ADHD can be both a handicap and a blessing in a work environment, but many corporate environments stifle the benefits. Photo / Getty Images
We’re taking a look back at some of our favourite and most popular Lifestyle stories of 2024, giving you a chance to catch up on some of the great reading you might have missed this year.
In this story from October, Annabel Fenwick Elliott, a UK-based freelance journalist, gives an open and honest account of how her ADHD can be both a handicap and a blessing at work.
THREE KEY FACTS
Annabel Fenwick Elliott is a UK-based freelance journalist who was diagnosed with ADHD in 2018.
OPINION
My relationship with “the office” has always been a troubled one. “You were brilliant and a shambles; it was never clear which version would show up on any given day,” one of my first bosses in advertising told me, years before I was diagnosed with ADHD. Regardless, no matter how much I often loathed the office, I also owe my career to it. Were it not for the structure, discipline and fiery overlords involved in a typical corporate environment I would never have made it in journalism. In all honesty, I might have ended up on a park bench.
Such is the paradox with having ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder; itself, both a handicap and a superpower) and working shoulder-to-shoulder, in a highly distracting goldfish bowl, with “normal” humans all day every day for most of your adult life. “People with ADHD may have problems with organisation and time management, following instructions and focusing on tasks,” says the UK’s NHS (National Health Service) website, as well as being “restless, impatient, impulsive and risk-taking”. All qualities I possess and that would look very bad on a CV, I think we can agree.
To understand why it can be so hard at the office with a brain like mine (I tested very high in all facets on the ADHD diagnostic scale), you first need a glimpse into how my mind operates before I even step inside those four walls. Imagine being in a room. The TV is on and it’s something flashy but inane, like Strictly Come Dancing. So is the radio, broadcasting the news, which is important. They’re both set to the same volume, though, so it’s hard to separate them. There’s also a DJ, playing the same song over and over again. And two monkeys squabbling in the corner. You’re trying to do a crossword. And there’s someone in the doorway asking you for directions; rolling their eyes, because “why can’t you just focus?”.
During my worst phases, particularly in the earlier years of my career and especially in jobs that I hated (before I became a journalist I was a model, a bartender, an artist’s assistant, a receptionist and an advertising executive) I was often late, unreliable, forgetful and even combative. I asked my last boss, from when I was on staff at The Telegraph, about my most difficult moments — missing flights, losing things, going Awol — and he had some interesting insights, which I’ll get on to later.
First though, and less often discussed, are the strengths often associated with ADHD, a neurological condition linked to innate dopamine dysfunction. For all our skittish qualities, we are also optimistic, energetic and flexible. We thrive under pressure and prevail in a crisis. Our minds work differently, which means we think outside the box. We can be highly innovative in problem-solving. Best of all, we can “hyperfocus”. This is a skill that cannot, alas, be turned on at will, but if a topic genuinely fascinates us or we are under serious, imminent pressure, we can concentrate for staggeringly long periods — forgetting to eat or use the loo — in a way that a neurotypical person does not.
It’s why, despite its outdated reputation as basically being an affliction that makes boys troublesome at school, some of the world’s most successful people have it. Elon Musk, who is also on the autism spectrum (the two conditions are closely linked and a common comorbidity), has spoken of his ability to hyperfocus as a blessing but his impulsivity more as a curse. Steve Jobs is widely suspected to have had it, too; known as he was for his mercurial character and tendency to obsess over new ideas only to lose interest and quickly switch course. Both tech giants are notorious for being rebellious and difficult to work with.
I’ve spent a good deal of time around Sir Richard Branson over the years, having profiled him several times, and while he tells me he has never sought an official diagnosis, he is a walking embodiment of ADHD. His closest colleagues refer to him as the “Energizer Bunny”; an effervescent character with a never-ending curiosity, constantly rattling off new ideas but very much in need of his clipboard-tapping team to steer him back on to course when he wanders off, as he does, quite literally, mid-conversation, all day every day. “Delegation,” he once told me, “is one of the very best tools in business”.
