Bandwidth
An Executive’s Field Manual for ADHD at the Top
Around 30,000 words: long enough to hold a complete operating system, short enough to finish. Written by a serving UK managing director with ADHD, under a pseudonym, because the writing is franker that way. It is a manual in the literal sense — numbered, cross-referenced, meant to be marked up — and it assumes a reader who will skip anything that smells of motivation.
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 pitch for the book is the reading of it, so read some.
There is a conversation I have had perhaps a dozen times, always with the same shape. Somebody senior — a partner, a director, once a chief executive of a business considerably larger than mine — takes me to one side after a meeting, lowers their voice, and tells me they have ADHD. Then they wait, braced, for me to say something about coping.
Here is what I actually say: it gets easier from here. Nobody believes me the first time.
The assumption is that seniority means more — more people, more meetings, more consequences — and that more is precisely what this brain cannot manage. But the assumption misreads what was ever hard. I did not struggle in junior roles because the work was too complicated. I struggled because I had no control over the shape of my own day. The nine-thirty stand-up, the hot desk under the air-conditioning vent, the four hours of afternoon meetings booked by people who would never have to sit through them in my head: that was the difficulty. The work itself was the easy part. It usually is, for us.
Seniority hands you the one lever that matters, and it is not money and it is not status. It is the diary. The managing director decides when to be available, when to think, and when to be somewhere else entirely. I keep one day a week free of meetings and I protect it the way I protect a board meeting, which is to say absolutely. In four years, the company has not once needed me on that day badly enough to break it. Almost nobody at my level runs their calendar as if they own it. They run it on habits formed over twenty years of being managed, and then they wonder why the top feels like the middle, only louder.
That is the inversion this book rests on. The condition did not change when you were promoted. The terrain did. Everything that follows is about using the terrain.
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What it is not
It is not a clinical text, a memoir, or an argument that ADHD is secretly a gift. The terms it coins — the hyperfocus tax, the strategic reserve, the stock response — are all defined free in the concepts index; the book is where they connect into one system, with the scripts and numbers attached. If the specimen above did not sound like your life, save the £24.