defined now by the “billable hour” as an attorney. Yes, some people might judge me if they walk by my office and see me asleep for a bit. But how I’m evaluated from a productivity standpoint is how many hours I have billed. It does not matter if these hours are billed at 6 a.m. or 1 p.m. — if I work the hour, I worked the hour, no matter at what point of the day. If I bill eight hours in a day, it does not matter what times I was working to bill those hours (and I will obviously not take naps during times I have meetings).

Thus, there is a lot more flexibility to handle a mid-day crash, where I struggle to focus and keep my eyes open, and when I can get really easily distracted by anything that seems better than keeping my eyes open.

Since leaving teaching to become a lawyer, there are also times I have to work nights. Teaching used to have a very firm work/personal life separation where, after school ended, most people did not bother me. But as a lawyer, there are pending deadlines, and in litigation, these are filing deadlines where something is due to the court. If I am completely wiped out and exhausted, I try to lay down for an hour or so before diving into the task for the night. This is not always possible and I have to weigh the benefits and drawbacks of laying down for the hour against being available to do something immediately, but it is a game-changer that gives me a huge reset to sleep when I need to rather than fighting the fatigue the whole time.

At night, I also sleep when I’m tired. There were times in high school and college I deprived myself of sleep when I had a lot going on. This backfired quite a bit because I would often do much worse on exams not being sharp (but it would sometimes work for papers). I now realize getting at least seven hours of sleep is much better than working late into the night.

. . .

Given my job, as a first year attorney in big law, work can come in huge ebbs and flows and be a bit unpredictable. But I am able to meet my billable hour goals at work, write a little bit (sometimes just a sentence or a paragraph), go on a run (sometimes as short as three miles), play some Chess (even if it’s just one movea day), do the dishes (even if it was only half the dishes), and clean the house (even if it’s just for 10–15 minutes a day).

I think the biggest shift from when I was younger isn’t the symptoms as much as it is the mindset. I now realize not everything needs to be perfect, that not everything needs to be completed from 0 to 100 every day. I now realize that, for someone like me, a big project being completed very gradually and incrementally is much better.

Like anyone, navigating my day with ADHD has good days and bad days. There are days I am more distracted and less focused. There are days when I am completely in the zone and productive from 6:40 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. and can go on a run and attend to domestic responsibilities. But I have been able to turn ADHD from a liability that led me to give up easily into an asset, using mostly slight adjustments and building long-term routines and systems.

Like checking for my valuable possessions on the train, I also have a badge to get into the office. It came in a separate lanyard and during my first two weeks at my new job, I would forget this badge at home, multiple times. I had to do the walk of shame from the security desk to hassle people to help me get into my office and navigate it.

I had to find a system that works for me: instead of keeping this badge in my lanyard, I decided to keep it somewhere I would never forget it again: my wallet. I keep this badge in my wallet and then just carry my wallet when I need to scan in and out of the office. Since those first two weeks, I have never forgotten my badge again and have never had to inconvenience the receptionist in my office about forgetting the badge.

This sounds so minor, but it feels like a major win since I established a system that defeated my deficiencies by knowing myself well and knowing what would and would not work for me.

I say this to convey that I am still trying to get better — I have drastically improved how I navigate life with ADHD. I am less driven by motivation and inspiration than I am by routines and systems. I think a lot of what I describe seems like normal life struggles for busy adults and I can pathologize a bit by saying, “oh that was totally my ADHD.”

But I think ADHD makes a lot of these struggles a bit exacerbated, like losing items, distractability, and procrastination. At the root of procrastinating was especially fearing something being boring, hard, and struggling.

My systems haven’t eliminated the fact that many things are a struggle, but that the struggle becomes a lot more manageable. As you can likely see, there are many times I am overstimulated and then understimulated, and I try to come as close to the balance as possible. And that’s a balance I am still trying my best to figure out in different situations.

—

This post was previously published on Invisible Illness.

***