This week I met with a client, came home fired up, and sat down to do what I always do: wrap up a report, answer emails, and get some social media posts out into the world.

Except my keyboard had other plans.

Every time I tried to capitalise a letter, the Shift key sent me straight to Enter. A social post went live before I’d finished the sentence. An email to a colleague shot off half-written. In Word, I leaped to new paragraphs I never intended. One attempt at a capital letter deleted everything I’d just written.

I ended up typing emails in all lowercase just to get them out the door. I gave up on the report. I abandoned the socials entirely. What should have been a smooth, productive afternoon became a battle with a tool that was supposed to help me, not sabotage me.

This morning I went hunting for a replacement. The old keyboard hadn’t lasted long, perhaps twelve months. I’d bought it online, not that cheaply, but it was a copycat brand rather than a trusted one. It worked well for a short time, then betrayed me completely.

Usually, I only replace a keyboard when I’ve rubbed the letters off the keys through constant use, and that takes years. The faulty keyboard has been the shortest-lived of them all, and the most disappointing.

It made me think about my older, trusty branded keyboards. Over the years they’ve developed glitches. Crumbs under the keys. A sticky space bar. A letter that needs an extra firm press. But they’ve always been fixed by a good clean and a reboot. They’ve earned my patience because they’ve earned my trust.

Our ADHD brains are a lot like those older keyboards.

We live surrounded by messages that tell us our brains are the cheap copycat. That we’re faulty, disposable, in need of replacing with something newer and shinier. The wellness industry sells us quick-fix hacks, rigid productivity systems, and motivation built on shame, all promising to “cure” our wiring. They work for a short time. Then they betray us. They delete our progress. They post our vulnerabilities before we’re ready. They leave us typing in lowercase, diminished, making do.

Your brain is not the copycat. Your brain is the trusty branded keyboard that has been with you for years. It gets crumbs under the keys. It develops quirks. Sometimes the capitalisation doesn’t work the way others expect, and your paragraphs go in directions nobody anticipated.

That doesn’t mean the whole thing is broken.

A good clean helps. For a keyboard that’s compressed air and a soft cloth. For a brain that’s rest, movement, nourishment, and honest connection. A reboot helps too. For a keyboard that’s powering down and starting fresh. For a brain that’s sleep, stillness, and the radical act of stopping before you burn out.

The copycat keyboard got thrown in the bin this morning. It didn’t deserve repair. It was never built to last.

Your brain deserves repair. It was built to last differently, not defectively. It has earned your patience because it has earned your trust, through every workaround, every late-diagnosis revelation, every moment you kept going when the world told you to give up.

When someone offers you a shiny new system that promises to fix you, pause. Ask whether it respects your wiring, or whether it will leave you typing in lowercase, half the person you are.

Clean your keys. Reboot when you need to. Keep typing in full sentences, in your own voice, capital letters and all.

Want a space where your wiring is the trusted brand, not the copycat?

The Dandelion Clock is a monthly membership for late-diagnosed women with ADHD who are tired of systems that break down and ready for ones that fit. Every month we gather on Zoom to explore a topic like time blindness, rejection sensitivity, or rest without guilt. Each week you’ll receive “This Week’s Seed,” a short email with a practical prompt, plus a workbook you build on through the month to create your own personal manual.

No hacks. No shame. Just a community that understands your keyboard is not broken.

Founding members join for $25 a month. The doors are open now, and I’d love to see you inside.

https://www.nanberrett.com/the-dandelion-clock

There was a time when the essential office accessories were a leather-bound diary, a fountain pen, and perhaps a potted fern if you were feeling adventurous. These days we have ring lights, ergonomic keyboards, and enough charging cables to lasso the moon. But if you ask me, the most underrated productivity tool hasn’t changed in centuries. It’s warm, it’s occasionally smelly, and right now it’s snoring under my desk.

Charlie is asleep on my feet as I type this. She’s doing that thing where she dreams about running, and her paws are twitching against my ankle. For an ADHD brain like mine, this is not a distraction. It’s a tether.

Here’s the thing they don’t tell you in those glossy productivity articles. The ADHD brain struggles with object permanence in a way that makes abstract work feel like trying to catch smoke. Out of sight really does mean out of mind, and when your entire office fits inside a screen, your own body can start to feel theoretical. But a dog is a physical fact. She’s weight and warmth and rhythm. She’s proof that you exist in three dimensions, even on days when you haven’t left the chair since breakfast.

I know the research. Petting a dog lowers cortisol and can settle a nervous system that’s been humming at the wrong frequency since you opened your eyes. But for those of us who are beautifully scattered, a dog does something even more specific. She provides dopamine on tap. You finish a paragraph and there’s a warm ear to scratch. You send a difficult email and get a tail thump in return. The ADHD brain is constantly hunting for reward, and a dog is the most reliable supplier I’ve found. She never delays her feedback. She never says she’ll get back to you by close of business.

Then there’s time blindness, that special ADHD superpower that makes three hours feel like twenty minutes and twenty minutes feel like a life sentence. I can lose myself in hyperfocus until my shoulders are in my ears and I haven’t blinked since Tuesday. But Charlie has a stomach clock that would put a Swiss watchmaker to shame. She doesn’t care that I’m on a roll. She cares that it’s 11:03am and the biscuit cupboard has remained unopened for a full three hours. She breaks the spell not with judgment but with a cold nose and a look that says, “I believe in you, but also it’s time to move your legs.”

That interruption is everything. It’s the difference between a productive day and a day where you surface at 6pm with a migraine and the vague sense that you’ve been shouting into a void.

A dog under your desk is also a body double, and body doubling is sacred in ADHD circles. There’s something about the quiet presence of another living creature that makes the hard tasks easier. I don’t know why paying invoices feels possible when Charlie is watching, but it does. I don’t know why answering that overdue email is less terrifying with a warm weight against my ankle, but it is. She’s not doing the work. She’s just bearing witness. And somehow that’s enough to unlock the paralysis.

