4 Ways To Make Work Fit Your Unique Brain

This image, along with the other illustrations in this post, was created with Midjourney AI.

You deserve the working arrangements that work for you.

Whether it’s the start of a new project or the start of a new school year, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by a change in pace or the need to organize your next set of tasks.  Time management books and productivity apps can’t save us from overwhelm, because they assume we all work the same way.

Instead, you need to work in your own way. That’s true even if you don’t have ADHD, autism or some other neurodivergent identity. We all think, perceive and communicate in different ways, so what we need to thrive at work is going to vary from person to person.

You deserve the working arrangements and tools that support your quirky brain. You shouldn’t have to go through an expensive diagnostic process to get those supports, and you shouldn’t have to disclose your personal medical information to your boss, either—your boss should want to help you work your best!

That’s the vision for a neuroinclusive workplace that I shared on the CBC’s Just Asking this weekend. Listen to the episode here.

Today I am sharing four ways you can adjust your work to suit your own unique brain.

1.  Calibrate your sensory intake.

The modern workplace is a sensory minefield, from fluorescent lights to hallway chatter. Even home offices aren’t immune, as my neighbor’s dog will loudly attest.

To create a more sensory-friendly day, pay attention to when you feel stressed or overwhelmed. Do these moments coincide with intense visual concentration, noise, light, or smell? And are there sounds, smells, sights, or textures that help you recover by making you feel calm, happy or energized?

Then talk to your boss about the tactics and tools that will help you work better. For instance, “I find office noise distracting when writing those blog posts you love. Could we get noise-cancelling headphones?”

Focus on the productivity, innovation or service benefits—by telling your boss how the supports requesting will help you deliver better work—to make the case for an environment that is less taxing and more supportive.

2.  Tinker with your tools.

Somewhere out there is the person whose heart sings at the way Microsoft Outlook displays a calendar, or how Apple Reminders groups tasks. The rest of us have to accept working with tools that reflect how someone else likes to organize their day, see their priorities or organize their notes, and live our lives with that constant friction between how things work in our brains and how they work on our screens.

Or at least we used to. The reason I’m so obsessed with tools like Coda and Notion, as well as with automation apps like Zapier, IFTT and Make, is because they let us no-coders create our own productivity tools—so that you can set up your task list, calendar and email to reflect your own work process, thinking style and visual perception.

As I’ve recently argued, there is great value in this meta-work: It’s the work of bringing our working process into alignment with how we actually think. After reading that last newsletter, Tim Bishop asked me for more details on how I tackled the meta-work of overhauling my notetaking system, so I created this Coda doc with all the details.

Mission: PKM gives you a glimpse at how I’m making my notes feel more like my brain, and at how I use AI as part of the documentation process.

3.  Clear hurdles with the help of AI.

If your quirky brain sometimes gets in the way of accomplishing your core tasks—or hinders your next professional leap forward—it pays to think about how AI  can help you transcend what you think of as your own limitations.

In a new report from Harvard Business Review Analytics Services, Preparing for a Future Powered by Generative AI, I made the case for where AI will have the biggest impact:

“It isn’t about doing what you already do more easily, more quickly, and more efficiently. The real gains from generative AI come from doing today what you couldn’t do yesterday.”

We often hear about how the power of AI will have that impact at a global level, as we cure diseases or invent new kinds of machines. But it can also be true for each and every one of us, as we harness AI to address the places we each struggle.

You can see AI customization in action the Nailed It podcast. I showed hosts Zara Zhang and Daria Zhao how I use ChatGPT’s voice interface to get rolling on writing tasks that I would otherwise procrastinate or avoid.

4.  Manage your energy like ketchup.

The cultural convention of a 9-to-5, 40-hour, 5-day work week promotes the collective mythology that productivity is like a bottle of olive oil you can just uncap and drizzle onto your tasks as needed.

But productivity is more like an old-timey glass ketchup bottle. My grandfather used to quote what I now find is a Richard Armour poem:  Shake and shake the ketchup bottle /  None’ll come, and then a lot’ll.

That’s what work feels like to me, a lot of the time: I can bang on the bottom of the bottle all I want, but sometimes the next great idea or the next sentence are just stuck! (No, I haven’t tried the thing of sticking a butter knife in my ear to see if I can scrape the sentence out.)

So that’s when I have to shake the bottle by going for a walk and talking to ChatGPT, or knitting a few rows while I pause and stew, or switching tasks to something that uses a different part of my brain, or even just taking a break.

Learning to recognize, work with and recharge your energy is essential to making the most of your unique brain. It can only make magic if you feed it when it’s hungry, and tuck it in for a rest when it’s tired.

Working your way helps everyone.

When you embrace tactics like recalibrating your sensory environment or managing your own battery, your work becomes less tiring and more enjoyable. Imagine what it would feel like to get to the end of a day that you’ve spent working in a groove that really feels like you, instead of forcing your brain into whatever box your boss and IT team have created.

Far from being selfish, adapting your work to your own strengths is the very best thing you can do for your boss and for your team. It’s how you’ll be able to bring your full energy and talents to the table, instead of just the portion that fits into the box you were given.

And it’s how you’ll help create a workplace that’s more inclusive for everybody.