It’s not just entrepreneurs who appear to have these tendencies. I’ve always seen signs of ADHD in my father (it is strongly hereditary; my brother has it, but my mother has no symptoms at all). I assumed, however, that he couldn’t because he’s a lawyer — a profession which requires one to wade through heavy literature and concentrate very hard. I have since discovered that lawyers are diagnosed with ADHD at a rate nearly three times higher than the general population. Indeed, he can be rooted to his books for weeks on end during a big case (that or whichever hobby has most recently taken hostage of his brain; designing croquet mallets, manufacturing duck houses and authoring cookbooks being notable examples) but ask him to fill out a boring form or wait patiently in line in a noisy shop and he will short-circuit and storm off.
I suspect my father managed his career so well because very early on he started his own firm and therefore had an office set-up that was on his terms. To this day, I cannot imagine him reporting to someone else. I, too, always found this hard. Not because of my immediate bosses (I’ve been extremely lucky, bar once, in that regard), but because of the general rules. It’s the same reason I despised school. Not every child learns best in the same format, and not every employee is going to perform best under the same structure — yet educational institutions and offices are all designed as if that were the case.
There is a theory, incidentally, that given the strong genetic component associated with ADHD, it may well have had evolutionary benefits. That, perhaps, while it makes sense for the majority of us to conform to a conventional way of working, it’s also important to have outliers.
According to the Sultan Lab for Mental Health Informatics, at Columbia University: “In the context of hunter-gatherer societies, the traits associated with ADHD — notably novelty seeking, impulsivity, and a heightened state of alertness — likely offered considerable adaptive advantages. This inherent inclination towards exploration would have propelled individuals to uncover vital resources such as food and shelter, essential for the survival and prosperity of their communities.”
It goes on to point out that while these traits are “often viewed as drawbacks in modern structured settings” they might well have been “crucial for evading predators or capitalising on fleeting opportunities”.
For me, as I touched on before, while office jobs were always hell before I fell into journalism, once I did, everything changed. For the first time, I was genuinely interested in what I was doing. I cut my teeth at a big tabloid, where we were required to write up to eight articles a day, the bosses were formidable and the pressure was too much for most writers to last a year. It was exactly what I needed, and though I still got scolded for all the usual transgressions, I performed well. As I touched upon before, the condition lends itself well to chaos and high stakes.
Later, when I moved to The Telegraph, where the culture was a lot more civilised but where, still, our metrics are closely measured, I continued (in between blips) to be high-achieving. Never more so, however, than when the pandemic hit and we were confined to working from home. With the physical restraints of the office taken away, but the short deadlines and the superiors still ever-present, I did better than ever before. Covid became an unlikely hero for me and handed me an environment that worked with and not against my ADHD-addled mind.
At home, I don’t have to pretend to be normal in front of other people all day. I can pace up and down when I’m thinking. When I go into hyperfocus, I can lock myself in a quiet room and not stand up until I’ve burned through a whole project. If I’m overwhelmed or short-circuiting I can leave my computer for as long as I need to. I never returned to the office after that, and am now freelance.
Ask most people with ADHD, who have made similar tweaks to the way they operate in life, whether they would press a button that would turn them neurotypical, and they will tell you no. When harnessed correctly, the advantages are too great. What I wasn’t expecting, when I spoke to my long-suffering aforementioned Telegraph boss, was that he would agree.
He conceded that I was at times unreliable, that I could be frustrating, and that there were moments of “classic Annabel”, particularly when I tried to do too much at once or wandered off in pursuit of wacky ideas. But he surmised: “As an editor you’d rather have someone enthusiastic and generally willing to put themselves about to get good stories — even if it means the occasional hiccup. Certainly beats someone who prefers to sit quietly waiting for work to come to them.”
There aren’t enough workers with ADHD in any given office for me to endorse a radical overhaul in how they are run. And the onus is arguably not on employers, but rather on the person who has ADHD to find, where possible, a role that compliments it — much like our nomadic ancestors did — rather than one which will make them a nuisance. But I do hope that as we come to better understand this condition, companies will treat it more as a useful resource than a red flag.
New York Times: How three months of helping coach children under 7 came as a revelation.