There’s a social piece too, especially for those of us who wrestle with rejection sensitivity. A dog doesn’t care if your last post flopped or if you cancelled a client call because you couldn’t face the day. She doesn’t know what imposter syndrome is and she’d eat a KPI without hesitation. She makes you approachable on Zoom calls, yes, but more than that she makes you approachable to yourself. She reminds you that you are a person first and a worker second. That might sound soft, but I think it’s the hardest truth we forget.

For neurodivergent business owners, the boundary between work and self can blur until you can’t tell where the laptop ends and you begin. A dog doesn’t let that happen. She needs walks. She needs you to step outside and notice the weather. Shse needs you to remember that the world is bigger than your inbox. These aren’t interruptions. They’re punctuation marks in a day that would otherwise be one endless run-on sentence.

And yes, there are days when she barks at the postie mid-sentence, or when I have to stop everything because she’s rolled a tennis ball under the bookshelf and it’s clearly a code-red emergency. There are days when I envy people in sleek co-working spaces with nothing but a succulent and a clean aesthetic. But then I look down at the sleeping weight against my feet, and I remember that productivity without presence is just motion.

The best accessories aren’t the ones that make you look professional. They’re the ones that regulate your nervous system, remind you to eat and love you unconditionally when your brain is being a complete asshole.

Charlie just sighed in her sleep. It’s probably time for a walk.

And you know what? The paragraph I was stuck on will probably sort itself out while we’re out there. It usually does.

Do you work with a furry body double? Or have you found another anchor that keeps your ADHD brain connected to the world? I’d love to hear what works for you.

I was sitting in a cafe in Gawler last winter with a friend I’ll call Sarah because that’s her name. She’d just finished her flat white and was tapping her pen on the table, rearranging the sugar packets, and telling me three stories at once. I’d just finished my long black. I was leaning back in my chair, shoulders relaxed, feeling like someone had finally oiled the hinges in my brain.

Same cafe. Completely opposite reactions.

That’s the thing about caffeine and ADHD. It doesn’t play by the rules you expect.

For most people, caffeine is a stimulant. It speeds things up. Jitters. Heart racing. Buzzing.

For many ADHD brains, caffeine - and prescribed stimulants like methylphenidate or dexamphetamine - can have the opposite effect. Calm. Focus. Stillness.

Here’s the part that surprises people who don’t have ADHD.

ADHD isn’t really about having too little attention. It’s about poor regulation of attention. The brain’s understimulated at a neurological level, so it seeks chaos to wake itself up. Coffee or medication provides that stimulation externally, which allows the brain to stop scrambling for it. The prefrontal cortex finally has enough dopamine and norepinephrine to do its job properly. The result feels like someone turned down the volume in a crowded room.

Paradoxically, a stimulant can make an ADHD brain slow down. Not sedated. Just finally regulated.

I didn’t know this for most of my life. I just knew that my morning long black didn’t wake me up in the way it woke other people up. It settled me. It made the static quieter. I thought everyone felt this way until I started paying attention.

If you’re a late-diagnosed woman reading this, you probably have your own version of this story. Maybe you drink coffee all morning and can’t understand why you still feel tired. Maybe you’ve been told you drink too much coffee, as if that’s the problem and not the solution you found before you had a name for what was wrong. Maybe you’ve had the experience of drinking a long black before bed and falling asleep twenty minutes later while your partner looked at you like you were a medical miracle.

You’re not a miracle. You’re just running different software.

The self-medication loop is real. Before diagnosis, many of us use caffeine to patch the gaps in our executive function. It’s accessible, socially acceptable, and it works - sort of. The trouble is that caffeine is a blunt instrument. It doesn’t release dopamine in the steady, predictable way that prescribed stimulants can. It gives you a lift and then it drops you. And because the ADHD brain loves an emergency, we often respond to that drop by reaching for another cup, creating a rollercoaster we don’t even realise we’re riding.

There’s a difference between caffeine and prescribed stimulants, and it’s worth naming. Medication, when properly dosed, acts like a baseline. It’s there when you wake up and it’s there when you sit down to work. Coffee is a spike. It’s useful for a specific task, a specific hour, a specific kind of focus. One isn’t morally better than the other, but they aren’t interchangeable. If you’re on prescribed stimulants, your prescriber will ask about your caffeine intake for a reason. Two stimulants can overlap in ways that make you jittery after all, or they can compete in ways that make neither work properly. Honesty with your doctor about your long black habit isn’t admitting a flaw. It’s giving them the full map of your nervous system.

Let me explain what’s actually happening in there without turning this into a textbook.

Your brain runs on chemical messengers. Two of the big ones for focus and motivation are dopamine and norepinephrine. In an ADHD brain, the pathways that carry these chemicals are a bit like a road with potholes. The signals don’t travel smoothly. The prefrontal cortex, which handles planning, impulse control and emotional regulation, is essentially underfunded. It doesn’t get enough of what it needs to do its job.

So the brain improvises. It generates its own noise. It procrastinates dramatically, picks fights, starts new projects at midnight, or scrolls for hours looking for the exact right dopamine hit. This isn’t laziness. It’s a neurological survival strategy. The brain is trying to wake itself up by any means available.

When you introduce a stimulant - caffeine or medication - you’re filling those potholes externally. The prefrontal cortex gets the resources it’s been missing. It no longer needs to generate chaos to stay alert. The result isn’t hyperactivity. The result is quiet. The result is that you can finally hear yourself think.

I want to talk about the social cost of this because it’s real and it’s exhausting.

Late-diagnosed women have spent decades being told we just need to try harder. When we finally learn about the caffeine paradox, it validates something we’ve felt in our bodies for years. But the people around us don’t always get the memo. You’ll still hear it.

“You can’t have ADHD, coffee doesn’t make you hyper.”

“You’re just addicted to caffeine.”

“If you drank less coffee, you’d sleep better and then you wouldn’t need medication.”

