ADHD isn’t a flaw in productivity — it’s a mismatch between how your brain works and how work is structured.
In product circles, we obsess over fit: product–market fit, founder–problem fit, even team–process fit. But when it comes to neurodivergent brains, we rarely ask: does this environment fit the person? And if not, how much cognitive load is being spent just trying to make it through the day?
This isn’t a thinkpiece about hustle culture or another neurodivergence-as-superpower pep talk. It’s a behavioural unpacking — of how ADHD creates a series of invisible mismatches with modern product workflows. And what we might change if we took UX design principles and applied them to the way we work, think, and plan.
Executive dysfunction: not what you think it is
When people say they “struggle with executive function,” they’re usually not talking about intelligence, effort, or willpower. They’re talking about the invisible friction that makes it hard to start a task, switch between tasks, or complete a task once momentum is lost.
This is why “just use a to-do list” can feel laughably naive. The list isn’t the problem. The problem is the lag between knowing what needs to be done and having enough internal clarity to do it.
Think of the brain as a prioritisation engine. In ADHD, the prioritisation logic often fails — not because we don’t care, but because dopamine rewards aren’t aligned with urgency. Something can be important, easy, and time-sensitive… and still completely inaccessible to our brain. That’s not laziness. It’s a design flaw in the system.
The product environment makes it worse
Agile rituals. JIRA boards. Backlog grooming. Stakeholder juggling. All of it requires relentless context switching and short-term memory juggling — exactly the kind of cognitive gymnastics that ADHD brains find exhausting.
The result? A constant low-level sense of failure. Not because you’re not contributing. But because your internal sense of “how work should feel” is always out of sync with how it actually feels. You’re perpetually catching up, second-guessing your own attention span, and masking just to appear “on it.”
And the kicker? Most environments aren’t designed to catch this. Instead of diagnosing the system, we pathologise the person. We send them productivity hacks and Pomodoro timers — treating the symptom instead of the architecture.
Behavioural UX for your own brain
What if we treated ADHD like a UX problem? What if instead of forcing neurodivergent people to adapt to rigid environments, we prototyped environments that adapt to them?
That might look like spatial workflows instead of list-based ones. Physical rituals to initiate tasks. Visual timelines that build momentum through tactile progress cues. It might mean fewer back-to-back meetings. Or workflows that honour hyperfocus instead of fragmenting it.
These aren’t hacks. They’re prototypes. Each one is a small bet that says: “Maybe the problem isn’t me. Maybe the system needs a redesign.”
And when those prototypes are built with care, they often help everyone — not just those with a diagnosis. Because the truth is, most product teams are working at the edge of cognitive overload. ADHD just gets there first.
Conclusion
ADHD doesn’t need fixing. The environment does. And when product leaders start applying their craft to cognitive environments — treating behavioural friction with the same seriousness as user friction — something amazing happens.
Work starts to flow again. Not because you finally found the right productivity app, but because the system finally stopped fighting your brain.
That’s not indulgence. That’s good design.