Have you ever assigned a direct report a task and said “Don't spend more than an hour on it”? Well, here's why that might not be the right thing to say to someone who's neurodivergent.

I – and many other neurodivergent people, particularly those with ADHD – suffer* with something called time blindness. I genuinely do not know how long it takes me to do pretty much any task. Now, you might say “You could just look at the clock, see what time it is when you start doing the task, and then see what time it is when you finish doing the task.” But there are a number of problems with that.

Firstly, the chances are, by the time it gets to the end of the task, I'll have forgotten that I was supposed to be looking at the clock and only remember several hours later, by which point my calculations will be useless. Of course, I could start setting timers to work out how long tasks take, but that leads us to our second problem, which is that I have a tendency to flit between tasks. My brain just works better that way.

Now, I spent a long time trying to stop myself from doing that. I thought, “This isn't a helpful or productive way to work. I will be so much better at my job if I just knuckle down and do one thing at a time.” But actually, it didn't help me be more productive. I am much more productive when I allow my brain to go to the things that it's drawn to.

And lastly, when we're telling someone to only spend an hour on a piece of work, we're not really talking about the unit of time. We're talking about how much effort we want them to put into it. So, the best thing to do here (instead of trying to get a neurodivergent person to train their brain to do something that it just fundamentally doesn't) is to think of a scale of effort.

So what does that look like? Something I used with a former manager was a scale based on percentages. What percentage of my effort does each task need? Is this something that only really needs my 30% versus my 80%?

And it is very important to qualify what these different percentages look like. What does 100% effort look like? Because for a lot of neurodivergent people, that will mean forsaking all other things – potentially including eating, sleeping, and basic life tasks. And that's not really something that you want them doing.

Make sure you agree on the scale, because what you think 100% looks like may be closer to their 75–80%. So if that's what they think that level of effort should be called, use those terms. That way, your neurodivergent direct reports aren't going to get confused about the amount of effort you're actually asking of them – or burnt out by putting in far more than is needed.

*I usually avoid using the word ‘suffer’ when it comes to neurodiversity and disability as a whole, but time blindness is one of those things that, in a workplace context, can be really debilitating.