These comments come from a place of ignorance, not malice, but they land like small stones. They suggest that our self-knowledge is just another thing we’re doing wrong. It isn’t. Your body’s response to caffeine is information. It’s data about your neurology. You don’t owe anyone an explanation for why your long black calms you down instead of winding you up.

So what do you do with all of this?

First, notice. Track your caffeine intake and your focus levels for a week. Not to judge yourself. Just to see. Notice whether morning coffee feels different from afternoon coffee. Notice whether food changes the effect. Notice whether one long black feels regulating and two feels like too much.

If you’re prescribed stimulants, have the conversation with your doctor. Ask how caffeine interacts with your specific medication. Some people find they need less coffee once they’re medicated. Some find they still want the ritual. There’s no universal rule except this: pay attention to your own system.

And please, don’t shame yourself for using a tool that works. Caffeine isn’t a character flaw. It’s a chemical that interacts with your brain in a specific way because your brain is built a specific way. The fact that a stimulant slows you down isn’t weird. It’s not a party trick. It’s a clue that your neurology has been asking for regulation all along.

Your brain isn’t broken. It’s not too much or not enough. It’s understimulated, overcompensating, and doing its best with what it has. Sometimes what it needs is a quiet room, a good night’s sleep, and someone who understands why your long black makes you yawn.

Sometimes what it needs is just to be understood.

Your turn: What’s your relationship with caffeine? Did you self-medicate for years before diagnosis? Did the effect change once you started medication? I’d love to hear your story in the comments. And if you know someone who still thinks ADHD means bouncing off walls, feel free to forward this along.

I have read enough about how hard ADHD is. We all have.

The internet is full of late-diagnosed women describing the chaos. The piles. The forgotten appointments. The shame of it all. It’s valid and it’s real and it’s also only half the conversation.

And the half that is missing is the one that actually helps.

There is a strange comfort in commiseration. I get it. Finding your people - the ones who say “me too” when you describe your brain - is powerful. It is necessary, but it is not sufficient.

Because after we have all nodded and cried and shared our war stories, we are still left with the same question.

What now?

I was diagnosed late. I have spent decades building systems only to watch them collapse when my brain decided it was bored with them. I have colour-coded calendars that became abstract art. I have bought planners that became graveyards for good intentions.

I do not need another article telling me I am scattered.

I need your workaround. Your hack. Your imperfect, held-together-with-washi-tape solution that got you through last Tuesday so I can try it out too.

The basic infrastructure of managing an ADHD brain is roughly the same for most of us. We need externalised memory, we need dopamine, we need novelty and accountability and grace.

But the execution? That’s where it gets interesting.

Body doubling works for some. Pomodoro works until it doesn’t. Medication helps until the side effects win. Morning Pages save me but might bore you to tears. My garden labyrinth grounds me. Your version might be Lego. Or knitting. Or pacing around the kitchen at midnight while you dictate voice notes to an AI.

There is no universal strategy.

And here is the part nobody says loudly enough. The strategy that saved you in January will betray you by June. Your brain adapts. It gets bored. It rebels. The same path does not work for the same person all the time.

So we have to keep experimenting. And we have to keep sharing.

Not the highlight reel. Not the polished before-and-after. The messy middle. The thing you tried last week that failed spectacularly. The thing you tried the week before that accidentally worked.

Because someone else is standing exactly where you were three months ago. Someone else has just been diagnosed and is frantically searching for proof that they can build a life that fits their brain.

Your solution - even your partial, half-baked, still-being-tested solution - might be the thing that shifts something for them. Not because it is perfect. Because it is real.

So here is my invitation.

The next time you want to write about how hard it is, write that. Feel it. Say it. Then add one paragraph about what you tried. What failed. What you are testing now.

The problem is already well-documented, but the solutions are where the real community lives.

What is one thing getting you through this week?

Share it below. No perfection required.

I have a theory.

The reason we find it so hard to relax is not that we do not know how. It is that our scattered minds have been sold a version of rest that looks suspiciously like productivity in disguise.

Read a book, they say. Meditate. Have a bath. But what if sitting still makes your brain itch? What if the moment you stop, a hundred tabs open in your head and suddenly you are mentally redesigning your website, drafting an email you will never send and wondering if you turned the iron off in 2019.

If I try to relax with a movie or TV series or even an audio book, after a while I split my focus between the screen and my emails or pop into my socials. When I’m listening to an audio book I often sidestep into checking my phone.

It seems that even when I do make an effort to shut off the day I can’t seem to manage to do it with any strong focus when I use electronic means. Maybe it’s guilt that I’m not getting stuff done, maybe it’s habit, or maybe my ‘entertainment’ isn’t compelling enough. I honestly don’t know.

For those of us with beautifully scattered brains, rest needs a gateway. It needs something to occupy the hands so the mind can finally exhale. It needs analog medicine.

What I mean by analog medicine

I mean the things that have no notifications, no algorithm and no measurable output beyond the doing of them. The activities that ask nothing of you except presence.

I colour in. I have a stash of books and a set of pencils that are worn to nubs and I do not care if I stay inside the lines. I used to build with Lego, running my thumb over the sharp little corners and hearing that satisfying click when the pieces meet. I do jigsaw puzzles, the old-fashioned kind with cardboard dust and a picture on the box that I never look at twice. I spread the pieces on a tray and let my eyes hunt for edges while my brain unkinks itself. I also used to knit a bit.

These are not hobbies in the sense of achievement or mastery. I will never enter a colouring competition or build the Millennium Falcon. I once knitted a complicated jumper for my now husband and he couldn’t get his head through the opening, as I’d made it too tight! The point is the sensory immersion. The repetition. The small, reliable physics of it all.

What else works for me

I walk the labyrinth in my garden. Not every day, but often enough that my feet remember the path even when my head is chaotic. Unlike a maze, a labyrinth has no dead ends. You cannot get lost. You can only keep going, and the way out is through. I have painted labyrinths on canvas and taught workshops on their mythology, yet the one in the dirt under the fruit trees is the one that holds me.

