Meetings in ADHD: Why I Get Lost in Long Meetings

Forty minutes into the meeting I notice that my mind has gone somewhere else. I do not know when it went. The slide on the screen has changed, someone is looking at me, and there is a silence as if a question has been asked.

This moment is so familiar that I now expect it in advance. This article describes why that moment comes and the things I have tried to make meetings a little more livable with ADHD.

I gathered the general accommodations you can ask for at work, including a written meeting summary, in the article on ADHD at work. Here I look at the meeting itself, at the inside of that one hour.

Where the mind goes

We usually explain distraction in a meeting by a stimulus from outside: a notification, someone passing the window, a sound from the next desk. In me, most of the time nothing comes from outside. The mind just gets up and goes by itself.

In research this has a name: mind wandering. A review that treats ADHD from this angle proposes that excessive, spontaneously arising mind wandering is associated with ADHD. According to the authors, the insufficient regulation of the default mode network, which becomes active when the brain has no external task, may lay the ground both for this wandering and for inattention and difficulties in cognitive performance (Bozhilova et al., 2018). This is still a model and the mechanism cannot be considered settled. But it describes the experience well: nothing is pulling my attention anywhere; what is missing is something holding my attention in one place.

To get lost in a meeting, nothing has to come from outside. The mind's own rooms are attractive enough.

Why a meeting is one of the hardest settings

A meeting gathers several things ADHD struggles with into the same room:

Passive listening. If you are not the one speaking, there is no task to hold your attention. No movement, no output, no instant feedback.

Someone else sets the pace. When reading, you can reread a paragraph. In a meeting the sentence you missed does not come back. In the glossary this is called missing it while listening.

Spoken information. Decisions are taken by voice and they are lost by voice. Who will do what, by what date, in which file: all of it hangs in the air.

The rule of staying still. Fidgeting, standing up, spinning a pen are counted as against meeting etiquette. Yet for some of us these movements are where attention holds on.

The urge to take a turn. I know that if I do not say what comes to mind right away, I will forget it. If I say it, I will have interrupted someone. This dilemma sometimes eats more energy than the meeting itself.

Meetings cost everyone

It is also necessary not to make ADHD the only culprit of meetings. Studies looking at the relation of meeting load to employees' job attitudes and well-being treat meetings as a kind of interruption. This relation, however, varies with how dependent the work is on others, the quality of the meetings and the person's focus on getting work done (Rogelberg et al., 2006).

This finding showed me the following: a badly set up, long meeting with an unclear purpose tires everyone anyway. Someone with ADHD may experience this fatigue earlier and more visibly. And most of the things that improve a meeting help everyone.

Should the camera be on

Online meetings have a load of their own. In a field experiment in which a hundred employees were followed for four weeks, keeping the camera on was associated with daily fatigue, and the fatigue in turn reduced speaking up and participation in meetings (Shockley et al., 2021).

This study was not done specifically on ADHD. Even so, it touches a familiar place in me. With the camera on, part of my attention goes to what is being said, part to my own face, and part to the question "do I look attentive?" This adds a job of masking to the meeting.

Turning the camera off is not possible in every setting. When it is possible, especially in meetings where I am only a listener, I think asking for it is a legitimate request.

There is a small thing I try in meetings where the camera must stay on: hiding my own image from my screen. The other side keeps seeing me, but I stop watching myself. The share of my attention that goes to "how do I look" shrinks a little and more room is left for what is being said.

Does fidgeting spoil attention

There is an interesting finding that I need to report carefully. In a study with boys aged 8 to 12, with ADHD and typically developing, the children with ADHD who had higher levels of movement during working memory tasks performed markedly better, though they did not reach the level of typically developing children. In typically developing children, more movement lowered performance somewhat. The change in movement did not alter attentive behavior in either group (Sarver et al., 2015).

This study was done with children and cannot be carried directly over to an adult in a meeting room. But it is reason enough to question the assumption that "the person who fidgets is not listening." I described how hyperactivity turns inward in adulthood in the article on inner restlessness.

What I try in meetings

None of these makes a meeting easy. They thin out the moments of getting lost a little.

A pen in my hand, paper in front of me. Taking notes adds a task to listening. I do not try to write everything; three columns are enough: decision, what is expected of me, what I want to ask.

A single word to get a turn. When something comes to mind I write a single word instead of the whole sentence. When my turn comes, that word brings the idea back and I do not have to interrupt anyone.

Giving myself a role. Being the person who sums up the decisions out loud at the end of the meeting. This role ties my attention to what is being said from beginning to end, because at the end I will have to say something.

A quiet movement. Moving my foot under the table, holding a small object in my hand. In the glossary: fidget tool.

Five minutes after the meeting. Not scheduling meetings back to back. Moving from one meeting to another is, because of difficulty with transitions, a separate job for me.

Say so when you notice you are lost. Saying "I missed the last two minutes, could you repeat the decision in one sentence?" is far less risky than quietly guessing. Most of the time someone else in the room is relieved because they could not ask the same thing.

Before and after the meeting

The before and after are as decisive as the meeting itself. In most of the meetings where I get lost, I have walked into the room without knowing what I came for.

One question before going in. "What information or decision do I need to leave this meeting with?" I write the answer at the top of the paper. When my mind wanders, that is where I will return to. If there is no agenda, asking the person organizing the meeting is legitimate too: "What will we be deciding in this meeting?"

Choosing a seat. In in-person meetings, a place where I can turn my back to the door and window and can see the speakers. The less movement at the corner of my eye, the fewer doors my attention has to escape through.

The phone somewhere else. Even a phone lying face down on the table is a call. Having it in my bag or pocket makes it harder for my hand to reach for it in the middle of the meeting.

Five minutes as soon as I leave. In the first five minutes after the meeting I write three lines: the decision taken, the job expected of me, the date. I send these lines either to my own list or as a short message to the people concerned. After five minutes it is much harder to remember the same information, and after an hour it is mostly impossible.

Asking about what remains unclear right away. If I do not fully know what is expected of me when I leave the meeting, I ask in a one-sentence message that same day. Every uncertainty I was too embarrassed to ask about comes back a few days later as a job done wrong.

In online meetings I add one more thing to these: closing all the other windows before the meeting starts. An open e-mail tab takes my attention away without waiting for the fortieth minute of the meeting. Joining standing up works too when possible; small movements of the body hold attention more easily than freezing in front of the screen.

If you are the one setting up the meeting

When I am the one setting up the meeting in my own company, I can do other things too: sending the agenda in writing beforehand, keeping the time short, ending the meeting with a decision and putting that decision into writing right away.

I also noticed this: some meetings do not need to be meetings. A written update of a few lines gives the same information in less time and, even if attention drifts, can be gone back to and read.

Meetings will never be easy with ADHD. When I get lost at the fortieth minute I now try not to read it as a character flaw. I look at how many places to hold on to the room has given me.