How I Managed ADHD Without Meds

I’ve known I had ADHD since 2002, but I didn’t receive a diagnosis or medication until 2023. In the meantime, here’s how I coped:

It really takes a book to cover this, and several people have written such books. But, to summarize:

Choose the Right Job:

At the beginning of my ADHD journey, I was working in Quality Assurance for software. This was the wrong job for me — QA is tedious and boring. I was good at finding problems, and good at the detail work of explaining them, but the discipline of QA is tedious, and (since you're essentially pointing out defects in your coworkers' work) created too much social friction on top of an already challenging position.

I ended up switching to project management. PM has a lot more human interaction — people asking things of you — than QA does, and those demands helped me stay on task.

Marry the Right Person:

Many neurodivergent people have relationship problems because, let's face it, our neurotype can be annoying. I have always had to choose my partners carefully.

The Day-to-Day Hacks:

For the day-to-day stuff, I always had what I called "a collection of hacks" (more on this at the end of the article). This is a large, and ever-evolving library. But here’s the broad brushstrokes, in order of effectiveness:

Lifestyle:

Lots of physical exercise!

At my (unmedicated) peak, I was only accepting jobs in San Francisco, where I lived. San Francisco is a walkable city, and I developed a routine of rolling out of bed, pulling on an outfit (assembled the night before) grabbing a bag (packed the night before) and getting out the door and halfway down the road before my sleepy mind could wake up and protest that she really didn't feel like exercising this morning. 

This gave me an hour of reliable exercise. After a few mistakes (while working out my morning setup) I was never late (walking is extremely predictable) and I never once missed a workout, because it was also my commute. Best life hack I ever had, hands-down.

I'd also use my lunch hour for a long walk instead of eating — slipping out at my morning break to buy a big salad and eating half at my desk in the morning and half in the afternoon. Using lunch to exercise helped keep me awake and focused. I would also do this in-between breaks: the open-plan office occupied an entire floor and I could squeeze in a quarter-mile of walking going to the bathroom. 

Nutrition:

Other people have gone into more detail on this, and I was doing a far-from-perfect job of it myself, but essentially: lots of plants, little or no processed food, light on meat and other animal products (which may contain hormones), minimal sugar, minimal alcohol, and a calorie count that kept my BMI under 20.

Social support. Your mileage may vary, but a large part of remaining functional was figuring out how much — and what kind — of social interaction I needed, and arranging my life to make sure I got it.

St. John's Wort. I was taking this for depression (the care for which, conveniently, overlaps with a lot of these ADHD measures) — so again, your mileage may vary. But I took it more or less constantly during the years I had a working collection of hacks.

Most importantly: Scrum

This is the foundation of both my development and maintenance, which later became the method I coach with (Agile4ADHD). Scrum is the framework through which my entire library and support system was built. I’ve maintained a daily backlog and retrospective cycle for most of my working life and for a long time it literally made the difference between whether I was employable or not.

Scrum was invented as an engineering discipline, but its capacity to keep you moving forward despite interruption, uncertainty, and changing circumstances makes it an excellent tool for attention deficit disorder. I strongly recommend Scrum over traditional planning if you're ADHD. It does not require the steady state most other methodologies assume. There’s a ton of free Scum resources out there, and AI can help explain the concepts as they apply to your life. 

(I know this sounds like talking myself out of a job, but if you’ve ever had to substitute ai for human help, you already know why telling people this doesn’t stop them from needing me.)

How to build a library of hacks and POS with Scrum:

By “hacks”, I mean tricks like choosing my outfit and packing my work bag the night before so I could get out the door in the morning with a minimum of friction. 

There are literally hundreds if not thousands of descriptions and tutorials out there on various ADHD hacks. Grab a book/podcast/video playlist, build yourself a backlog (I leave it to you to educate yourself about backlogs), and work your way through a series of experiments. Keep the hacks that work, discard the hacks that don’t. Don’t neglect your retrospectives (ditto). Eventually you end up with what I call a “Personal Operating System” (lots of writing about this elsewhere on my blog) that will support you.

This will need ongoing adjustment and maintenance as hacks stop working or your situation changes. But at minimum you will not be starting from scratch. If things get mysteriously hard, run an audit and retrospectives —you’ll generally notice an obvious fix you were too deep in the weeds or too busy to notice.

Hope that helps.