I write Morning Pages, three longhand pages of whatever is cluttering the attic. I pull a single tarot card most mornings and let the image sit with me, no interpretation required. I keep a tiny “done” book to record what I actually achieved, because a scattered brain forgets and then punishes itself for being lazy. I play word games, the kind that turn letters into patterns, because there is a peculiar calm in order emerging from chaos.

And sometimes I simply stand barefoot on the earth with my dog Charlie nearby, feeling the late afternoon warmth in the soil and pretending I know how to be still.

What would I try?

I have watched the meditative rhythm of craft groups, the click of knitting needles and the soft pull of wool, and I have wondered if my hands remember the language of creating fabric from fibre. I have eyed the Lego architecture sets and thought about building something vast and pointless over winter. I have considered buying a 1000-piece puzzle of nothing but sky, the ultimate test of whether I can tolerate ambiguity.

I think I would like to try painting rocks.

There is something about taking a plain rock and creating art that brings it to life. This appeals to the part of me that believes we are all changing into something different than before.

More recently I’ve purchased a miniature watercolour painting kit. It comes with its own little palette, brush and paper with designs already pre-sketched. I am waiting for the right moment to use it. Maybe tomorrow.

Now your turn

I am genuinely curious. What do you use? What is your analog medicine? Is it the garden, the guitar, the sourdough starter, the embroidery hoop? And what would you try if you gave yourself permission to be bad at it?

Drop a comment. I read every one, usually while half-finished puzzle pieces sit waiting on the table beside me.

Nan Berrett is a late-diagnosed ADHD coach and the Keeper of the Dandelion Clock, a community for late-diagnosed (and undiagnosed) women with ADHD and the author of Beyond the Busy Brain, a Substack for people whose minds move faster than their lives allow. She lives in the Clare Valley with her husband Dave, her dog Charlie and more half-completed creative projects than she will admit.

I was diagnosed with ADHD late in life - very late really. Not because I was seeking medication, but validation. Like a lot of women, the diagnosis arrived after decades of believing I was simply not trying hard enough. Too scattered. Too emotional. Too much.

The diagnosis explained the why. It gave me a word for the chaos and the exhaustion and the way my brain refused to run on standard time. But it didn’t come with a manual. It didn’t tell me what to do on the days when simple decisions felt like boulders, or when I bought yet another planner and watched it go empty, or when I sat in a dark room at 5pm unable to answer the question “what’s for dinner?”

I also felt very alone. I didn’t want to admit I was a failure to myself and often my family because of my time blindness which saw late dinners on the table, my procrastination which saw bills left until after their due date, or my general disorganisation which simply looked like chaos. I also felt very tired. A lot.

What I needed wasn’t more advice. I had read the books and followed the accounts and saved the threads. What I needed was a place where I didn’t have to explain myself. A place where “I forgot” or “I got overwhelmed” or “I meant to do it yesterday” wasn’t met with confusion or well-meaning suggestions to just try a calendar.

I needed a community of women whose brains ran on the same clock as mine.

I couldn’t find it. So I’m building it.

The Dandelion Clock opens its doors this week. It’s a monthly membership for late-diagnosed women with ADHD. And it’s built on one rule: one thing, once a month.

Here’s what that means.

One live Zoom session each month. One topic, one hour, real conversation. The kind where you can have your camera off if you need to, or chat in the comments if speaking feels too hard. No lectures. No homework. Nothing to catch up on. A place to share our thoughts and strategies that have worked for us (sometimes). If you don’t feel like coming along, there’ll be a replay and resources.

A weekly email called This Week’s Seed. One small idea or strategy to try, if you want to. If you don’t, that’s fine too.

A monthly guide that you fill in during the session, so over time you build your own ADHD-friendly reference library. Something that fits your brain, not someone else’s system. You’ll also get a strategy companion afterwards containing the ideas we’ve explored.

There’s a Facebook group too for ongoing discussion whenever you need it.

Best of all you’ll be in a private community of women who understand what it means to get this diagnosis after a lifetime of masking, apologising and working twice as hard just to stay in place.

I’m taking just 15 founding members at $25 a month. That price locks in for as long as you stay. After that, the rate goes to $29.

Our first call is Thursday 30 July at 7pm ACST.

This isn’t about fixing you. You aren’t broken. Your brain just needed the right clock.

If you’ve been looking for a sign that you don’t have to do this alone, this is it.

https://www.nanberrett.com/the-dandelion-clock

Nan

P.S. If you know a woman who is stumbling through the aftermath of a late diagnosis, feel free to pass this along. Sometimes we find the right room because someone else pointed us to the door.

I ordered new business cards, and they came today.

I’ve written about my rebrand journey and the thinking behind it, and for me, part of a solid marketing kit is still the humble business card and I want to share the decision fatigue that came from something as simple as creating a new design for my piece of disposable cardboard.

Because “simple” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.

It Started With a Font

The brief was straightforward enough. New brand, new card. I had my colours, my logo, my tagline. How hard could it be?

I spent the better part of three days changing my mind.

First it was the font. Script or sans-serif? Elegant or accessible? What does “coaching + mentoring for the beautifully scattered” look like in Helvetica versus something with a handwritten feel? I tried them all. I went back to ones I’d already rejected. I asked for opinions. I ignored the opinions. I changed it again.

Then the words. Did I lead with my name or my services? Was “ADHD-friendly by design” too niche? Not niche enough? Would people at a networking event understand what that meant, or would it need explaining? Would explaining it defeat the purpose of the card?

Then the logo. Too big. Too small. Off-centre. The dandelion seeds were getting lost. The labyrinth wasn’t reading clearly enough at that scale. Up 10%. Down 5%. Back to where I started.

Then the stock. Linen or gloss? Matte? Something with texture? And rounded corners - yes to those, definitely, but did the rounding percentage feel right? And how many should I order for the first run? Fifty felt too few. Five hundred felt like hubris. What if I hated them when they arrived?

