News ADHD and Managing Your Professional Reputation

[Maksim]

Paul Graham's essay titled "Good and Bad Procrastination" argues that procrastination can be virtuous when it means putting off small tasks to work on more important ones. He categorizes procrastination into three types: doing nothing, doing something less important, or doing something more important. The last category, he argues, is actually good procrastination - the kind practiced by "absent-minded professors" who forget to eat while solving important problems.

But this isn’t great advice for someone like me. For those of us with ADHD (or ADHD-like traits), the challenge isn't choosing the important over the urgent - our brains naturally gravitate toward novel, high-upside activities. The real challenge lies in managing the accumulating costs of neglected maintenance tasks and, more importantly, the reputational consequences of this pattern.

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When faced with a choice between administrative tasks and potentially transformative opportunities - a new project, a fascinating research direction, or a serendipitous networking opportunity - I consistently choose the latter. This isn't the result of careful prioritization; it's my default state.

This aligns perfectly with Graham's prescription for good procrastination. But there's a catch.

The Visible and Hidden Costs
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The visible costs are straightforward and often manageable:

• Late fees on bills
• Suboptimal travel arrangements
• Administrative inefficiencies

These are what I call "stupidity tax" - the price you pay for operating in a way that prioritizes cognitive bandwidth for important work over administrative optimization. Often, this is a worthwhile trade.

But there are two categories where this strategy breaks down:

1. Catastrophic Downside Scenarios: Certain administrative tasks, particularly around immigration, legal compliance, or crucial deadlines, can have devastating consequences if missed. These are rare but significant enough that they require special attention.
2. Reputational Decay: This is the more insidious cost. When you consistently:
   • Take days to reply to messages
   • Miss logistical commitments
   • Require multiple follow-ups for simple tasks

You develop a reputation not just for being busy or focused on important things, but for being unreliable. This reputational cost compounds in ways that are hard to measure but potentially devastating. (Unfortunately, i’ll never know the opportunities I never got for having developed this reputation)

The Reputational Trap
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Most successful people are known for being hard to reach or slow to respond. But there's a crucial difference between:

"They're probably working on something important" vs. "They're probably dropping the ball again"

The same behavior can be interpreted radically differently based on your reputation. Once you're branded as unreliable, future delays are seen as confirmation rather than the natural cost of focusing on important work.

Why Traditional Solutions Fail
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If developing and maintaining organizational systems were easily achievable for people like me, it would have been one of the highest-return investments possible. The fact that I haven't successfully implemented such systems isn't a matter of lacking information or motivation - it's like trying to teach advanced machine learning to someone with an IQ of 100. No matter how well-intentioned the advice or how clear the potential benefits, there's a fundamental mismatch between the cognitive requirements of the task and the available cognitive machinery.

This is why most productivity advice, no matter how logical or well-structured, has been absolutely useless for me. "Just use a calendar." "Set up reminders." "Create a system." These suggestions assume that the primary challenge is knowing what to do rather than the neurological capacity to consistently execute such systems.

A More Realistic Framework
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1. Accept the Core Constraint: Rather than trying to fix what might be unfixable, acknowledge that consistently executing administrative systems will be extraordinarily difficult. This isn't defeatist; it's realistic resource allocation.
2. Reputation Management Over Task Management: Focus on managing how your limitations affect others rather than trying to eliminate those limitations. This means:
   • Being explicitly upfront about your administrative weaknesses early in relationships
   • Giving trusted contacts alternative ways to reach you when truly urgent
   • Building a reputation for being aware of your limitations rather than in denial about them
3. Catastrophe Prevention: While we might not be able to handle all administrative tasks well, we can identify and focus on ones with potentially devastating downside risks. Create minimal systems just for these, even if they're inefficient or costly in other ways.
4. Strategic Compensation:
   • Make sure your high-value work is visible enough to offset administrative reputation costs
   • Be exceptionally helpful when you can, so people are more forgiving when you drop administrative balls
5. Acceptable Losses:
   • Explicitly decide which penalties you're willing to eat (late fees, booking inefficiencies)
   • Consider these costs as part of your operating expenses rather than failures to optimize
   • Be willing to pay for services that handle routine tasks, even if they seem unnecessarily expensive

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