Should You Ask for Workplace Accommodations With ADHD? | HIDDEN ADHD

Should you ask for workplace accommodations? I'm no expert, but I'll tell you what I've done in my Fortune 500 career and what I came across in researching for this video. Hi, Focus friends, it's Aaron here on HiddenADD where I share with you the tools, insights, and science-backed strategies that I used to go from 15 years of failure with undiagnosed ADD to the past seven years where I built a successful Fortune 500 career working with some of the biggest names in business. So should you request accommodations at work for your ADD? The general consensus that I found from my research is that the answer to that question is only if you need to. So in my career, first as a management consultant for Deloitte and KPMG, and now as a senior manager at a Fortune 500 company, I've gotten lots of accommodations, but none of them has been requested formally or been done through disclosing my ADD. You lost me there, dude. You see, many accommodations can be granted without asking for a formal accommodation or even calling them accommodations. The best approach for doing this comes from Tim Ferriss in the mega bestseller, The 4-Hour Workweek. The quick summary of his approach is to use a small request and to use it for a defined trial period. So when I wanted to work from home with fewer distractions, I asked my boss for a one-month trial and I was going to do it for one day a week. She agreed, and when I had something more tangible accomplished at the end of those four weeks, she saw that I could be productive or even more productive with the new arrangement. Win, win. So that's one example of a workplace accommodation I was able to get without having to request a formal accommodation or disclose my ADD. Here are some other accommodations that you can try to put in place for yourself first before putting in a formal accommodation request, which in many cases is sort of your last resort. The reason that it's generally a last resort is because you can achieve most of them without disclosing and you're not 100% guaranteed to get all of them. So it's a bit of a trickier path. That said, there are certainly exceptions to the general advice, and I highly encourage you to do your own research if this is something that you're interested in pursuing. So you can wear noise-canceling headphones when you work. You can arrange to work in a quiet space, a coffee shop, or an unused conference room. You could negotiate different start and end times to your day than the typical worker, which would allow you to get some work done without other people in the office distracting you. You can carve out no-interruption periods in your day that you arrange with your boss and colleagues and they know when you'll be getting back online and getting back to them. You can barter or exchange work with a colleague where you have complimentary skillsets. Maybe you're great at the big picture stuff and they're great at the detail stuff, and you can start to exchange work and collaborate. You can work with a coach to plan ahead for challenges that you expect to face. You can team up with an accountability buddy and you can delegate work either to your staff or if you don't have staff, to interns or maybe someone who's younger than you and they're willing to do some of that work because it gives them exposure and develops their skills. And in exchange, you mentor and train them. The short version is that these are exactly the types of accommodations that you would request formally through HR. And so in most cases, the prudent approach is to try to get them on your own and only if you can't get them and you can't succeed at your job to go through a more formal request process. So what have I done at my job? I got these attractive looking headphones. Who's cool now? After my boss gave me a big project, I said I really wanted to dive in and focus on it and would it be okay if I used a conference room for a couple hours? Afterwards, I told her how great it was. Then I asked her a day or two later if she minded if I did it again for a couple hours and she said, no, that's fine. And she said, you know what? You don't need to ask me, it's fine. So basically once you build some trust, you can start to loosen it up. I hired an executive coach for my first year in my new job and the support was invaluable. Having a coach and it doesn't have to be an executive coach and it doesn't have to be $8,000 like I paid out of pocket, but having a coach that you can plan ahead for obstacles and how you'll navigate situations that you know that you're weaker at is a critical success advantage. ADD is not a life sentence for failure, but we do need to put things in place to work around our ADD. So those are some examples. I also do a lot of negotiating with other colleagues about who's gonna do what work on various projects and there are many more types of things that you can do. So do you have any strategies you've used to succeed in the workplace? Have you gotten informal or formal accommodations? Let me and the other viewers know down in the comments below and I will see you in the next video. ♪ Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh ♪