The Inversion
The Inversion is the observation that seniority makes ADHD easier to live with, not harder — the opposite of what almost everyone assumes. The received wisdom says more responsibility means more chaos. In practice, the single variable that governs how ADHD behaves at work is control over your own diary, and seniority is how you get it. A managing director who decides when to take meetings, when to think and when to disappear has more room to work with this brain than any junior employee following someone else’s calendar.
The problem as you experience it
The standard account of ADHD and work runs in one direction: the higher you climb, the worse it must get. More reports, more meetings, more plates. If you cannot stay on top of an inbox, the reasoning goes, how will you stay on top of a company?
Senior people with ADHD know this account is wrong, because they are the counter-evidence. What breaks this brain is not responsibility. It is powerlessness over time — the calendar someone else fills, the open-plan noise you cannot leave, the eight back-to-back meetings accepted on your behalf. Those are the conditions of junior work. The condition did not get lighter as you rose; your control over the conditions did.
Most executives never collect the winnings. They run their diaries on habits inherited from twenty years of being managed — accepting every invitation, apologising for thinking time, treating structure as something done to them. The Inversion says: the diary is now yours. Behave like it.
The practice
Take the diary back formally, not aspirationally. I keep one entirely meeting-free day every week, and it is protected the way a board meeting is protected: it moves for genuine emergencies and nothing else. One day in five, the company runs without access to me, and the company has never noticed.
Plan tomorrow at the end of today. I do this with a trusted lieutenant in the last minutes of the working day — tomorrow’s three decisions, tomorrow’s one hard thing, said out loud to another person. It closes the open loops that would otherwise follow me home, and it means the morning starts with a plan made by yesterday’s calmer self.
Then defend your sharpest hours. Everyone with this brain has two or three of them a day and knows roughly where they live. Refuse meetings there. You do not owe anyone an explanation beyond “that time doesn’t work”; you are senior enough that no one asks twice.
None of this requires disclosure, permission or a policy. That is the point of the Inversion: the accommodations junior people have to request are, at your level, simply called a working style.