The current world of work can feel like being the child of an unhappy marriage.
Parent 1: “We reward high performance!”
Parent 2: “You must be available at all times!”
And you’re stuck in the middle, feeling like you can’t make anyone happy, least of all yourself.
As I’ve said in this post, most workplaces demand focus while structurally preventing it. If you find yourself losing focus mid-task at work, it’s not just you, it’s how the environment is set up.
And while that’s hard for everyone, it’s especially punishing for people with executive functioning challenges. So let’s dive into what focus means for folks with executive functioning challenges, though I suspect many of us struggle with focus these days.
Focus is a hot commodity. Film studios are literally telling screenwriters to remind audiences about important plot points throughout the movie, because their data says, people can’t even sit through a whole movie without disrupting themselves anymore.
No one asked me when it was time to name ADHD and lemme be real, the name sucks. People with ADHD don’t really have attention deficits, they may however struggle to:
Folks with ADHD can absolutely hyperfocus when they:
It took me nearly two decades to figure it out, but it turns out I can hyperfocus on the client sitting across from me. I listen with my whole body and helping them figure out what’s going on or how to optimize their lives is one of my favorite challenges. I can do it again and again for a few hours. (Might have to recharge my battery after, but that’s a different post).
((I can also hyperfocus on owls, TV shows, and the art of French patisserie, though those may be slightly less relevant to this discussion.))
Now of course, there are different types and presentations of ADHD, when managers ask employees to:
They may be inadvertently making it harder for them to sustain focus.
Leaders may think that their employees take too long to complete tasks, but they’re not always seeing how constant disruptions are wreaking havoc on their team’s ability to get work done.
Here’s how that usually shows up in practice…
What clients often say:
What I hear:
When people with executive function challenges are pulled away from focus to “answer this quick question” or attend a meeting, they have to work harder to switch contexts for the interruption and thrice as hard to then come back to the original task at hand. I do a lot of deep thinking before I get to the work and if you interrupt me while I’m in that zone, I will totally lose the momentum. And once that happens, getting back into the task can feel just as overwhelming as starting it in the first place.
Clients often come to me when they’re exhausted from working after the workday is done so they can work without interruptions, or, and here’s what I don’t think we talk about enough…
when they’ve lost the spark for the work because it’s become a chore and no longer a place to use their brilliance.
In the fast-paced world of knowledge work, what seems like a minor distraction to a leader might not feel that way to their direct reports for a couple of different reasons.
Folks with neurodivergent brains struggle to prioritize the stimuli of multiple inputs, so for some of them, every distraction is urgent. When everything feels urgent, sometimes it can feel like their brains are short circuiting and which makes it hard to be effective dealing with any of the tasks at hand.
While I’m primarily addressing struggles for folks with executive functioning challenges, I also want to call out the power dynamics at play here. Due to their family of origin, a lifetime of experiencing bias, or cultural expectation, some folks experience a leader pinging, as urgent no matter what. Similarly, if they see leaders responding to everything in real time, they see this as an unwritten rule that they should, too.
The Gallup State of the Global Workforce tells us every year that employee engagement is down, yet I don’t see enough companies choosing to take their implicit messages to couples therapy.
While I’m not a couples counselor, I do call myself Work Shrink, in part because I help managers design workflows that reduce interruption and make focus possible.
If you’re managing a team that’s struggling with focus, it’s rarely just an individual issue. It’s usually a design problem. I work with teams to reduce interruption and build workflows that actually support deep work. Reach out if you want to explore that.
If these challenges sound familiar, know that you’re not alone, and there are ways to make your workday less draining. Reach out if you’d like support.