ADHD is part of my story. It belongs here alongside the products, the books and the violin, because the person doing the work does not disappear when the meeting starts.
I care about a question that product teams can easily skip: how much effort does a system demand before somebody can do the thing they came to do? A tool can be technically simple and still make the person using it keep too much in their head.
Make the next step visible
Consider an illustrative task: preparing for a product review. “Prepare for the review” sounds like an instruction. It is actually a small project wearing a false moustache. Which decision needs to be made? What evidence is missing? Who needs to see it? What does finished look like?
A clearer starting point is one visible action: write the decision the meeting must resolve. Then collect the evidence for that decision. Then identify the uncertainty. This is a proposed way to structure work, not a claim that one routine suits everyone with ADHD.
There is a product lesson here too. If the next action is buried behind five tabs, a vague label and a notification that vanishes, the interface has outsourced its organisation to the user.
| Vague task | Visible next action | Stopping point |
|---|---|---|
| Prepare the review | Write the decision to resolve | One clear decision statement |
| Collect everything | Find evidence for that decision | Evidence and gaps are separated |
| Keep improving it | Ask for a decision | Owner and next step agreed |
Clarity is a design choice
A useful workspace can keep the current task, its next action and its stopping point close together. A useful meeting invitation can explain the decision it needs, rather than simply announcing that a meeting will happen. Revolutionary technology, apparently: a sentence with a purpose.
These are design proposals, not medical advice or a universal account of ADHD. Different people need different support. I do not want a personal label to become an excuse for assuming that everyone thinks, works or struggles in the same way.
The same principle matters when making product decisions early: make the important choices explicit, rather than expecting people to reconstruct them from scattered conversations.
The person comes before the productivity story
It is tempting to package every difference as a productivity advantage. I would rather leave room for a person to be a person. Not every part of a life needs to justify itself with a dashboard.
AI adds another version of this temptation. It can produce a plan instantly, but producing more instructions does not necessarily make the next step clearer. The useful question is whether the tool reduces the work of getting started or simply gives somebody a longer list.
That is the thread connecting this personal story to AI that behaves in the real world. Start with the human being and the actual difficulty. Then decide what the product should do.
For teams turning this into interface decisions, W3C’s guidance on clear step-by-step instructions is a useful practical resource. It recommends breaking instructions into steps without leaving out the supposedly obvious ones.
