ADHD at Work: Motivation, Burnout and Better Workplaces (Part 1)
About this Episode
In this episode of DEI Will Not DIE, Dr Bree Gorman explores ADHD in the workplace through a mix of lived experience and practical insight. Bree unpacks the common misconceptions around ADHD, challenging the idea that it’s about a lack of attention, and instead, reframing it as a challenge of motivation and energy.
Drawing on their own experience completing a PhD through intense periods of hyperfocus, Bree highlights both the strengths and the hidden costs of working this way, especially with the heightened risk of burnout. They also share how traditional workplace structures, from rigid schedules to open plan offices, often work against neurodivergent people rather than enabling them to succeed.
This episode is only part one for leaders, managers, and workplaces to rethink how productivity is measured and supported. Bree offers practical strategies for creating environments where people with ADHD can thrive, from flexible work and task design to more effective and human-centred approaches to feedback and accountability.
What You'll Learn
Why ADHD is less about attention and more about motivation, and what that means at work
How deadlines can both support and harm people with ADHD, and how to use them more effectively
Why time-at-desk is a poor measure of productivity, and what to focus on instead
The impact of emotional regulation and rejection sensitivity, and how to give feedback in ways that land
Resources Mentioned
Inclusive Leadership Workshop (designed to help leaders build practical, inclusive workplaces)
Keep Learning & Connect With Bree
Want practical strategies for navigating resistance and building real momentum in your DEI work? Access my free webinar on evidence-based DEI strategies here. It’s packed with tools you can start using today.
If this episode sparked ideas or questions and you want to talk more about how I can support your team or organisation, book a free 20-minute callwith me. I’d love to hear what you’re working on and explore how we can move the work forward—together.
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Well, it's Monday morning and the topic that I am going to discuss today is ADHD in the workplace, which feels very, very relevant for a Monday morning where I was really struggling to hit record on this podcast because I had other things that I wanted to be doing this morning and it wasn't recording a podcast — but I have managed to find some ways and use some of my strategies to get myself here and now I'm actually excited for this.
It's really a conversation with you and I'm really keen to hear your thoughts and your experiences after you listen to this episode.
I want to start by saying that I acknowledge that I live, work and play on the country of the Wadawurrung people and I want to pay my respects to their elders past and present and I call out to any Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders that are listening in today, particularly those who are neurodivergent.
I'm going to start this episode by sharing my experience with ADHD as well as things that I've learnt. But what I want to say from the forefront — and this counts for any topic that I talk on — is that you can't be an expert in any person's experience. Everyone with ADHD has a very different experience of their ADHD and how it impacts their work life and what strategies work for them.
So if you want to take anything from this episode — and perhaps you can just grab this sound bite and leave — it's that you need to talk to people about what works for them and you need to help people discover what works for them to help them be productive, efficient, but also well in their work. And that's ultimately what we're looking for. I don't think there's many managers that want to see their staff burn out, that want to see their staff unwell. Of course they want to see productivity, but we also, we're humans, we want to care for people.
I'm going to give you some ideas and some thinking points and strategies, but ultimately it comes down to the particular person that you're working with — yourself, whoever it is that's ADHD and has to exist in a workplace that wasn't designed for people whose brains work the way that ours do. It is individual and it's unique. So just putting that out there from the beginning. That's your sound bite — you can take that and leave if you don't have much time today.
So I want to say to get us started that I personally don't struggle to work hard. I work hard. I work in a way that's sometimes very different from the way neurotypical people might work. But I do work hard and I am incredibly effective at getting a job done when there is a deadline that I need to meet and one that I am committed and responsible for.
That's one of the ways in which I have managed to create my multiple different careers over the years, the way I was able to complete a PhD. And for many years, I actually believed that I wasn't ADHD. My number one piece of evidence for that was that I had a PhD. Surely someone who's ADHD couldn't get a PhD. Well, that myth is completely false. There are so many of us who are ADHD who have managed to perform well — whether it's in an education setting, whether it's in a workplace or sporting environment. Our ADHD doesn't stop us from doing those things. Sometimes it helps us get there.
For me, I really did not do much for the first two and a half years of my PhD scholarship, to be honest. I practically did my entire PhD in the last six to eight months. The deadline was looming. I put my head down and I literally worked 24/7. I was running experiments that ran overnight, so every three hours I had an alarm set and I would wake up and go back into the laboratory and do some more work. That's how I managed to get a PhD.
