I run a marketing agency and I have ADHD

I have ADHD.

For a long time I was not especially interested in making that part of my professional identity. Not because I was embarrassed by it, but because I did not want it to become a neat explanation for everything I did well or badly.

I still do not.

ADHD does not make me a better marketer by default. It does not make me creative every day. It does not turn missed emails into a charming founder quirk. And it definitely does not mean every chaotic behaviour should be celebrated as a superpower.

But it is part of how I work, how I think and how I have built the systems around me. Ignoring that would be equally dishonest.

The useful bit is the way ideas connect

Marketing is a strange job because very few problems live neatly inside one box.

A PPC problem might actually be a proposition problem. A content problem might be a confidence problem. A sales problem might begin with who marketing is attracting. A website issue might only become obvious after listening to customer calls.

My brain is good at holding several of those things at once. I can be looking at data, thinking about a sentence somebody used in a sales call, remembering a competitor ad I saw three weeks ago and connecting it to something in the customer journey.

That is useful. Particularly in strategy work, where the answer is often sitting between departments rather than inside one of them.

It is also why I can become absurdly interested in a problem. If something catches, I want to pull it apart, follow every branch and understand how the pieces connect.

That energy has helped me build an agency, co-found software, host a podcast and write a book. It has also led me to open fourteen tabs in order to answer one apparently simple question.

The cost is less photogenic

The harder part is inconsistency.

I can spend three hours completely absorbed in a difficult strategy problem, then find a two-line admin task almost physically difficult to start.

I can remember a tiny detail from a conversation six months ago and forget why I walked into a room. I can generate ten new ideas before lunch and then need a system to make sure any of them actually survive until Friday.

And yes, I can leave a perfectly reasonable email unanswered for longer than is reasonable.

Running a business magnifies that. The founder's brain is allowed to be messy. The business cannot be.

People need decisions. Clients need replies. The team needs priorities that do not change because I had an exciting thought in the shower.

The spreadsheets are scaffolding

There is a line on my website that probably explains this better than anything else: the spreadsheets are not a personality trait. They are scaffolding.

I like systems because I need them.

Project boards, checklists, dashboards, documented processes, clear ownership, recurring meetings, automation. From the outside, that can look like I am naturally organised.

I am not. I have built organisation around a brain that does not reliably supply it on demand.

That distinction matters because one of the worst things you can do is build a working life around the person you think you should be.

I used to rely far too heavily on memory, urgency and adrenaline. It works brilliantly right up until it does not. It also creates a business where everybody else has to absorb your inconsistency.

So now I try to externalise things. If it matters, it goes somewhere. If somebody else needs to know it, it cannot live only in my head. If a process repeats, we try to give it a home.

I have also stopped apologising for needing to work differently

There is a version of professionalism that is basically performance. Sit still. Work in the approved order. Respond to everything immediately. Keep one train of thought at a time. Make your calendar look calm.

That has never been how my best work happens.

My best work usually comes from intensity, conversation, scribbling things down, jumping between the commercial problem and the customer problem, then creating enough structure afterwards to make the thinking usable by somebody else.

I have stopped trying to sand all of that off.

The responsibility is not to look organised. The responsibility is to make sure the people around me are not damaged by the bits where I am not.

That means communicating. It means boundaries. It means systems. It means hiring people who are better than me at things I am bad at and not secretly resenting them for being different.

ADHD is not my brand. Honesty probably is.

I do not want to build a personal brand where every story ends with, 'because ADHD'.

I am a marketer who has ADHD, not an ADHD influencer who happens to run an agency.

But I do think talking about it matters because businesses are full of people who have quietly designed elaborate coping mechanisms and still assume everyone else finds the basics easy.

Sometimes the useful thing is not another productivity hack. It is permission to build a system that fits the way you actually work.

There are days when ADHD feels like energy, curiosity and rapid pattern recognition. There are days when it feels like friction.

Both are true.

I am not interested in pretending the difficult bits are secretly gifts. I am interested in understanding them well enough that they do not get to run the business.

And if that requires another spreadsheet, I am fine with that.