Changing Jobs Often in ADHD: Boredom or a Poor Fit?

The first weeks of a new job, a new project, always pass for me with the same brightness. Everything is to be learned, every conversation teaches something, waking up in the morning is easy. I build systems in my head, I write down ideas at night.

Then one day, a day I cannot say exactly when it was, the same job turns grey. What I have to do has not changed. What has changed is that I have to lift something inside me to do it.

Sometimes a person takes that greyness for the job itself and begins to look at the next one.

In this article I want to talk about that moment: leaving when bored. I talked about which jobs suit ADHD better in a separate article; here, rather than choosing a job, I look at the decision to leave a job itself.

What the research says and does not say

Let me put the data first, because the sentence "people with ADHD always change jobs" is both true and incomplete.

A study that followed people diagnosed with ADHD in childhood up to young adulthood found clear differences in working life when it compared them with a control group (Kuriyan et al., 2013). The share of those who had been fired at least once was 61 percent in the ADHD group and 43 percent in the control group. Those who had quit because they did not like the job were 53 percent in the ADHD group and 36 percent in the control group. For being fired, an ADHD diagnosis and academic problems during the school years turned out to be decisive.

But the same study has this too: there was no difference between the two groups in the total number of jobs. These people, who had reached their thirties, had on average changed jobs a similar number of times.

This detail changed a question that stayed with me for a long time. Perhaps the real issue is how the jobs end. Am I leaving of my own will, planned and toward somewhere, or bored, burnt out or fired?

The long-term follow-up study by Barkley and colleagues draws a similar picture: young adults who were hyperactive in childhood had been fired more, and employers rated their job performance lower and their ADHD symptoms at work higher (Barkley et al., 2006). In this study, symptoms at work are reported to predict both performance and the risk of being fired.

I need to leave a note here. The samples of these two studies consist of people who were clinically diagnosed in childhood and whose symptoms were visible. Someone like me, diagnosed late and with a quiet presentation, is not exactly inside that picture. Still, the pattern is familiar.

The same person, a different job

The study that made me think most was one that looks at narrative rather than numbers.

Lasky and colleagues held interviews about work experience with 125 young adults who had been diagnosed with ADHD as children (Lasky et al., 2016). More than half of the participants described their symptoms as changing with context: in some jobs they had almost no trouble, and in others they said they scattered. The features of jobs that did them good were also striking: a certain difficulty and pressure, novelty and variety, a fast pace, physical and hands-on work, real interest in the subject.

This makes it possible to read changing jobs often in two different ways.

First reading: the person seeks stimulation, when the novelty ends the interest ends too, and they run to the next novelty. In the glossary there is a concept close to this: the fading of novelty.

Second reading: the person is leaving a structure that does not suit them and looking for one that does. The reason a job looks grey after a year can also be that the job really is not for you.

Being bored does not always mean running away. Sometimes it is an accurate measurement.

The hard part is that the two feel the same from the inside. In both the morning gets heavier, in both looking at other listings gives the same small excitement.

The cost of leaving

In the glossary this pattern is called the career zigzag. The name is a little cute but the cost is real.

Every new beginning resets part of what has built up: relationships, knowledge of the institution, trust earned over years. There is also an invisible cost: beginnings themselves are expensive. They mean new systems, new people, new rules. The brightness of the first months is in fact the brightness of an energy expenditure too high to sustain for long.

The long-term picture needs to be looked at too. In a study of 414 clinically diagnosed adults in Norway, the share of those who reported working was 24 percent, against 79 percent in a control group from the general population (Halmøy et al., 2009). This is a sample that applied to a clinic and probably sought help because they were struggling; it does not represent all adults with ADHD. But it reminds us that being tossed from one job to another does not always end with moving up. In the same study, having received treatment in childhood was the strongest predictor of being employed in adulthood.

How this looks in my own work

I have my own company, and this gives me a strange freedom: I can change the inside of the work without changing the job. Each project in digital strategy is a different brand, different data, a different question. I now understand better why this structure suits me so well; novelty is in the definition of the job.

But the same pattern works here too, only in another guise. A new service idea, a new type of project, a new field... When I reach the boring but necessary part of the current work, I notice my mind sliding to the next bright thing. I am not changing jobs but the urge to change jobs turns into the urge to start something new. I think this comes from the same root as what I described in the article the hobby graveyard.

The questions I ask before leaving

To slow down the moment of decision I built myself a list. Its aim is not to bind me to a conclusion; it is to separate the source of the greyness.

Can I write in one sentence what has faded? "I'm bored" is not enough information. "I'm bored of preparing the same report every month" and "I'm learning nothing in this job" call for different decisions. The first can be solved by changing a part of the job, the second perhaps cannot.

Is what has faded the job or the novelty? I ask myself this: even if it is not as it was in the first month, compared with how I was a year ago, do I still find this job interesting? If the answer is yes, what is missing may be novelty, and novelty can be produced inside the job too: a new responsibility, a new project, handing part of the job to someone else.

What are my sleep, load and season like? In a period when I am burnt out, every job looks grey. I had written that in recent months I got tired trying to keep up with everything; I now look more cautiously at the decisions I made in that period. Making the decision to get out of burnout while burnt out is risky. I gathered its signs in the burnout article.

What does the place I am going to do differently? The appeal of a new job comes largely from its not being known yet. It helps to look at the features in Lasky and colleagues' list and ask concretely: is the new job more varied, does it give faster feedback, is it a field I really care about? Or is it just new?

The thirty-day rule. When the urge to resign or drop everything comes, write the decision into a calendar and ask the same questions again thirty days later. In that time applying and researching are allowed; taking an irreversible step is not. If the urge still stands with the same sentence after thirty days, it is probably more than an urge.

If you are going, how to go

Sometimes after all the questions the answer is still "go." Then the manner of going matters too.

In ADHD the riskiest exit is a decision made suddenly one morning. A resignation message written after a bad meeting, a door shut in a moment of anger. In the glossary its name is sudden decision: the decision sometimes turns out right, the process is still risky.

The exit routine I find worth trying consists of three steps. First, deciding where I am going, or at least the direction; seeing the next step instead of jumping into a void. Then pouring unfinished jobs into a list and making them handoverable, because in ADHD what is most easily forgotten when leaving a job is the mess left behind. Last, protecting relationships: a short thank-you, a clear handover note. The business world is small and the door you close today can be the door you want to open in a few years.

Staying is not always a virtue either

I should say that this article is not saying "change jobs." Staying in a job that does not fit and trying to correct yourself also has a heavy cost. Sometimes leaving is the right decision, sometimes the best decision of a life.

What changed for me is that I no longer look at the urge to leave as a character flaw. I look at it as a signal. The signal sometimes says "this place is not for you," sometimes "the novelty is over, you need to build something." Telling the two apart takes a few weeks. Those few weeks feel like the cheapest investment I have made over the years.