The first two and a half years I played a lot of tennis. I got involved in all the social things and I did anything other than my PhD. But I really smashed it in that last six to eight months and ended up not only getting a PhD, but without corrections — which for those of you who know anything about PhDs, that's a big deal.
So I can work hard and I can excel, but there are also a lot of challenges in getting to that point. And of course there are repercussions. When you spend eight months working 24/7, you don't fare so well at the end of that. I submitted my PhD and I actually never worked in a laboratory again. There are a number of reasons for that that I didn't quite understand at the time, but now looking back, a fair few of those were because of the way my brain works. If I had known then what I know now about ADHD, it might have been a different scenario. But we don't have regrets, we just keep moving forward.
The reason I'm sharing that particular story is this: the way that I experience ADHD — and this is certainly true of many ADHDers — is that it is not that we have a problem with attention so much. When we are interested in a task, we can be more focused than neurotypicals. We can hyper-focus, and we can hyper-focus for days, weeks, months, years sometimes, if we're really into something.
ADHD is about motivation. It's about the inability to control that motivation and what catches our interest. Hence why it's super important that we're involved in work that we are passionate and committed about, because that's how you get the best out of us. Job selection is super important. But it's also important that we understand, once we're in a role, what is going to motivate us to get the work done? How can we work within the structures that exist to meet the deadlines that are required — but mostly to avoid burnout? Because the reality is that for a lot of us, we will meet those deadlines, but at what cost? That's something we need to be openly talking to our employees about — how are we tracking, and what could change the mad last-minute burnout to meet a deadline? What kind of strategies can we put in place to avoid that?
So that's one of the big friction points I think ADHDers face in the workplace — finding that intrinsic motivation to do the task. And we all have tasks we don't want to do. Some people will just see it as laziness, that everybody has tasks that they're not interested in. But the only way I can describe it is that for ADHDers, those uninteresting tasks feel like torture.
As a business owner, I have plenty of tasks that do not meet my passion and my needs. Admin, for example — there's a lot of admin in being a business owner. And so I have to find ways to get through those tasks and still look after myself because it can feel like sticking pins in my eyeballs to, for example, reconcile my accounts. A task that might take somebody half an hour is definitely not going to take me half an hour. That's something I cannot keep my brain focused on for half an hour.
So what I have to do is give myself extra time for that task, and I have to sit on the couch in front of the TV and have Netflix on. Quite often if I don't have Friday night plans, you'll find me on my couch watching Netflix with my laptop open, reconciling my accounts. That's a workaround I've created so that I will actually do the accounts — because otherwise they won't get done.
And what's boring is very different from one person to the next. So intrinsic motivation — we've got to find it. And if we don't have it, and we have a task that just needs to be done but we have no motivation towards, we have to build in strategies to be able to complete those tasks.
The second friction point is deadlines. Deadlines are absolutely an ADHDer's gift. And they're also our worst enemy. Because as I mentioned, that push to really get to a deadline can mean a burnout at the end because we have to put so much work in at the last minute.
But we need the deadlines. For me personally, I work very hard on chunking work into smaller deadlines. So if I'm quoting a job, I will quote it with a bunch of milestones that have payment attached. A job might be a six-month job, but I've now got four milestones within that which give me a reward — I get paid. That has been a real game changer for me. Not getting to those awful last-minute deadlines where I've got to do six months worth of work in two weeks.
That's not going to work for every ADHDer, but it's definitely a common strategy. And if you have an employee who perhaps you think is ADHD — and maybe they don't know it yet, or maybe they haven't come up with strategies that work yet — chunking the work down might help. But there needs to be some kind of reward at the end of each of those chunks. It might be quite individual what that reward is.
For me it's quite clear — and that's why owning a business works for me so well. I get that reward in terms of payment milestones, which is different from just getting my salary every fortnight. In an employee situation, you don't necessarily have that. So in what other ways can that employee be rewarded for meeting that deadline? How are they accountable? And sometimes it doesn't have to be a reward as such — accountability can be enough if that person is motivated to not be the person who is letting the team down or not achieving milestones.
Also, the purpose of the work. What's it contributing to? With ADHDers, you really need to make sure they're brought in on why we're doing this work and why this deadline matters. Once we feel connected to that, we're much more likely to be able to turn our attention to it.