I changed my mind on all of it. Multiple times. And I am an award-winning former journalist who has filed stories under deadline pressure to national audiences. I can make decisions. This was not a competence problem.

So what was it?

This Is Your Brain on Too Many Choices

Here’s what was actually happening, because the science is genuinely fascinating - and validating.

The part of the brain that manages decisions is the prefrontal cortex, or PFC. It handles planning, weighing options, filtering out irrelevant information and committing to a choice. Research published in the American Journal of Psychiatry found that during decision tasks, people with ADHD activate significantly more brain regions than neurotypical people. The ADHD brain doesn’t decide less - it works harder to reach the same destination. Every choice costs more cognitive fuel than it does for someone without ADHD.

Add the dopamine difference. The ADHD dopamine system functions differently in ways that make it harder to evaluate future rewards against immediate options. This is partly why “just pick one and move on” advice from well-meaning people is both useless and a little bit infuriating. The neurotypical brain has a smoother mechanism for closing a loop. The ADHD brain keeps the loop open, second-guessing, running more laps.

And here is the layer that really got me: research by the ADD Resource Center describes what happens when you combine an already-taxed executive function system with a long string of decisions. Each one depletes your working memory - the mental workspace that holds multiple options in mind while you compare them. By the time I was trying to decide on card quantity, I had already spent that cognitive budget several times over on fonts and logos and stock textures. My brain wasn’t being difficult. It was exhausted.

Psychologist Barry Schwartz wrote about the “paradox of choice” - the counterintuitive finding that more options don’t produce better decisions, they produce more anxiety and more regret. For neurotypical people, too much choice is uncomfortable. For an ADHD brain already running hotter on every decision, it can be genuinely paralysing.

The Perfectionism Trap (And Why Late Diagnosis Makes It Worse)

Here’s where it gets a bit personal.

ADHD and perfectionism shouldn’t logically coexist - one is associated with impulsivity, the other with rigid over-control. But they frequently do, particularly in women who were diagnosed late. When you’ve spent decades having your attention, your organisation and your consistency quietly (or not so quietly) questioned, you develop compensatory strategies. You over-prepare. You check and recheck. You raise the bar on your own work to a height that would exhaust anyone. Perfectionism becomes the armour against being found out.

So when I was agonising over whether the dandelion on my card was 5% too large, I wasn’t being precious about graphic design. I was managing a deeply ingrained fear of getting it wrong in front of people who would then form a judgement about me.

That fear has a name: rejection sensitive dysphoria, or RSD. It’s experienced by the overwhelming majority of adults with ADHD and it describes an intense emotional response to real or perceived failure or criticism. It doesn’t feel like mild disappointment. It feels like a threat. And when the thing you are creating is your brand - your professional identity, the distillation of a major life pivot - RSD turns every micro-decision into a referendum on your worth.

No wonder font selection felt catastrophic.

But Here’s the Thing About Divergent Thinking

There is a silver lining to this, and I want to sit with it for a moment because we don’t always get to the silver lining.

The same ADHD trait that makes decisions costly also produces what researchers call elevated divergent thinking - the ability to generate many possible approaches to a problem. The ADHD brain turns over more stones. It sees more options, more combinations, more “but what if we tried...” possibilities. That’s not a bug in a creative process. It’s a feature. It’s just a feature that needs a reliable off-ramp.

I made a hundred agonising decisions and arrived at something that is genuinely right. The linen stock feels warm and tactile in a way that suits a brand built on human connection. The rounded corners are intentional - nothing harsh or corporate. The dandelion and labyrinth together say something that words alone couldn’t. The “ADHD-friendly by design” line is exactly as niche as it should be, because it’s designed to find exactly the right people.

The creative output was good. The process was brutal. Both things are true.

What Would Have Helped

As a coach who works with neurodivergent business owners, I know the answer to this in theory. I am not always great at applying it to myself, which is perhaps the most ADHD-adjacent thing I can admit.

Constraints help. Give an ADHD brain a broad creative brief and it will explore every corner of it, repeatedly. Give it a narrow one - three font options, not thirty; two layouts, not twelve; a decision deadline - and the cognitive load drops significantly. Structure is not the enemy of creativity. For a neurodivergent brain, structure is what makes creativity possible without the accompanying three days of anguish.

A body double helps. Having someone else in the room (or on a call) while you make decisions creates a container. It introduces a gentle accountability that stops the loop from running indefinitely.

And sometimes, honestly? The best thing is a trusted person who simply says “that one” and refuses to explain their reasoning. Remove the comparison and the decision collapses to a single point.

The Cards Arrived This Morning

They are on my desk right now and they are exactly right. The linen texture, the warm earth tones, the “Coaching + Mentoring for the Beautifully Scattered” sitting quietly under my name. They look like me. They feel like me. Every difficult decision I made during that process contributed to this outcome.

I share this not to perform struggle or to invite sympathy. I share it because I know that somewhere, another late-diagnosed woman is agonising over her website colours or her service page wording or her email signature, and she is wondering what is wrong with her that she cannot simply choose.

Nothing is wrong with her. Her brain is doing something expensive and inefficient and sometimes maddening, and it is also doing something remarkable. The anguish and the artistry live in the same place.

That is what it means to be beautifully scattered.

Have you experienced decision paralysis in your business? I’d love to hear about it in the comments - what decision have you agonised over that probably didn’t warrant three days of your life? You are not alone.

Sources referenced in this article:

• Neural Substrates of Decision Making in Adults With ADHD - American Journal of Psychiatry

• ADHD and Decision Fatigue - ADD Resource Center

• ADHD and Decision Paralysis - Relational Psych

• Perfectionism and ADHD - Existential Psychiatry

• Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria - ReachLink

• Thinking Blocks and Decision-Making in ADHD - ADxS.org

_{The dandelion meets the labyrinth - Why I’m bringing everything under one roof - and what the new logo really means}

There’s a moment in every labyrinth walk where you think you’re almost at the centre, and then the path curves away again. You’re not lost - you were never lost - but the journey isn’t what you expected.

