Seniority with ADHD is easier, not harder.
I run a UK company and I have ADHD, with two burnouts behind me. For years the advice I was handed assumed I was junior — fixed hours, a manager, not much I could change. None of it fit, and nobody mentioned the thing that turned out to matter most: as I climbed, the job got easier, not harder, because I started to control my own diary. Bandwidth is what I worked out. I have written it under a pseudonym because I still hold the job and would rather keep it.
I call that the Inversion, and the rest of the book follows from it: how to pay the hyperfocus tax before it turns into another burnout, how to delegate when your attention comes and goes (Proceed until apprehended), how a strategic reserve of finished work covers the weeks you produce nothing. It is less a set of coping tips than the way I actually run the place.
The catalogue
- Bandwidth, the book£24
Eight chapters, around 30,000 words. The full argument and the full system, written to be read in two sittings and used for years.
- The Bandwidth Toolkit£39
The scripts, templates and meeting system from the book as working documents, for anyone who would rather use them than copy them out by hand.
- Book and toolkit together£49
The whole system in one purchase. The arithmetic is on its own page.
Who it is for
Managing directors, partners, founders, and the people a rung below them — often diagnosed late, or still wondering, and tired of advice written for someone with none of their leverage and all of their symptoms. I have assumed you are good at your job and short of time, and that effort was never the thing you were missing.
Who it is not for
If you are early in your career, a lot of this describes leverage you do not have yet. It may still be worth reading as a map, though it was not written for where you are standing. It is not a clinical book, either — it diagnoses nothing and replaces no one’s doctor. And if you want to be told that ADHD is secretly a gift, I am not your writer. My view is that it is a condition with real costs, a few of which can be turned to your advantage if you are deliberate about it, and no more than that.
The vocabulary
The book names things — the sofa-tea paradox, the dopamine kill, the message tax, the stinging nettle — because I have found that a problem you cannot name is one you cannot hand to anyone else, or plan around, or see coming. All eighteen terms are defined in the concepts index, in full, for nothing. The book is where they fit together.