If you’re dyslexic, or you have ADHD, or like me you have one and a lot of the other, this is for you. Especially if you’ve spent years at work building quiet workarounds so nobody notices. I’m not a doctor or a specialist, and I don’t really like giving advice. This is one person’s experience of dyslexia and ADHD traits at work: what I tried, what cost me too much, and what finally helped.
Dyslexia and ADHD: what they are, briefly
I’ll keep this short and stick to the NHS and the British Dyslexia Association, because they say it better than I can.
The NHS describes dyslexia as “a common learning difficulty where your brain works differently to most people”, and says plainly that “it does not affect intelligence”. It describes ADHD as “a condition that can affect how you focus”.
The two often turn up together. The NHS says people with ADHD may also have “a learning difficulty such as dyslexia”, and the British Dyslexia Association lists ADHD among the conditions that most often occur alongside dyslexia. The BDA estimates that 10 to 15% of the population have dyslexia or another specific learning difference.
My own version: I was tested for dyslexia in my first year at university in Newcastle, and it genuinely made a difference. Suddenly things made sense. I’ve never had a formal ADHD diagnosis, but I show a lot of the traits. The NHS list of signs in adults includes “being easily distracted or forgetful” and “losing things often, like your wallet, mobile or keys”. I’d add ideas to that list.
What dyslexia and ADHD look like on a normal working day
Ideas arrive fast, and my attention moves on faster. I’ll have seven ideas before breakfast, hyperfocus on one for 90 minutes, then completely forget the other six existed. I can build an entire dashboard in a morning and forget to reply to the email that started it. Some days I do 12 hours of work in four, then nothing useful for the rest of the day.
The dyslexia shows up in the typing. I misspell things constantly, and I’ve been hiding typos for about 35 years. (You should see my WhatsApps.)
And I lose things. A link someone sent me, a screenshot of a page I liked, a ChatGPT answer I swore I’d come back to. For years my filing system was open tabs and hope.
The workarounds that cost too much
For most of my career I compensated. Lists. Reminders. People around me who held the threads I dropped.
Then there was Asana. I used it religiously for years, and so did the whole company. Every personal task, every project, everything tracked. I knew we’d gone too far when a project manager created a task called “Be Creative”, assigned it to three people and gave it a date and a 90-minute slot. Madness. But it mostly worked.
The problem was what it cost. Every tool I tried wanted me to decide which project or folder something belonged in before I could save it. By the time I’d decided, the thought had gone. All that effort was the overhead of managing a brain that doesn’t come with a filing system.
What actually helped
None of this is clinical advice. It’s what worked for me, roughly in the order I worked it out.
1. Capture first, sort later
The biggest change was splitting the two jobs completely. Save everything in a few seconds, badly, and sort it out later, or let something else sort it. Most productivity advice starts at the sorting stage. My problem was always the bit before.
2. Let software fix the spelling afterwards
Ordinary spell check fixes one word at a time and still guesses wrong. LLMs are the first piece of software in my life that has done what I meant, not what I typed. So now I write fast and messy and let the tidying happen afterwards, instead of stopping every few words to check.
3. Talk when typing can’t keep up
When my fingers are slower than my head, I record a voice note instead. Something that transcribes it and pulls out the point means the idea survives without me sitting down to type it. I’ve saved 32 recordings since January.
4. Ask for things back instead of filing them
I don’t remember where I put things. I do remember roughly what they were. So the search that works for me is one I can ask in normal words, something like “what was that pricing page I saved about note apps?”, and get the actual thing back.
5. Fewer places to look
Every extra inbox is another thing to forget to check. I keep cutting the number of places things can live. These days anything that needs me, from my own reminders to the questions my AI agents have for me, ends up in one list with one filter. I wrote about how I set that up last week.
6. Good people
I’ve always had good people around me, at home and at work. Katie, my wife, can always tell when my head is somewhere else. “You’re not here,” she’ll say. I stopped hiding how my brain works from the people close to me a long time ago, and it helps. I also run, which helps too.
Why I built Ultrathink
Eventually I built the tool I wanted. Ultrathink is somewhere to throw everything quickly, without deciding where it goes first. One click in the browser, a screenshot, a voice note, a file, a ChatGPT or Claude conversation.
Then an AI pass does the boring bit afterwards. It fixes the spelling and grammar, writes a short summary, adds tags, and works out whether something is a task, a project or just worth knowing. If I wrote “chase this Friday”, it picks up the date. When I need something back, I ask for it in plain English and it answers with links to the entries it used.
I’ve put over 1,300 things into it since January: about 800 notes, 250 links, 49 screenshots and those 32 voice recordings. Most went in messy.
It won’t suit everyone, and plenty of good tools do parts of this. There’s more on choosing a note-taking app for ADHD and on information overload elsewhere on this blog. Ultrathink’s free plan includes the browser extension and desktop widget. The AI part is in Pro (£9.99 a month), or free if you bring your own AI key.
If you’re working this out for yourself
I’m not qualified to tell anyone what to do, so this is just what I’d say to a friend.
If you think you might be dyslexic, find out. Being tested made sense of years of struggling for me. The British Dyslexia Association has information on diagnostic assessments, and the NHS has pages on dyslexia and ADHD in adults.
Whatever tool you use, make saving something take seconds, and leave the sorting for later or for software.
And go easier on yourself about the typos. Mine still turn up everywhere. These days they get fixed after I’ve had the thought, so I don’t lose it on the way.
I still have seven ideas before breakfast. Now I can find most of them again by lunch.