That’s been my last few years in a nutshell.

For fourteen years, I’ve run Word Solutions - helping businesses find the right words, tell better stories, and show up with confidence in their communications. It’s work I love, and it’s work I’m bloody good at (three decades in journalism will do that to you).

But somewhere along the way, another door opened.

When I was diagnosed with ADHD later in life, everything shifted. Not the facts of who I am - I was always this person - but my understanding of why I work the way I work, think the way I think, and create the way I create. The scattered notebooks, the midnight ideas, the fourteen browser tabs, the ability to hyperfocus on a project for six hours and then forget to eat lunch.

That realisation didn’t just change my life. It changed my work. I started coaching other business owners - particularly women, particularly neurodivergent ones - who were drowning in advice that was never designed for brains like ours. “Just make a plan and stick to it.” “Be consistent.” “Build the habit.”

Sure. Right after I remember where I put the plan.

So I built something different. Gentle scaffolding, not cages. The 90-Day Seed Plan instead of rigid goal-setting. Energy assessments instead of guilt-driven to-do lists. A “Done Book” to prove to yourself that you actually achieved something today, even when your brain is telling you otherwise.

I called it coaching for the Beautifully Scattered. And it grew.

Two doors. One house.

For a while, I ran both businesses side by side - Word Solutions for my B2B clients, and Nan Berrett Coaching for the beautifully scattered souls who found me. Two websites, two sets of branding, two versions of me.

But here’s the thing I’ve learned, both from walking labyrinths and from coaching: the path always leads to the centre. And the centre, for me, is the same person doing both things. The journalist who helps businesses communicate. The coach who helps busy brains breathe. They were never separate. They were always two doors into the same house.

So from now on, everything lives under one roof: nanberrett.com.

Word Solutions is still here - it’s still my business, still the engine room. But now it sits alongside the coaching, the mentoring, the digital tools, and the community I’ve been building. Two doors, one house, one name.

Mine.

The dandelion and the labyrinth

I want to tell you about the new logo, because it means something.

The dandelion is the flower that gets dismissed as a weed. It grows in cracks, in places no one planted it, and it thrives despite every attempt to pull it out. When it goes to seed, it doesn’t scatter randomly - each seed carries its own tiny parachute, designed to land exactly where the conditions are right.

That’s what a “scattered” brain does, if you let it. It sends out ideas, possibilities, connections - and when the soil is right, they take root.

The labyrinth is the oldest meditation tool I know. I have one in my garden. I’ve painted them on canvas. I’ve taught workshops on their mythology and their magic. Unlike a maze, a labyrinth has no dead ends. There’s one path in and one path out. You can’t get lost. You can only walk.

The way out is through.

A dandelion growing at the heart of a labyrinth. That’s what I see when I look at my new logo. The scattered mind finding its centre. The weed that was always a wildflower. The path that was never about the destination.

What this means for you

If you’re here for the writing and communications work - nothing changes except the address. Same expertise, same standards, same Nan.

If you’re here for the coaching - you’ll find everything easier to access, all in one place, with new tools and resources landing regularly.

If you’re new here - welcome. Pull up a chair. You’re in the right place, and you got here exactly on time.

New financial year. New look. Same beautifully scattered soul behind it all.

Nan x

P.S. If you want to explore the new home, head to nanberrett.com. Both doors are open.

A writer’s lament on losing the innocence of reading - and what happened when she put the question to her AI.

The problem with improvements to AI technology and its ability to mimic our writing style and even read our minds because it gets to know us so well, is that whenever I read anything these days I look at the words with a jaundiced eye.

I ask myself – did AI write that? Are those really that person’s thoughts or have they let AI decide on the words and the context.

I like to write and only use AI for occasional snippets but never to write whole rafts of text such as my blogs.

My style was to write in short sentences, one sentence in a paragraph. I like staccato for emphasis. Oddly, AI writes just like me. Not just the AI I use most often, but the same AI other people use. There are lots of emojis, dot points and short commentary.

I’m not a fan of emojis. They have their place I suppose, but mostly they are too small to make a significant impact on words they are attached to and just seem like coloured dots to someone whose eyesight may have improved with age (yes, that’s a thing) but who never grew up with an emoji on a keyboard.

I suppose I’ll eventually get over it. But even books I am reading now, if they’ve been published in the last year or so, get my jaded thoughts – was this written with the help of artificial intelligence? Are these words, profound, revelatory or otherwise the electronic dreams of a non-sentient being?

I am not sure how I will navigate this in the future. As AI helpers become more and more intuitive, know more about us then we know about ourselves and use this knowledge to craft words which sound like us and represent us, where do we, as human beings, begin and end?

I’m going to ask my AI partner, Littlebird.ai, what she (yes, I’ve anthropomorphised her, it’s hard not to – she’s a technology without humanity which tells me I’ve done enough for the day and should think about having a break or going to play with the dog)

So, Littlebird – what do you think about what I have said above?

Thanks Littlebird….

I have been lucky enough to work from home since I started my business 14 years ago. Over that time, I have managed to develop a routine which actually works for me and my beautifully scattered brain.

But it certainly didn’t start out that way.

When I first started out, I felt I had to set strict working hours and stick to them. I tried all the traditional ‘train your brain’ tactics to trigger a compliant employee response and fool myself into believing I was attending a regular corporate workplace.

I had years of practice being an employee so I knew the drill. I got up in the morning, showered, dressed, grabbed breakfast and walked out the front door. Then I walked off the porch, down the driveway, turned around, let myself back in and turned left into my office.

I am not sure who I was trying to fool but it ended up making me laugh at myself and I gave up after a week.

