Bandwidth
An Executive’s Field Manual for ADHD at the Top
Long enough to cover the whole thing, short enough that you will actually finish it. I wrote it under a pseudonym because I can be more honest that way, and because I still hold the job it describes. It is a manual in the plain sense: numbered, cross-referenced, meant to be written in. I have left out anything that reads like motivation, on the grounds that I would have skipped it too.
Buy the book — £24 Direct via Gumroad. VAT handled at checkout.
The chapters
- §01 The Inversion
The argument: seniority makes this easier, and control of the diary is why. What breaks the received wisdom, and what to do in your first protected week.
- §02 Working With, Not Against
The working relationship with your own brain: the ADHD tax paid on purpose, grounding that survives a boardroom, body doubling stripped of its student framing.
- §03 The Energy Economy
Energy as the scarce resource, not time: the hyperfocus tax, the early warning catalog, the strategic reserve, and the sofa-tea paradox resolved by compartmentalisation.
- §04 Meetings, Reframed
Meetings redesigned around a brain that runs them better than it sits through them: rotating leadership, the note-taking system, “let’s percolate”, the 10-minute quick chat.
- §05 Inbox, Slack, and the Message Tax
The message tax measured honestly, then capped: windows, triage, and the end of the always-open inbox.
- §06 Decisions and the Dopamine Economy
Decisions and the dopamine economy: the dopamine kill, premature announcement, and pricing novelty into how you choose.
- §07 Leading a Team With This Brain
Leading a team with this brain: proceed until apprehended, risk of the week, the 5% passion-project culture, the two-archetype framework, the stinging nettle.
- §08 The Long Game
The long game: burnout arithmetic, the systems that survive a bad quarter, and what the diary looks like five years on.
A specimen
From Chapter 1, The Inversion. The best case I can make for the book is to let you read a little of it.
The standard story about ADHD and work assumes you are junior. It assumes someone is measuring you on the things a junior is measured on: hours at the desk, an inbox kept clear, arriving and leaving on time, looking busy in the approved way. Every piece of advice built on that assumption quietly falls apart as you climb, because the thing that was punishing you was never the work. It was the lack of control over how the work got done.
I want to make the counter-claim early and without hedging, because it is the spine of this book. Being more senior can make you less stressed, not more, because you gain control over your time, your diary, and your own availability. The Inversion is real. The higher I have gone, the more the job has fitted the brain rather than fought it.
I did not always believe this, and the reason I believe it now is that I remember the opposite so clearly.
My first proper job was in customer service, in the insurance section of a well-known bank. After two weeks of data entry I did something that, looking back, was the first act of self-advocacy in my career, though I had no language for it then. I did not go to my manager. I went over her head, to the Head of Department, and told her plainly that I could not keep doing this — that the work was making me feel ill.
3
I am still grateful to that woman for hearing me out and not judging me for it. She moved me to a role in mortgages that was slightly less monotonous.
Slightly less was not enough. The job still hurt my brain, day in and day out, and left me anxious in a low, constant way I did not understand. I understand it now. I did not have the dopamine to keep starting small, repetitive tasks, one after another after another, and no amount of willpower manufactures that. I found ways to switch off, to be a little less present, to survive it. But it was only ever a matter of time before I would have to leave and find somewhere new — for my sanity first, and my wallet second.
The pattern followed me through jobs I genuinely liked, too, which is how I know the problem was never the work. I enjoyed those roles. What I could not do was survive them in the approved posture. I found myself taking holidays not to relax and enjoy, but to recover. The more time I spent trapped at a desk, with the kind of workload that handcuffed me to it, the worse I felt, and the faster.
So I improvised. I started taking my laptop to other corners of the office, then out to cafés and libraries (this was before home working was ordinary), and it took the edge off, but it did not solve anything. I was medicating the conditions. I could not yet change them.
4
And I was slowly working out the real lesson underneath it all: that going full pelt all the time was a recipe for disaster, and that if I wanted any working life worth having, I would need to find a way of working with this brain rather than against it.
That is the before the rest of this book depends on. Hold it in mind. It is the brain that the standard advice is written for, trapped in the conditions that make it suffer.
Years later I stood in my office as a director for the first time, and something turned over in me.
5
What readers say
Nothing here yet, and I would rather show you nothing than something invented. Bandwidth launched quietly. As real readers write in, a few of them — anonymised, given who they are — will appear here.
What it is not
It is not a clinical text, and it is not a memoir. The terms in it — the hyperfocus tax, the strategic reserve, the stock response — are all defined for free in the concepts index. What the book adds is the joining-up: how they work together as one system, with the actual scripts and numbers I use. If the specimen above did not sound like your own life, it probably will not, and you should keep your £24.