ADHD and Working From Home: Freedom or Trap?

The first day of working from home starts like freedom. Nobody is watching the clock, there is no commute, no noise, and the coffee is right next to me.

At four o'clock I lift my head. The washing machine has been emptied, the kitchen has been tidied, and I have done reading on three separate subjects. The real work is sitting exactly where it was in the morning.

Working from home is a two-ended thing in ADHD. Some days it is my most productive self. On other days the line between work and home is erased so completely that I am neither fully working nor fully resting. The glossary entry on remote work gives the general description of this arrangement; in this article I want to look at both ends.

What the research says, and what it does not

One of the most cited studies on working from home is a randomized experiment run in the call center of a large travel company. Employees who volunteered to work from home were randomly assigned to work either from home or from the office for nine months. The performance of those who worked from home rose by 13 percent; 9 percent of that came from working more minutes per shift, and 4 percent from answering more calls per minute thanks to a quieter and more suitable environment (Bloom et al., 2015).

There is a less well-known part of the same study. When the employees were given the choice again at the end of the experiment, half of those who worked from home chose to return to the office. Among their reasons, the loneliness of working from home and a lower chance of promotion stood out.

This finding says nothing about workers with ADHD. Call center work is measurable, repetitive and structured, and very different from strategy work. But it showed me something important: working from home can raise productivity in the same person and at the same time produce another cost.

How neurodivergent workers describe working from home

A qualitative study of professionals with conditions such as ADHD, autism, learning difficulties, anxiety and depression describes how, while working from home, these people set up accessible physical and digital workspaces for themselves, negotiated for accessible ways of communicating, and tried to balance the tensions between productivity and well-being (Das et al., 2021).

What struck me most in this description was the verb "set up." A home does not become an accessible workplace on its own; it becomes accessible when the person makes it suit them.

An international consensus statement on the effect of ADHD on working life also stresses that ADHD continues into adulthood and that its symptoms affect functioning at work (Adamou et al., 2013). A work-from-home arrangement does not remove this effect; it moves it somewhere else.

The freedom side

Working from home has sides that really do me good.

My own focus window. The hours when I think best do not coincide with everyone's working hours. At home it is easier to protect those hours.

Control over sound. I can shut out, at home, sounds I cannot shut out in a crowded environment. The details of the sensory side are in the article on sensory overload.

Movement. Getting up and walking while thinking, working standing, changing places: nobody notices.

Less pressure to be seen. In the office, "looking like you are working" is a job in itself. At home that job gets lighter.

The trap side: the scaffolding does not come home

Going to the office did far more things on my behalf than I realized. Getting dressed, setting off, walking through the door, other people working around me, lunch break having an hour of its own. All of these were cues telling me from outside that the day had started, was continuing and had ended.

At home most of these cues are missing. The start of the day is left to one decision, and its end to another. And in ADHD it is exactly these starting and stopping decisions that are hard.

On top of this comes the matter of the boundary between home and work. A theoretical work on everyday role transitions describes the boundary between roles as a spectrum: sharp separation at one end, complete blending at the other. Separation reduces the mixing of roles but makes it harder to move from one role to another; that move is often made easier by small rituals. Blending makes the transition easier but increases mixing and the difficulty of protecting the boundary (Ashforth et al., 2000).

Working from home pushes a person toward the blending end on its own. The sound of the washing machine enters work hours, a work message enters dinner. In ADHD this mixing is more expensive, because attention already goes to the nearest and newest stimulus. At home the nearest stimulus is always a household chore.

The office gave me the skeleton of the day. At home I have to rebuild that skeleton every morning.

Drawing a boundary inside the home

What I find worth trying is rebuilding, in small form inside the home, the cues the office gave from outside:

A commute ritual. The same small sequence every morning: getting out of pajamas, a coffee, a short walk, then the desk. In the glossary it is the transition ritual. The length of the walk does not decide anything; even stepping out the door and back in tells my mind "you have arrived at work."

Separating the place of work from the place of living. A separate room is not a must. A desk, a chair, even a corner of a table is enough. What matters is not working on the bed or the sofa; those places always call me to let go.

A visible start. Writing the first task of the day the night before and leaving it on the desk. When I do not have to decide in the morning, starting gets easier.

Putting housework in a box. The rule "no housework while working" did not hold for me. What works is collecting housework into a set slot: fifteen minutes at lunch. That way, when the laundry crosses my mind, I can say "at noon."

Someone next to me. Sometimes an online body doubling session fills the emptiness of working alone at home. Nobody talks, people on the screen are working, and I am working too.

A sentence that closes the day. At the end of the day, writing down what I will do first tomorrow and shutting the computer. Without this small closing, work leaks into the evening. The details are in the article on end-of-day closure.

Nobody at home ends the workday. When you work from home, there is no outside signal that tells you the work is done. A computer opened at nine in the evening "to check one thing" may stay open until midnight. The end time has to be made as visible as the start.

On a bad day

All of these arrangements work on good days. On a bad day, by twelve o'clock I have done nothing, and a single sentence passes through my mind: "Today is gone anyway."

This sentence is much more dangerous when working from home than in the office. In the office the day keeps going on its own; a meeting, a question, someone walking past pulls you back to work. At home nobody pulls. The moment the day is declared "gone," it really is gone.

There are a few things I find worth trying for these moments.

Splitting the day in two. When I lose the morning, I do not count the whole day as lost. I start the afternoon like a new day: a short walk, a glass of water, back to the desk, and a single small task as the first job.

One twenty-minute task. I do not look at the day's list, because a long list produces only guilt at that moment. I pick one thing that can be finished in twenty minutes. When it is done I look at the second. Often the first small job is enough to start the rest.

Changing place. When I am stuck at the same desk, changing the room or the building. Another room, a library or a quiet café sometimes brings back the feeling of "having come to work" that got lost inside the house.

Telling someone. Writing to someone I trust: "I could not start today, I will look at this job for two hours." Even if the other person does nothing, a spoken word adds a small outside structure to the silence of the home.

It is not possible to save all of these days. Some days really call for rest, sleep or simply doing less. To tell them apart I ask myself: am I tired, or am I unable to start? If I am tired, resting is a decision; if I cannot start, what I need is a small step. To avoid turning one bad day into a verdict on a whole week, the distinction in the article on all-or-nothing thinking often works for me.

The share of loneliness

The least talked-about cost of working from home is loneliness. It was one of the reasons the employees in the experiment gave for returning to the office.

In ADHD loneliness also has an energy side. The presence of other people sometimes pulls attention up to a workable level. After being alone for a long time, days begin to look alike, and the need for novelty is looked for elsewhere, often on the phone.

In my own work I decide where I will work myself, and I have noticed that I do not always make that decision well. Today I try to choose by the type of work: days that call for long thinking at home; work that involves talking to people, or work I cannot start alone, next to someone else.

Working from home is neither salvation nor a trap for ADHD. To the extent that you can build your own scaffolding, it is freedom; to the extent that you cannot, it is a fog.