There's a particular kind of exhaustion that doesn't come from the work itself.

It comes from everything around the work. The open-plan hum. The meeting that could have been a message. The brief delivered verbally, at speed, with no written follow-up. The unspoken rule that good people answer Slack within four minutes. For many people, none of this registers. For others, it's the whole day: hours spent translating themselves into a format the workplace can read, with whatever's left over going into the actual job.

Those people are often neurodivergent. ADHD, autism, dyslexia, dyspraxia, and the many brains that don't fit neatly under any label at all. And here's the uncomfortable part: the friction they feel usually isn't a flaw in them. It's a design decision someone made about how work should look, without realising they were designing for only one kind of mind.

The myth of the superpower

Let's get one thing out of the way. Neurodivergence is not a superpower.

It's a popular line, and it comes from a kind place. But it flattens real people into a motivational poster. It suggests every autistic person is a pattern-recognition genius and every ADHD brain is a fountain of creative brilliance, which quietly implies that if you aren't producing extraordinary results, you're doing neurodivergence wrong.

The truth is more ordinary and more useful. Different minds have different strengths and different costs. Someone who can hold an entire system in their head might struggle to switch between six small tasks before lunch. Someone who generates twenty ideas in ten minutes might find the eleventh admin form physically painful. Neither is better. Both are real. And both are shaped enormously by the environment they're placed in.

A fish isn't brilliant in water and broken on land. It's just a fish. The question is whether we keep building workplaces out of land.

Attention isn't a tap, it's a tide

One of the most useful ideas I've come across is monotropism: the theory that some minds tend to focus intensely on a small number of things at once, rather than spreading attention thinly across many. When those minds are locked in, the depth is extraordinary. Hours disappear. Problems that seemed impossible become obvious.

But pulling that attention out, to answer a "quick question" or jump into an unscheduled call, isn't a small ask. It's like being yanked out of deep water. The cost isn't the two-minute interruption; it's the forty minutes it takes to get back down.

Most workplaces treat attention like a tap you can turn on and off at will. For many neurodivergent people, it behaves more like a tide. You can't schedule it to the minute. You can only build the conditions where it's allowed to come in, and protect it when it does.

What actually helps

The good news is that the changes that help neurodivergent people most are rarely expensive, and almost never just for them. Design for the edges, and the middle gets better too. A few that consistently make a difference:

• Write it down. Every brief, every decision, every "as discussed." Spoken instructions vanish; written ones can be re-read at the pace your brain actually processes them. Nobody has ever complained that a brief was too clear.

• Default to asynchronous. Not everything needs a meeting. Recorded walkthroughs, shared documents and comment threads let people respond when their attention is available, not when the calendar says so.

• Protect deep-work blocks. Make long, uninterrupted stretches a team norm, not a personal eccentricity someone has to defend. Status lights, focus hours, "no-meeting" mornings. Whatever makes it legitimate.

• Let people control their senses. Noise-cancelling headphones without judgement. Softer lighting. A quiet corner. Cameras optional on calls. Sensory overload isn't fragility; it's a tax, and you can choose not to charge it.

• Judge the output, not the performance of work. If someone does their best thinking at 11pm or while pacing, the only question that matters is whether the work is good.

• Make the unwritten rules written. What does "urgent" actually mean here? When is it okay to say no? Hidden social rules are a maze for some brains. Draw the map.

The creative industry has a head start, if it wants it

Creative work has always quietly depended on non-linear minds. The person who sees the brand idea from a strange angle. The designer who notices the one-pixel misalignment nobody else could. The strategist who connects a retail problem to something they read about bees. These leaps don't come from people who think in tidy, sequential steps.

And yet the industry often runs on the opposite: chaotic open studios, back-to-back reviews, last-minute verbal changes, and a culture that mistakes being constantly available for being committed. We celebrate the output of different minds while building environments that burn them out.

It doesn't have to be that way. A studio can be designed as carefully as a brand. The rhythm of the week, the format of a brief, the shape of a feedback session: all of it is design. And design, done well, always starts with the question who is this actually for?

Different isn't a deficit

The goal isn't to make neurodivergent people better at pretending to be neurotypical. That's the exhausting translation work we started with, and it's costing us some of the most original thinking in the room.

The goal is to stop designing work around a single imaginary average brain, and start designing it around the real, varied, gloriously uneven people who actually do it. Light enters a prism as one beam and leaves as a spectrum. Nobody looks at that and calls the colours a problem.