Can't Switch Off After Work: ADHD and Taking Work Home

I have no working hours. Because I run my own company, nobody tells me "that's it, go home." This began as a freedom and then turned into work that never ends.

I shut down the computer. While cooking, a missing link in a brand's content strategy comes to mind. I pick up the phone and note it down. While noting it down I see a message. While replying to the message I open a data report. I look up and it is midnight and I am in the kitchen, standing, looking at a spreadsheet.

The next morning I remember the work I did that night but I do not remember the evening.

In recent months I had written that I was worn out from trying to keep up with everything and that I wanted to slow down. The hardest part of that slowing down was this: not leaving work, but getting work to leave me.

Disconnecting has a name

This subject has long been studied in occupational psychology. Sonnentag and Fritz developed a scale to measure how employees recover after working hours and showed that recovery consists of four separate experiences: psychologically detaching from work, relaxing, mastering something new, and having control over free time (Sonnentag and Fritz, 2007).

The first of these four, psychological detachment, is not the same thing as being physically away from work. If you sit at home thinking about work, you have not detached. If you check your email on holiday, neither.

Not being able to detach has a cost. In a study by Sonnentag and colleagues that collected data from both employees and their spouses, not being able to disconnect mentally from work played a mediating role in the relationship between workload and emotional exhaustion and need for recovery (Sonnentag et al., 2010).

If you think about work even when you are not doing any after hours, you are actually still working. You just aren't being paid.

The night of unfinished work

There is also the sleep side, and it is the most visible one in me.

Syrek and colleagues followed employees for weeks and looked at the sleep of those who entered the weekend with unfinished work. Unfinished tasks led to negative and emotional work-related thoughts, that is, an inner talk that keeps going round and round, and this disrupted weekend sleep (Syrek et al., 2017).

In ADHD the number of unfinished tasks is usually high. In the glossary this is called an open loop. Every unfinished task means one more thought spinning when I get into bed at night.

I explained how I close the day, that is, writing a closing list and tomorrow's first task, in the article on closing the day. Here I want to look more at why that closing does not hold for me.

How ADHD makes this picture heavier

Hyperfocus opens in the evening. My attention, which scatters during the day, can lock onto a task in the evening, in the quiet, when notifications are fewer. In a study with adults, those with higher ADHD symptoms reported more hyperfocus, both in general and in school, hobbies and in front of screens (Hupfeld et al., 2019). A hyperfocus that starts in the evening means a night in which time is not felt and the body is forgotten. There is a broader article on hyperfocus here.

Ideas come off schedule. In ADHD mind wandering is more frequent and work ideas do not fit working hours. They come in the shower, while walking, while lying down. For fear of losing them I want to write them down immediately, and the moment I write, I am back at work.

The transition is hard. Going from work to home is a transition too, and transitions are expensive in ADHD. To leave one job and enter another mode, the mind has to let go of the old job. The work is finished but the mind is not.

Time is not felt. What I call "I'll look for five minutes" turns into two hours. I notice when the evening ended only when tiredness comes.

The line between work and home

Ashforth, Kreiner and Fugate proposed that people arrange their work and home roles along a spectrum. At one end there is an arrangement that separates work and home sharply, at the other end one that interweaves the two. Separating reduces the blurring between roles but makes moving between roles harder. Interweaving makes the transition easier but makes it harder to protect the boundary (Ashforth et al., 2000).

Reading this framework, I saw my own situation more clearly. Working from home, on my own hours, reachable at any moment by phone had moved me almost entirely to the interwoven end. Entering work was very easy. Leaving work never happened.

For someone with ADHD the appeal of an interwoven arrangement is great, because it lowers the cost of transition. But the same arrangement makes detaching almost impossible. I decided to take a few steps toward separating.

Boundaries I find worth trying

A physical closing movement. Shutting down the computer is not enough, because the phone is still in my hand. I shut down the computer and put it in the bag, and I move the work papers on the desk into a box. When no work is left in sight, it comes to mind less too.

Closing the work zone on the phone. I use a focus setting that turns off work app notifications at a certain time in the evening. The exceptions list is very short. This keeps me from remaking the decision every evening.

An idea box, without going back to work. To avoid losing ideas that come in the evening, there is a single notes file. The rule is this: I write only one sentence there, and I open nothing else. The idea is safe, and the evening is safe.

Not ending the day with a hyperfocus task. I now know that if I choose a task I can sink into, like data analysis or a strategy draft, as the day's last task, the evening will be gone. As the last task I put something short, with a clear ending, and boring: an invoice, a filing, a reply. When it is finished the mind lets go by itself.

A bridge for the transition. Instead of going straight from work to something home-related, I do a small thing in between: a short walk, the same song, changing clothes. The body understands that it has moved from one room to another.

Allowing some evenings. Forbidding every evening is not sustainable for me. Sometimes I really want to work. So I deliberately mark one or two evenings a week in advance as a "work evening." An evening decided beforehand feels very different from an evening lost to impulse.

The detachment question. Before going to bed in the evening, ask yourself a single question: "Did I spend at least one hour this evening without thinking about work at all?" Write the answer on a one-week chart. Not being able to detach often goes unnoticed, because it looks like you are not working. When the number becomes visible, the pattern becomes visible too.

When nobody says "enough"

For those who run their own business or work freelance this matter is even sharper. In a workplace there are at least signals from outside, like the office closing, the team leaving, working hours ending. When you work for yourself, you have to produce all of these signals yourself.

There is also the expectation of the other side. When I once replied immediately to a message that came at eleven at night, the next message came at the same hour. The expectation is built by my behavior.

That is why I started writing my working hours clearly to the people I work with: which hours I am reachable, which channel to use in an emergency, when I will get back to the rest of the messages. Saying this felt at first like confessing a flaw. Yet it is the professional side of the work; working with someone who has limits is more predictable than working with someone who answers at all hours but then burns out. Mostly nobody objected to these limits.

The sleep and burnout side

The heaviest bill of taking work home is paid by sleep. I explained that sleep already comes late in ADHD and the reasons for it in the article on ADHD and sleep. A job that runs until midnight starts the next day's attention with a deficit.

When not being able to detach continues for a long time it can turn into burnout. The finding of Sonnentag and colleagues also points in this direction. I gathered the symptoms and the recovery side in the article on burnout. If you cannot close down in the evenings at all, if your sleep pattern has been disrupted for a long time, and if this state is seriously reflected in your work and life, talking about it with a specialist is a good step.

Still, on some evenings I find myself looking at a spreadsheet in the kitchen. I now know that this is not a passion but a lack of boundary. I redraw the boundary every evening.