Background
Diagnosed with ADHD at 34, eight years into a sysadmin career in healthcare IT. The diagnosis explained a pattern: outstanding in a crisis, drowning in routine. My performance reviews literally alternated between 'exceptional under pressure' and 'needs to improve consistency'.
The challenge
Nobody warns you that the hard part of ops isn't the outage - it's the maintenance window paperwork three weeks later. I hyperfocus through a major incident, get praised, then spend the next fortnight unable to start a ten-minute patching ticket. The shame spiral is real: the task gets more overdue, which makes it harder to start, which makes it more overdue.
A list is a graveyard; a 25-minute timer is a race.
What helped
- Body doubling on video calls. Two of us silently doing our own ticket queues on a call. Sounds absurd. Works instantly.
- Timeboxing with visible timers, not to-do lists. A list is a graveyard; a 25-minute timer is a race.
- Automating the boring parts - I turned the patching runbook into a script partly so the task became 'write a script' (interesting) instead of 'follow 14 steps' (impossible).
- Asking for the on-call shifts others hate. Trading routine work for crisis work made both sides happier.
Advice for others
Design your role around your brain where you can, instead of spending all your energy compensating. And if you alternate between 'hero' and 'problem employee' on reviews, that's a pattern worth taking to a professional - it took me eight years too long.
Sound familiar?
The forum has a room for exactly this conversation: swap tactics, ask the question you can’t ask at work, or just say “same”.
