ADHD and Freelancing: Irregular Work, Irregular Income

The first feeling of working for yourself is freedom. Nobody is waiting at the door at nine in the morning. The meetings are in your calendar, the jobs are your choice, and if your best working hour is midnight, you work at midnight.

The second feeling comes a little later: nobody is waiting at the door at nine in the morning.

The same sentence, a few months apart, means something entirely different.

I run my own company, and in this article I take freelancing and self-employment together, because from the ADHD point of view what they share is the same: the structure that comes from outside goes away. I had talked about which jobs suit ADHD better in a general article and touched on freelancing there briefly. Here I want to open up that brief mention.

Do people with ADHD really work for themselves more?

A little, yes. A study using more than seven thousand adults from a Swedish twin registry, replicated in Dutch students, found that as ADHD symptoms increased, the likelihood of working for oneself rose slightly. The side that carried the relationship was the hyperactivity symptoms; inattention symptoms alone were not related to self-employment (Verheul et al., 2016).

This finding struck me as interesting, because I am someone who stands more on the inattentive side. So I cannot easily apply this picture to my own story. Also the relationship is small. It is not enough to say "people with ADHD are born entrepreneurs."

The interviews Lasky and colleagues held with young adults diagnosed with ADHD offer another angle: more than half of the participants said their symptoms changed according to the work environment, and among the features they described as helping were novelty, a fast pace and genuine interest in the subject (Lasky et al., 2016). Freelancing provides some of these easily: every project is new, and you often choose the subjects yourself.

The freedom side is real

I do not want to belittle the good sides of freelancing.

In a group of workers followed for years in Australia, self-employed people reported less work stress than employees, and this difference was fully explained by the feeling of being able to control their work (Hessels et al., 2017). Being able to decide when, how and what you will do takes away an important part of stress.

For someone with ADHD the value of this control may be even greater. Choosing your own focus hour, avoiding long meetings, putting the boring job in your most energetic hour, working without open-office noise... These are accommodations that have to be negotiated one by one in a workplace. When you work for yourself, most of them come on their own.

The structurelessness side is real too

The same control comes back in another form. If nobody tells you when to start, starting is left entirely to your executive functions. And the place ADHD struggles most is exactly there.

When you work for yourself you do not only do the work. You are also the manager of the work, its accountant, its sales representative and its archivist. Writing proposals, issuing invoices, following payments, remembering the tax period, keeping in touch with old clients. Nearly all of these are boring, repetitive jobs with delayed rewards.

For a long time I thought these jobs were unimportant next to the "real work." Then I noticed that when these jobs are not done, the real work does not happen either.

Freelancing does not remove structure. It hands the responsibility for the structure entirely to you.

Irregular work, irregular income

There is a cycle freelancers know well: for a period you say yes to everything, you work every night, you cannot keep up. Then as soon as the work ends, silence comes, and in that silence looking for new work has never crossed your mind.

From my own experience, I see the places where this intersects with ADHD like this.

In the busy period the future is not visible. In a busy period all my attention goes to the job in front of me. What will happen three months from now falls into the "not now" region of time blindness. Building new work connections, returning to old ones, preparing proposals keep getting postponed.

In the silence panic begins. When the work ends, I suddenly try to do everything at once. This makes it easier for me to say yes to the first job that comes along without looking at the price. I described the price side in the article on asking for payment.

Money comes like a heap. In a salaried job, money comes in on the same day every month, in the same amount. When you work for yourself, a large payment comes one day, and then for weeks nothing comes. When a large payment arrives, the account looks full and spending becomes easy; at that moment you do not feel that this money belongs to the coming months, to taxes and to the quiet periods.

I have to state a limit here: I could not find a study that directly examines how income irregularity is experienced by freelancers with ADHD. This part comes not from research but from the known workings of the symptoms and from my own experience.

Building your own scaffolding

The study that made me think the most was a study not about ADHD but about independent workers.

Petriglieri, Ashford and Wrzesniewski held detailed interviews with people who had worked independently for many years. These people lived both anxiety and fulfillment intensely. Those who could cope with the insecurity of the work had built themselves a kind of "holding environment": they attached themselves to routines, places, people and a wider purpose (Petriglieri et al., 2019).

These four headings struck me as an almost ready-made list of external scaffolding for ADHD.

Routine. If nobody is waiting, I wait for myself. I do not have to start at the same time every day, but starting in the same way every day works: the same first movement, the same first file, the same first check. So as not to make the decision to start again every morning.

Place. Working at home is both freedom and a trap for me. On days when work and home are on the same desk, less work gets done and the work never ends. A particular desk, a particular room, or another place of work on some days of the week tells my mind "now it is work."

People. The least talked-about side of freelancing is loneliness. When there is nobody to work with, body doubling becomes very valuable: even if we are not doing the same work, working at the same time as someone makes starting easier.

Purpose. Remembering why I do this work keeps the boring administrative tasks from turning into a meaningless chore, a little. Issuing the invoice is part of keeping the work I build strategy for going.

Set-aside paths for money

The arrangement I find worth trying for irregular income is this:

• Incoming money goes straight to a business account. Every month I transfer the same amount to my personal account as a "salary." When a large payment arrives, my personal account does not swell. In the glossary the general name of this is the separate account method.
• A separate edge for taxes and obligations. From every payment I set aside a certain share at once. What the rate will be and which obligations there are is best clarified with an accountant for my own situation; I will not give a general rate here.
• The invoice on the day the work is finished. An invoice left for later is, with me, a lost invoice.
• A weekly work table. Once a week, ten minutes: what I am working on now, what is finishing soon, who I am talking to for the coming months. Looking at this table even in a busy period reduces the quiet period being a surprise.

A quiet-period list. On a day when you are not busy, write down what you will do when work slows: who you will write to, which old job you will go back to, which service you will update. When the work ends, instead of thinking in panic about what to do, you open the list. The decision has been made on a calm day.

The busy period also has a rule of its own. When jobs pile up, instead of answering every new offer immediately, I gather them all into one day and decide that day by looking at my calendar. The "yes"es given in a busy period always end up in the same place with me: the nights, the postponed invoices and no energy left to prepare the next quiet period. When estimating my capacity, I try to count not only the work but also the correspondence and the administrative tasks around the work.

I covered the general side of money management in the article on ADHD and money management.

Not for everyone

I do not want to recommend freelancing as a solution. For some people with ADHD, the fixed hours, fixed salary and deadlines from outside in a salaried job are much more protective. Building your own scaffolding is serious work, and while doing it there may be no energy left for the real work.

For me the real question is this: "Which structure am I taking from outside, which do I have to build myself, and do I have the strength to build it?"

Freedom is truly lovely. But with me it only feels like freedom when there is a scaffolding.