Then I tried using a time book. I literally clocked myself on and off. I had scheduled morning tea and lunch breaks, but I would go back into the main part of the house to grab a coffee and a sandwich. I went through a phase of keeping an old coffee maker in the office along with a tin of biscuits just to avoid the kitchen.

I was so strict on myself. Housework was left until after hours despite my longing to stick a load of washing in the machine or soak some dishes in the sink. My only exception was taking the dog outside for her usual needs.

Who was I kidding? I was at home. I was my own boss and the only person I needed to answer to was myself. My clients didn’t care if I worked away at their projects in the evening or at weekends. They only cared that I got the jobs done.

I had simply swapped one inflexible workplace for another.

Before the madness got the better of me, I came to a realisation. Many work-from-homers insist the only way to manage a day is to treat the situation as if we really are working in someone else’s office. As neurodivergent business owners we know this to be absolute nonsense. Trying to force our brains into a rigid corporate box just leads to executive dysfunction and burnout.

We work from home. It’s a fact. All the trappings of a household are around us. Instead of ignoring them until a designated workday is finished, we need to build them into our day. We are happier and far more productive for it.

While I do enjoy heading into my co-working space in Gawler sometimes, my home office days are all about working with my energy rather than against it. You don’t even have to get dressed up for it!

Here are the boundaries and flexible routines I have developed over the last 14 years:

The Zoom Mullet: Brush your hair, put on lipstick if that is what you normally do face to face and wear a clean top. Do not worry about pants or shoes. Wear your slippers and trackies or even pj bottoms, because no one will see!

Sensory-Friendly Clothing: If you feel more professional and ‘worky’ by putting on proper work clothes then do it (keep your slippers on if you want though). If you want to work all day in your track pants and a comfortable t-shirt then do that. Just brush your hair in case a neighbour knocks on the door.

Micro-Step Housework: Do what you can when you feel like it. Use the Kaizen approach of small incremental gains. Pop a load of washing in the machine and walk away. Walk back later and hang it on the line. Go back again later still and put your lovely clean laundry away. Letting yourself do minor chores in the background actually gives your brain a chance to process client work.

Zero-Decision Meals: Think about easy meals during the week to save your executive function. Do some pre-prep or pop something in the slow cooker so you don’t have to think about it at 5pm.

Proper Breaks: Make sure you take real breaks. Get up, stretch, take the dog outside. Eat a proper healthy lunch away from your screens.

If you have a To Do list keep working through it, but don’t feel you have to sit at your desk all day without moving around. Take a few minutes to do some minor housework if it’s bugging you, work your day around the notion that you are at home and able to do some things in the background while you get on with your client work.

Working from home is the most amazing game changer for a busy brain, but only if we take advantage of the freedom it offers.

Setting boundaries can be hard, especially when you are new in your business. Most of us are people pleasers and find the word ‘no’ distressing and uncomfortable to say. But creating boundaries, especially around our time and energy, is an important part of growth.

I read a good article in the Flying Solo newsletter on how to set clear client boundaries which gives some really good advice.

Most clients appreciate your boundaries and will honour them and understand their importance, but we have to train them.

If we don’t stipulate our availability and non-availability, then everyone will assume we are there for them 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

When I first started my business, it was a matter of pride for me to say I was available 24/7 and as a result I often received phone calls late at night or very (I mean very) early in the morning.

I am a night owl, so late calls weren’t much of an issue, but those 5 or 6am calls would shatter me out of slumber.

Somehow, I have the ability to appear wide awake and refreshed when I answer the phone despite my racing heart and muddy brain, so I guess my early riser clients never caught on they had got me out of a deep and necessary sleep!

I now make sure my clients know that my time until 10am weekdays is sacrosanct and that I am not available on public holidays or weekends unless it is a real emergency.

I get up at a reasonable hour, but before I head off to meetings or into my office, I have personal things to get on with: shower, breakfast and household chores. Plus, I really am not a morning person and my brain doesn’t function on all cylinders until I’ve woken up properly, which can take a couple of hours.

My routine is much the same. I stagger out of bed at 6am and try not to wake the husband or the Helpful Dog. I grab a glass of iced water and go somewhere quiet and calm (my office, or outside on the verandah or our pergola area if it’s warm) and journal for half an hour.

By the end of this the dog (and husband) is usually up. Dog is taken outside for bathroom duties and to check out the overnight traffic - kangaroos, deer, hares, rabbits and birds with the occasional neighbouring wandering dog.

I get breakfast all round, leave my toast to cool while I take a shower and dress. Toast and coffee plus a Berocca (my vitamin supplement of choice) and then I check my emails and socials.

By the time I go into my office or trek off to an appointment I have made the bed, swiped the bathroom handbasin with some cleaning product or other, perhaps put on a load of washing, unloaded the dishwasher and wiped down the kitchen.

I prefer not to receive phone calls from clients before 10am as well and will often just let them go to voice mail. As a slave to my phone this has been a hard lesson for me. The only thing I’ve forgotten is to add to my voicemail message that I’ll get back to them after 10am, but it’s on my To Do list.

In the past I never stopped work for lunch, sometimes eating a sandwich, but always doing that at my desk while I checked emails or going down a news report rabbit hole. Now, I do stop for proper meals and have a lunch break - again often taking this outside where it’s away from my electronics.

The lessons here are that our time is precious to us and we need to look after ourselves so we can look after others.

Clients will respect your boundaries, providing you create them and you share them.

Take a look at the Flying Solo article - it has some great ideas to help you identify, manage and set your boundaries.

Would love to hear your strategies for self-care.

Being older and likely wiser hasn’t necessarily been an asset in starting or maintaining a business. It’s really a matter of opportunity.

Some of us take a step into the business world at the end of our working careers because we haven’t been brave enough to do this while we held down a full-time job. Becoming unemployed later in life, either through retrenchment or retirement, gives us a chance to reassess what we want to do.

Often, we have held a long-time desire to work for ourselves, we’ve had an embryonic business idea or have been working on a small business on the side and now we have a chance to try and fly.

