The cadence colleagues misread
Most AuDHD adults at the some-band run a roughly two-week cycle: a high-output stretch where everything is interesting and accessible, followed by a slower stretch where the same tasks feel impossible. The cycle isn’t about discipline. It’s about which operating system is dominant that week.
If you can predict the cycle, you can use it. Schedule the deep-work-heavy projects into the hot-fortnights, calendar the admin into the cooler fortnights. Most AuDHD adults at this band only see this pattern once they start tracking it.
Masking that’s invisible to your manager
Some-band AuDHD adults often mask competently enough that colleagues don’t see the cost. You appear fine in meetings, deliver fine in standups, and then unravel in private at 6 pm. The structural problem with this is that nobody asks for accommodations they look like they don’t need.
The first useful move is naming it — to yourself, then in writing, then in a quiet conversation with a manager you trust. Not as an apology, as a design constraint.
Three accommodations that actually move the needle
Most AuDHD accommodations are dressed up versions of the same three things.
- Two protected deep-work blocks per week, on the calendar, declined-by-default for the rest of the company. Two hours each is the floor.
- Camera off in non-presentation calls. The cognitive load of performing-presence-via-camera is non-trivial; written participation in chat is genuinely equivalent.
- Written task assignment. Verbal-only handoffs vanish through the working-memory gap; the same task in writing survives the week.
The meeting tax
Some-band AuDHD adults often discover that what costs them isn’t the work — it’s the meetings. If your week is mostly 30-minute calls, you’ll run a recovery debt regardless of how much your actual output is. The intervention is structural: cap meeting load by day, batch them onto two days, and protect the remaining three for the work the meetings are nominally about.
The eighteen-month itch in every role
Some-band work histories often show the same arc: brilliant first six months while the role is novel, a solid year as the autistic side systematises it, then a slide once the systems run themselves and the ADHD side is left unfed. Managers misread the slide as disengagement or promotion-hunger. It’s neither — the role simply stopped producing the inputs your reward system runs on.
The cheap fix is rotating the work, not the job: a new project, an adjacent skill, an internal transfer every eighteen months or so. At this band that cadence is usually enough — you rarely need the scorched-earth job change the itch is proposing.