Another friction point is time at desk. I found this for years. The struggle is real in open-plan offices when you're an ADHDer who struggles to sit still for more than 10 or 15 minutes. At home, I will get up from my desk on a very regular basis — there are a bunch of different things in the house I'll do that take two, three, five minutes before I come back and sit back down. I have that freedom because I work from home. And that's what you'll find many ADHDers love about working from home — not constantly being watched in terms of how much time is spent sitting at the desk.
Time at desk does not equal productivity. I'm going to be way more productive if I can move every 15 to 20 minutes than if I am stuck in my chair. That doesn't mean all of that time away from my desk makes me less productive than a neurotypical person who sits at their desk from 9 till 5 — because I can smash out some work in 20 minutes that other people perhaps couldn't.
Outcome-based leadership is absolutely what ADHDers need. And as a manager, you also need to think about this: in my experience, the actual problem in open-plan offices is the way peers monitor each other. It was actually less about managers who were time-watching, and more about having peers who were time-watching.
Remember that many ADHDers experience rejection-sensitive dysphoria. We're very acutely aware of the sense of being rejected by our peers. There can be enhanced social anxiety, and emotional regulation struggles. And we know in open-plan offices that there are people who are spending a lot of time worried about how much time somebody else is sitting at their desk — and talking about it. As a manager, you need to set the culture and the tone: we're about outcomes and effectiveness here.
Some days it might get to two o'clock and there is just no value in me sitting at my desk anymore. If my brain is no longer able to focus, I'm going to be grabbing my phone every three seconds, looking out the window, doing everything other than working. That task is going to take three, ten, twenty times longer than if I did it at a time when I actually had the focus and energy for it.
My day today, for example: I got up and went to the gym this morning, I'm doing a solid piece of work now, at 11 o'clock I'm playing pickleball for two hours, then coming home to do another solid piece of work, having a break, cooking dinner, and then jumping on a call and doing some more work tonight. That's what's going to work for me today. Tomorrow, that might be a completely different story.
If I try to push through moments when my brain is unable to focus — when it's essentially gone offline — that's when I can get into burnout. It's also just this really negative headspace that has me hating my job, hating the work, looking for ways to avoid the task. Whereas that same task might be perfectly fine for me to do at nine o'clock tomorrow morning.
We think about flexible working for parents — we've got to really think about it for people who are neurodivergent too. Because you want us at our best, and at our best we can sometimes be way better than what you'd expect from an employee. But we have to be able to work in the times when our brain is on.
I know that can be really difficult to manage across teams, but with some proactive management, it can really work for everybody.
Open-plan offices really are the devil. There is so much distraction and noise. Distractions absolutely drag us out of our headspace, out of that hyper-focus — and being unable to jump back in is a real issue. Building in quiet spaces is super important, and workplaces find that many employees benefit from that. But also really listen to your employee in terms of the environments they need to work in. Some of us who are neurodivergent actually work better in a cafe — we need the noise and the sensory inputs so that we can keep focused on a particular task. As I said, my bookkeeping has to be done in front of the TV or I'm going to give up on it in five minutes. Horses for courses.
Now I touched on emotional regulation earlier, but I want to come back to it because it's very much understated and under-considered when it comes to ADHD. ADHD absolutely has a huge emotional element. I know that from my personal experience, from family members, and from the research as well. Not everybody is super aware of that — for themselves or for others. So it's important we consider it.
The way that we provide feedback to people with ADHD is critical to how they will receive it — particularly if they experience rejection-sensitive dysphoria. I know I do, so this is coming from personal experience. I am really open to feedback because I have a huge drive to master things — whether that's DEI work, whether that's pickleball. I need and want and crave feedback so I can get better. But the way feedback is delivered is really critical to whether I can actually receive it.
We used to talk about the feedback sandwich — really quite effective for me, though not effective for others. Have that conversation with your employee, whether they're ADHD or not: how do you best receive feedback? Is it that you need it in an email first so you're not getting that face-to-face rejection, and then we talk about it? Are there certain words that help? Do I need to start with the positives and then come to the improvement points? How do you best receive feedback?
I don't think managers do that enough. If you want to get the best out of your employees and you want them to learn, you need to provide feedback — but ask them how they best receive it so they can actually grow.
Hopefully that's just some useful points — whether you're ADHD yourself or whether you're managing or working with someone who is. We might do a part two to this episode at some point. But I'm interested in your thoughts — please let me know what I've missed, how it lands for you, and what are some other friction points that I haven't covered here.
I'll wrap this up now and get ready for my pickleball session. Catch you in the next episode.