Your ADHD isn’t broken. Your systems are.
My 1:1 program helps you 2x your output through real clarity, momentum, and progress. A few November spots are open. See how it works ➝
Scroll LinkedIn for thirty seconds nowadays and you’ll see job titles like these:
“Go-To-Market Engineer.” “Creator-In-Residence.” “AI Consultant.”
If they sound made up, it’s because they are.
If you’re like most of the ADHD or tech people I know, you’re probably struggling to find a fulfilling job you genuinely like.
At the end of the day, every corporate ladder in existence is made up. Every fancy title, every promotion.
Here’s a different way to look at jobs and work environments, especially if you have an atypical (read: exceptional) ADHD brain.
How I Rewrote My Own Job Title
Back in my Meta days, I wanted to switch to a faster-paced Instagram team. I loved the team members, the product mission, the manager.
There was just one catch.
The job title said "Android engineer."
Across almost all Instagram teams, mobile engineers stuck to the client app, while server engineers only touched the backend.
I wanted to explore everything across the tech stack.
So I took the job anyway, with a plan in mind. I completed my Android tasks patiently. But the moment the team was short-staffed on a new server project, I jumped on it.
Six months in, I became the first of ten engineers to work across the stack. My title still said Android engineer. But the way I operated filled a gap the team didn’t realize existed.
I became the go-to person for questions spanning the full product flow, and beyond the engineering team as well.
Other engineers followed my lead. By the end of my first year, multiple people on the team were working across roles.
Simply because I took ownership of my own job “title,” the whole team became more flexible, more productive, and more fulfilling to work on.
A Job Is Just a Basket of Tasks
So if the job title doesn’t answer whether a role will be a good fit, what does?
One of my clients and I distilled it down to this:
A job isn't the title. It's just a basket of things you're doing every day.
A "software engineer" at one company looks nothing like a "software engineer" at another.
What even is a "product manager," anyway?
I dare you to find two founders doing the exact same thing.
Whether you take a desk job or operate a traveling circus, none of the optics matter as much as one question:
What are you actually doing day to day, and does it match your strengths?
Some important questions to ask might include:
Novelty + Challenge: Do I get to learn, explore, and grow, almost every day? Is the work actually interesting to me and expansive?
Stimulation: Do I get to work in sprints rather than doing tedious tasks all day? Is the schedule somewhat flexible or is it extremely routine?
Collaboration: Do I get to work with smart, curious people? How much social interaction is involved?
Most of my ADHD clients struggle to find a role they actively enjoy. Often, the problem isn't you.
It's the made-up box you're trying to fit yourself into.
Find the Right Environment, or Mold It to You
Focus less on the title and more on the actual tasks you're responsible for. This is crucial with ADHD and a spiky skills profile.
You have two options:
Find a new environment that mostly fits your very interestingly shaped brain
Mold your current environment to fit your strengths
The second one is underrated, and often the fastest. Create win-win conditions with your manager or team. At Instagram, I first carved out a new place for myself, and it benefited everyone around me on my new team.
For a lot of ADHD brains, the ideal environment:
Lets you explore new ideas and values your ability to make creative connections
Has just enough structure to keep you from losing the plot, and enough flexibility that you don't feel boxed in
Includes social interaction and collaboration to keep your momentum going
Fit the environment to you, not the other way around.
This Week: For You
I’ve been heads down refining my 1:1 program, where we build out your ADHD skills profile and shape your goals, environment, and schedule to your unique strengths. No more contorting yourself to “how you should operate.”
Grab a quick 20-minute call, no commitment. We’ll chat to understand where you’re at, and you’ll leave with strategies you can apply immediately.
PS: AI Tools that Actually Work
In partnership with
If I had to recommend a single AI tool for ADHD, it would be Wispr. It is the most natural form of brain dumping I've come across, immediately breaks task paralysis, and actually doubles typing speed.
Lowest error rate on real dictation. Ahead of Google, OpenAI
Speech models love clean lab audio. Your real prompts don't sound like that. So Wispr Flow tested its in-house speech model, Canto, on 10 hours of real dictations from 2,300+ speakers.
The result: the lowest word error rate of every model tested, including models from Google, OpenAI, AssemblyAI and Deepgram. It also tied for the lowest error rate on LibriSpeech, a standard public benchmark.
For you, that means fewer fixes and longer, richer prompts. Speak your context, constraints and examples into ChatGPT or Claude, and Wispr Flow turns it into clean text in any app. Works on Mac, Windows, iPhone and Android.
Hi, I’m Kat! Welcome to my newsletter—your biweekly dose of strategies to work with your extra-interesting brain, not against it.
Were you forwarded this email? Click the button below to subscribe too!
Thanks for reading!
— Kat