How I Live With My (Undiagnosed) ADHD

I’ve never been tested for ADHD. I want to say that upfront, because I think it matters. I don’t have a diagnosis, and I’m not going to pretend I do. But I tick a lot of the boxes that come with it, and after years of fighting myself, I stopped waiting for a piece of paper to start actually dealing with it.

Why I think I have it

In school I got kicked out of class more times than I can count. I couldn’t sit still. I learn extremely fast — genuinely fast — but the moment I’m actually capable at something, I lose interest almost as quickly as I picked it up. That combination is confusing from the outside. People assume you’re lazy or you don’t care, when really you’re just already bored.

The daily list is longer: trouble concentrating, getting distracted in seconds, high energy that has nowhere to go, and a brain that gets bored faster than almost anyone I know.

I procrastinate a lot. When I’m in the zone I completely lose track of time. When I’m not in the zone, I can’t stop thinking about whatever problem is stuck in my head, even when I’m supposed to be doing something else. If a task isn’t written down, it’s gone. And the classic one: I walk to the kitchen for a glass of water, stop at the bathroom on the way, walk back to my desk, and completely forget why I got up in the first place.

McKinsey made me suspicious

I worked at McKinsey for a while, and it’s where I started seriously wondering about this. I met a lot of colleagues who had the same tells I did. The moment they got bored, they drifted — visibly, fast. But the job also demanded something specific: understand a complex problem almost instantly, form a point of view, then switch context completely and explain it to a totally different audience an hour later.

That’s not a coincidence. A lot of the traits that make ADHD hard to live with — fast context switching, intolerance for boredom, needing stimulation — are exactly what that kind of work rewards, at least in short bursts. It made me realize the issue was never that I couldn’t focus. It’s that I need the right conditions to focus, and most environments don’t give you those by default. You have to build them yourself.

This is basically the description of what’s called “high-functioning ADHD”: symptoms that don’t visibly wreck your daily life, either because they’re milder, because they only show up in specific areas, or because you’ve quietly built compensation strategies that cover for them. From the outside it looks like things are fine. What it actually means is you’re working twice as hard, in ways nobody sees, just to land in the same place as everyone else.

Everything I tried that didn’t work

I’ve tried a lot of tools. Not casually — properly tried, for weeks at a time.

Pen and paper to-do lists. Fine in the moment, useless five minutes later. The list isn’t with me when I need it, and rewriting it every day is its own chore.

PARA. Great system on paper. Way too much overhead for a brain that needs to capture a thought in under three seconds or it’s gone.

Apple Notes, Notion, Obsidian. Same core problem with all three: they’re not around all the time. Opening the app already takes too long. And “too long” for me can be five seconds — that’s enough time for something else to grab my attention, and now I’ve forgotten what I opened the app for in the first place. Then I close it having achieved nothing, and the task is still just floating in my head.

The pattern across all of them: any tool that requires a deliberate step to open, think, and write loses to my own distractibility. I needed something that was already open, already in front of me, with no extra step.

What actually works: timeboxing in my calendar

The one thing that has genuinely stuck is timeboxing, directly in my calendar.

Here’s the actual mechanism: I block specific tasks as calendar events. Not “work block” — specific things, like “answer email to X” or “write ADR for Y.” When that block starts, there is one rule: this is what I’m doing now, nothing else.

I use Google Calendar, mostly because it’s what we have at work anyway. But the tool genuinely doesn’t matter — Apple Calendar, Outlook, whatever you already have open all day works just as well. The important part isn’t the brand, it’s that it’s already there and already the thing you check.

It’s similar to the 5-4-3-2-1 method — you’re not deciding anymore, you’re just executing what you already committed to. The calendar removes the moment of choice, which is exactly the moment my brain likes to wander off. I don’t decide what to do next; I already decided, earlier, when I had a clearer head.

A few rules I stick to:

• Blocks are 30 minutes to 1 hour. Long enough to get into something, short enough that I don’t lose the entire day if I misjudge it.
• I never block more than two days in advance. Anything further out is too abstract and I’ll just reshuffle it anyway. If a task is bigger than that, I break it down until the pieces fit.
• Finishing late is fine. Not starting is the actual problem. I don’t punish myself for a block running over. The whole point is showing up at the start.
• If I finish early, I get a real reward. I either move to something else productive or I go grab a coffee. That small break matters — it’s the payoff for actually finishing.

The reason this works when the apps didn’t: the calendar is already open. It’s already the thing I check. There’s no extra app to launch, no extra step where I get derailed. And a calendar block comes with a built-in reminder — the exact thing that pen and paper and note apps never gave me on their own.

A few concrete tips if you want to try this

• Put your phone somewhere you physically can’t reach it. Not on silent, not face down — out of the room, or at least out of arm’s reach.
• Name the task specifically, not vaguely. “Work” is not a task your brain will commit to. “Write the intro paragraph for the ADR” is.
• Never schedule more than two days out. Keep it close enough to be real.
• Decide in advance what “finishing early” earns you. Coffee, a walk, five minutes of nothing — something you actually want.
• Forgive the late finishes. Never forgive the skipped starts. That’s the only rule that actually matters long-term.

I’m still figuring this out

I don’t have this fully solved, and I’m not claiming timeboxing fixes everything. Some days I still walk to the kitchen and come back without water. But this is the first system that’s survived contact with my actual brain for more than a couple of weeks, and I think that’s worth sharing, tested diagnosis or not.

If you recognize any of this — the drifting, the forgotten glass of water, the apps you opened and immediately closed — I’d genuinely like to hear about it. Comment with your own struggles, or what’s worked for you. I’m collecting ideas, not just giving them.

Further reading: ADDA — High-Functioning ADHD, which also cites the underlying research:

• Lesch, K. P. (2018). “Shine bright like a diamond!”: is research on high-functioning ADHD, at last, entering the mainstream? Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 59(3), 191–192. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.12887
• Palmini, A. (2008). Professionally successful adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): Compensation strategies and subjective effects of pharmacological treatment. Dementia & Neuropsychologia, 2(1), 63–70. https://doi.org/10.1590/S1980-57642009DN20100013