I was thirty-one years old when a psychiatrist handed me a diagnosis that reframed the previous three decades of my life in about forty-five minutes.
ADHD. Inattentive type.
She was thorough and kind, and she explained the neurological mechanics patiently — dopamine regulation, executive function, working memory, the particular cruelty of a brain that is simultaneously restless and paralysed. I listened carefully, nodded at the right moments, and then drove home and sat in my car outside my flat for twenty minutes because I couldn't quite work out how to begin the act of getting out.
That, as it turned out, was extremely on-brand.
What followed the diagnosis was a period of recalibration that I suspect many late-diagnosed adults will recognise. You go back through the evidence of your life — the abandoned projects, the missed deadlines, the jobs you were brilliant at until suddenly you weren't, the relationships strained by your inability to just do the simple thing — and you understand, for the first time, that these weren't character failures. They were symptoms of a brain that works differently, given tools designed for a brain that doesn't.
The tools problem is what eventually led me to build ndproductivity.co.uk.
I had tried everything. I want to be clear about this because the productivity app market loves to suggest that the right system is just one download away, and I'd made peace with the fact that this was not true for me.
Notion: beautiful, infinitely customisable, a labyrinth I disappeared into for two weeks building a system I never actually used. Todoist: excellent for people who can look at a list of seventeen items and simply choose one. For me, a list of seventeen items is seventeen simultaneous demands arriving at the same volume, which produces exactly the paralysis it's supposed to prevent. Things, Asana, Linear, Bear, Obsidian, a paper notebook, a whiteboard, a wall covered in Post-it notes in a pattern that made sense for exactly four days in November 2022.
Every system I tried had the same foundational assumption: that I would show up each day with roughly the same cognitive capacity, that I could prioritise from a fixed list, that I would find it motivating rather than overwhelming to see everything I hadn't done yet.
None of those assumptions applied to me. And I suspected, given what I was reading about ADHD and neurodivergent experiences in the workplace, that they didn't apply to a lot of other people either.
The number that crystallised it for me: 1 in 7 adults is neurodivergent. That's not a niche. That's 700 million people being handed tools that were never designed for how their brains work, and being quietly blamed — by the tools, by their employers, by themselves — for failing to use them correctly.
I wanted to build something different. Not a productivity app with an ADHD mode toggle.
Something designed from first principles around variable energy, around executive function challenges, around the specific cognitive architecture of a brain that works the way mine does.
The morning check-in was the first thing I built and it remains the thing I'm most proud of. It sounds almost comically simple: you open the app each morning and answer four questions. Your energy level (Depleted / Low / Moderate / Good / Energised — descriptive labels, not numbers, because numbers invite comparison and ADHD brains are already doing enough unhelpful comparison). Your focus capacity. Your sensory state. Your intentions for the day — not a task list, just one to three things that would make the day feel worthwhile.
The entire rest of the application reads from this check-in. On a day when you've logged energy level two and sensory state high, the adaptive planner doesn't give you six tasks in ninety-minute blocks. It gives you one task in a twenty-minute block, a mandatory recovery period, and explicit permission to stop after that first step if you need to. The task breakdown engine caps its steps at ten minutes each and adds a line after step one that says: "You can stop here. This is enough." That line took me a long time to put in. It felt, initially, like I was building failure into the product. A productivity app that tells you it's okay to do one thing and stop feels like a contradiction in terms.
And then I shared an early version with a small group of ADHD adults and one of them messaged me at eleven o'clock on a Wednesday night. She said: "I've never had a piece of software give me permission before. I didn't know how much I needed that."
I kept the line.
The stressor decoder was the feature I built for myself most directly.
I had spent two years in an open-plan office before going fully remote, and I had spent most of those two years convinced that something was wrong with me. The noise was physical — a low-level constant assault that other people seemed to metabolise without effort while I arrived home every evening feeling scraped out and exhausted. I developed elaborate routines: noise-cancelling headphones, a particular corner desk, a precise arrangement of objects that created a visual boundary between my workspace and the rest of the floor.
My manager was bemused. My colleagues were tolerant. I was ashamed.
When I built the stressor decoder — where you describe a workplace situation that felt overwhelming and the tool identifies the likely sensory or cognitive mechanism and suggests one concrete accommodation — I ran my own open-plan office experience through it. The output named auditory hypersensitivity, explained the neurological mechanism in plain English, and suggested three specific HR-requestable accommodations I hadn't known existed.
I had worked in that office for two years. If I'd had this tool on my first week, I might have spent those two years differently.
ndproductivity.co.uk is not a cure for anything. ADHD doesn't get cured; it gets understood, accommodated, and worked with. What the platform tries to do is reduce the daily friction between a neurodivergent brain and the work it's trying to do — not by making the brain conform to the tools, but by finally building tools that conform to the brain.
There are 700 million neurodivergent people in the world. Most of them are using productivity software designed for someone else.
I built this for the ones who've tried everything and concluded the problem was them.
It wasn't. It never was.
ndproductivity.co.uk is free to try. The morning check-in and task breakdown are permanently free. The full suite — adaptive planner, mental load map, stressor decoder — is available on the Focus plan at £8/month.