My desk looks like a crime scene.
Three notebooks, none of them complete. Sticky notes in colours I haven't developed a system for. A browser with forty-two tabs open, several of which I genuinely intend to come back to. An idea written on the back of a receipt from a coffee shop I was in three weeks ago.
This is where some of my best work starts.
If you have ADHD — or you've worked with someone who does — you've probably been told some version of the same story: the disorder is the problem to be managed. The chaos is the symptom to be treated. The goal is to become more organised, more linear, more like the people in the productivity books.
I don't believe that anymore.
Disorder is not the enemy of creativity
Creativity is not a straight line. It's pattern recognition across apparently unrelated inputs — making a connection between two things nobody thought to connect, seeing a shape in what looks like noise.
Disorder is, for me, the optimal environment for that kind of thinking. Not any disorder — chaos that I can trust, that has material worth sifting through. But the scattered, non-linear, hyperactive way that information moves through my brain isn't a bug. It's the feature.
The receipt idea. The tab I haven't closed because part of my brain is still processing it. The notebook I abandoned because the idea moved on faster than my hand could — these are not failures of organisation. They're the residue of a mind that's constantly making connections.
What ADHD actually looks like in creative practice
Here's what a project looks like for me, from the inside.
I'll start on the brief and immediately think of something tangentially related. I'll follow that thread — not because I'm distracted, but because something in me knows it matters. Then I'll be in the middle of that and another connection will surface. By the time I come back to the original brief, I have three angles I wouldn't have found if I'd stayed on task.
That's not distraction. That's divergent thinking. It's exactly what's required when you need to find the unexpected idea, the reframe, the approach that makes a client stop and say "we've never thought of it that way."
The challenge is learning to trust the chaos long enough for the clarity to arrive.
The moment chaos becomes fuel
There's a specific feeling I've learned to recognise — a kind of productive overwhelm where I have more material than I know what to do with. It used to panic me. Too many ideas, no hierarchy, no obvious path to a coherent output.
Now I know that feeling is the signal that I'm about to make something good.
Because what comes after the overwhelm — if I sit with it instead of forcing a premature structure — is synthesis. The irrelevant falls away. The connections that matter become obvious. And what emerges is almost always cleaner and more surprising than anything I would have arrived at by working in a straight line.
The chaos was the research. The clarity is the output.
Making chaos productive, not just comfortable
None of this means I work without any structure. It means the structure comes later — and that I've learned to distinguish between the structure that helps me and the structure that kills my thinking.
Deadlines help. External constraints help. Working with someone who keeps me accountable at the output level (not the process level) helps enormously.
What doesn't help: rigid step-by-step systems, task management software that wants me to predict what I'll be thinking two weeks from now, timelines that assume linear progress.
The best brief anyone ever gave me was: "We need this by Friday. How it gets there is up to you."
That's the environment where ADHD becomes an asset. Where the disorder isn't a liability to be managed but fuel to be used.
What I tell people who work with me
If you're a client, you won't always be able to see what's happening in my process. It doesn't look orderly. The intermediate stages don't look like progress.
But the output will be clear. The thinking will be decisive. And somewhere in the chaos, a connection got made that a more linear mind might have missed.
That connection is the thing worth paying for.
The mess is just how it gets there.