Starting a New Job with ADHD: How the First 90 Days Go

Monday morning at nine you sit down at your desk. Within forty minutes you are told twenty names, four programs, a shared folder structure and the sentence "you can ask Selin about that later." By noon you remember the first three names, and one of those is doubtful. In the evening you go home with the feeling of "I am not going to be able to do this."

As I see it, most of that feeling comes not from you but from the situation. The first three months of a new job are, for ADHD, less about the difficulty of the work than about the difficulty of the information load. Three things really do lighten that load: noting everything in one place, saving up questions and asking them at set hours, and talking with your manager in the first weeks about how you work. Below I make these concrete.

Why the first week is so tiring

At a new job nothing is automatic. You learn one by one where the coffee machine is, which floor the meeting room is on, which form approves an invoice, who answers which kind of question. Each is small, all of them together are big. Working memory cannot hold this many pieces at the same time.

Working memory is one of the areas that many people with ADHD struggle with, and the international consensus statement counts difficulties in executive functions as a common part of ADHD (Faraone et al., 2021). I described what this looks like in daily life in the article on working memory and forgetfulness. That is why the exhaustion of the first week gets described by others as "I was overwhelmed," while in you it can be read as "something is wrong with me." In your place I would reject that reading from the start, and I would take the exhaustion not as inadequacy but as a measure of the load.

A distinction Barkley has stressed for years helps me here: in ADHD the problem is often not that you do not know what to do, but that the knowledge does not switch on at the moment it is needed. So the solution is not to fix the information more firmly in your head, but to keep it ready outside, where you need it. A notebook and a list do this job.

One notebook, one place

Pick one place from the first day. It can be a paper notebook or a single notes file on your phone, but let it be one. Start each day with the date. The layout I suggest has three headings.

People. Name, what they do, what to go to them for, and one detail. The detail can be something small like "she answers in the mornings" or "he is always late to meetings." If the company has an organization chart, take a photo of it and write your notes next to it.

How it is done. When someone shows you a procedure, do not try to keep up. Mark the step with a single word ("invoice, approval, second screen") and, when the demonstration is over, within ten minutes at the latest, write the steps out in your own sentences. This kind of self-recall has been shown to produce more lasting learning than rereading your notes (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006). The study was not done with adults with ADHD; it is general learning research, but its logic seems to suit this situation as well. Why writing while listening is hard I explained separately in the article on taking notes with ADHD.

My questions. Every question that comes to mind during the day goes here. We will use this heading in the next section.

Do not scatter your tasks inside this notebook. Let the task list sit in a separate, single, visible place. Why this works I explained in the article on the single list rule. At the end of the day, spending ten minutes on the last page of the notebook to write what you will do first tomorrow makes tomorrow morning's start easier. I covered this in detail in the article on the end-of-day shutdown.

Asking questions: at which time does it become embarrassing

At a new job, the thing put off most, I think, is asking questions. The sentence "she explained this last week" silences people. Yet in the first three months asking questions is not only normal, it is expected behavior. Colleagues mostly learn what a newcomer knows and does not know from their questions.

The hard part is how often you ask. Asking everything the moment it comes to mind interrupts the other person's work, and work that has been interrupted has been shown to be done both more slowly and with more stress (Mark et al., 2008). You cause a disturbance, and at the moment you get the answer you also lose the other thing in your head.

For this I suggest setting two hours. Say 11:30 and 16:00. Everything you wrote under My questions you ask together at those hours, or send as a single message. Urgent ones are outside this. And you copy the answer into your notebook right away, because instead of asking the same thing a second time, looking at your own notes puts both you and the other person at ease.

Some sentences make this easier for me:

• "This is how I understood it, is that right?" (More a confirmation than a question, and easy for the other side too.)
• "Could you send me this once in writing so I can put it in my notebook?"
• "I am asking about this step for the second time; from now on I will check my own notes."

Also, in the first week ask your manager: "Who should I go to for what?" That answer spreads the question load across the right people and spares you from constantly interrupting the same person.

The first meeting with your manager

In the first week, ask your manager for a half-hour meeting. Bring the agenda yourself, because the manager will be busy in the first week too. There are four things I would want to ask:

1. What would you want to see by the end of three months to say "this went well"?
2. Which tasks are the priority in the first months?
3. When I ask you questions, which way do you prefer: face to face, in writing, at set hours?
4. How often and in what form do you plan to give feedback?

I care especially about the fourth. Criticism lands heavier than expected for many people with ADHD, and it can get heavier still when it arrives as a surprise. Setting up a rhythm with your manager such as "a short fifteen-minute check-in once a week in the first three months" takes feedback out of a single heavy sentence and turns it into a small piece. I wrote about how this works in the article on receiving feedback at work.

Whether to disclose the diagnosis is a separate decision. It is not required, and in the first week it is not required either. These questions lay out how you work without needing a diagnosis disclosure. How I weigh the decision to disclose I explained in the article on telling them at a job interview, and how to work together without telling in the article on if your manager does not know about your ADHD. When they give spoken instructions, saying "could you send that by email as well?" is the easiest form of this conversation.

Meetings and the shape of the first three months

In the first weeks everyone in meetings uses abbreviations and project names. Trying to understand all of them exhausts your attention. Open an "abbreviations" list in the corner of your meeting notebook, write the words you do not understand, and ask after the meeting is over. When you leave the meeting, write three lines too: the decision, what is expected of me, the date. I gathered why meetings are so tiring and small measures like a written summary in the article on meetings with ADHD.

I divide the first 90 days into four parts. Each builds on the one before:

Period	Focus
Weeks 1-2	Set up the notebook, write down the people, fix the question hours, hold the first meeting with your manager
Weeks 3-6	Turn recurring tasks into templates, fix a weekly planning hour, hold the second meeting with your manager
Weeks 7-10	Drop the system that does not work, simplify the one that does, note where you are still stuck
Weeks 11-13	Produce a written summary: what I learned, what I am still asking whom, what I want to change

For the weekly planning hour, "if-then" sentences can help: "On Monday at 09:30 I will write the week's list." A meta-analysis has shown that plans of this kind generally increase reaching goals (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006). The evidence for adults with ADHD is more limited, so it is right to see this as a small experiment.

If three months have passed and you are still struggling

The systems are set up, the question hours have settled, you have talked with your manager, and yet you are still sinking every day: look at where the difficulty gathers. Is it the content of the work, the environment, or your energy during the day? If you fall apart in an open-plan office, the environment itself may be a factor. The article on which jobs suit ADHD better may help when you look at the question "is it me who does not fit, or the job?" In the article on ADHD in working life and accommodations I also gathered the accommodations you can ask for.

One practical piece of information as well: under labor law the probation period is at most two months, and with a collective agreement it can go up to four months, and during this time either side can end the job without a notice period. For this reason the first three months can really be stressful. Know the period in your own contract, and try to think of it not as an "exam" but as the time in which the two sides get to know each other. If you take medication, you can talk with your doctor about whether the timing fits your work hours.

What I think

In the first 90 days my goal would not be to look flawless. Instead I would look at "is my system standing?" One notebook, two question hours, a rhythm with my manager. When these are in place, the rest of the job gets learned. When they are not, even a smart and hardworking person drowns.

I also have a clear view on questions: questions that come regularly and in writing are not a sign of weakness. Keeping silent out of embarrassment is, I think, the most expensive mistake a person with ADHD can make in the first three months. If you are asking something for the second time and writing it in your notebook, you will not ask a third time.

At the end of the third month, look at your notebook. You will see full pages, marked questions, crossed-out steps. That notebook is the proof of how you learned this job, and you can use the same method at your next new job too.