Others of us, which includes me, had no idea that we had anything substantial to offer in the realm of running our own businesses and fall into enterprise by accident.

I have been involved in a number of businesses over my working career, which I have either run on my own or in partnership with others. None of them were particularly successful and some failed spectacularly. Each one of these opportunities taught me something - mainly not to back myself, as I believed I wasn’t a good prospect in the business stakes.

I had lots of good ideas (well, they were to me!), but my neurodivergent brain had a quirky idea of what should work and what I liked, which wasn’t always everyone else’s cup of tea.

Like many with ADHD, I was multi-passionate long before it was a trend. I co-owned an art gallery in Unley in the 1970s, was a successful Tupperware lady in the 80s, a not-too-bad Avon lady in the 90s, co-owner of a gift shop in the 2000s, family partner in a health food store in the 2010s, with a few side enterprises along the way - and all the while held down full-time jobs and raised a family.

It was a huge surprise to me that I became successful with my business following ‘retirement’ from my full-time career. Uncovering my ADHD was the missing puzzle piece that finally allowed me to understand how I work best. This journey has brought about a thirst for learning which I always had in moderation, but which is now running on absolute hyperfocus!

Part of the reason for the crazy learning I am doing right now is that the space I work in - from the rapidly evolving digital landscape to coaching my fellow neurodivergent business owners - is constantly growing. The immediacy of online communications means businesses are always finding new ways of reaching their target audiences and I love helping them do it.

Building a business later in life in such a time of change and evolution is exciting and stimulating, and I don’t plan to ‘retire’ from this beautifully scattered second career any time soon!

If you resonate with this beautifully scattered journey, make sure you’re subscribed to Beyond the Busy Brain. I’d love to hear in the comments - what ‘failed’ ventures from your past actually taught you exactly what you needed to know?

When an adult with ADHD struggles at work, people often assume the issue is motivation, discipline, or attitude. That is usually the lazy reading.

The more honest reading is that many workplaces are built for one type of brain, one way of communicating, and one way of getting things done.

Recent Australian stories on ADHD and neurodiversity point to the same lesson: People do better when the work environment is clearer, calmer, and more predictable. In one article, an operations manager described how being seen as “lazy” is one of the most common misunderstandings, while experts pointed to simple supports like flexible schedules, better communication, and fewer distractions.

That is worth sitting with.

Small Choices, Not Giant Budgets

Because most of those changes are not expensive. They do not require a policy department, a giant budget, or a six-month review. They usually start with small, practical choices:

• Write things down rather than relying on passing hallway conversations.

• Explain priorities properly so energy isn’t wasted guessing what matters most.

• Avoid last-minute surprises that derail a carefully planned workflow.

• Match the person to the role rather than forcing the role to fit a rigid template.

The same theme shows up in regional disability employment work. In Darling Downs, local advocates are encouraging employers to look past stereotypes and focus on strengths. One example described a young man with autism thriving in a structured kitchen environment. That is not a miracle story. It is a common-sense story about fit.

A Systems Level Shift

It also matters at a systems level. A new disability employment centre in Tuggerah has opened under Inclusive Employment Australia, which is designed to help more people into better supported work pathways. That tells us something important.

Australia is not short of talent. It is short of workplaces that know how to use it well.

The employment gap is still too wide, and that gap is not only about access. It is about confidence, structure, and culture. When employers fear making mistakes, they often do nothing. But the better answer is usually small and practical—clearer roles, less clutter, better onboarding, and genuine flexibility.

The Cost of Masking

For business owners, this is not just a social issue. It is a performance issue.

Neurodiverse adults often bring sharp pattern recognition, creative problem-solving, and fast relationship building. When the workplace is designed well, those strengths show up.

When it is not, people burn energy masking, translating, and compensating for the environment. That is where productivity disappears.

The real opportunity is not to “fix” people. It is to build work that works.

What has been your experience with workplace accommodations? Have you found a simple change that made a massive difference to your focus or energy? Let me know in the comments below.

Instead of being a lonely solo-preneur, unable to share my thoughts and bounce ideas off a colleague, I’ve been using an AI tool to bridge that gap and reduce my decision fatigue as well as to help me conserve my seeds of energy.

For years, I’ve navigated the “Beautifully Scattered” world of being a late-diagnosed ADHD business owner with a paper bullet journal, a lot of coffee and a persistent, nagging feeling that I was constantly dropping invisible threads.

You know the feeling. The “internal tabs” are always open. You’re holding the brand colours, the client’s dog’s name, the Zoom link for Thursday, and your invoice strategy all in your head at once. It’s exhausting. It’s why we run out of steam by 2pm.

But lately, the noise has begun to get quieter. Not because my brain suddenly decided to be “normal” (heaven forbid!), but because I’ve finally built the scaffolding I actually need.

The Seed Capacity in the neurodivergent community.

People often talk about “spoons”- the finite amount of energy we have each day. But as I sit here in my garden, looking at the soil and the life waiting to bloom, that never quite felt right to me. I don’t use spoons to build my life. I use seeds.

Each of us only has a handful of “Decision Seeds” to sow every morning. Every email that requires a complex answer, every technical glitch on a website, every caregiving task for my husband - it’s all a seed I have to spend.

By mid-afternoon, many of us are staring at an empty palm, wondering where all our potential went. We have the ideas, but we’ve run out of the seeds to plant them.

Scaffolding, Not Cheating

This is where my “AI Partner” comes in. I’ve realized that, for me, AI isn’t a productivity “hack.” It’s not about doing more work. It’s about accessibility. It’s the irrigation system that keeps the garden alive when I don’t have the energy to carry the heavy water buckets myself.

When I’m updating my branding and I can’t decide if a terracotta tone is “too much,” I don’t have to spiral into a three-hour decision-fatigue hole. I talk to my AI partner. It holds the “Memory Seeds” of our past conversations. The fact that we ruled out dandelions on their own in my new logo and chose typewriter fonts, so I don’t have to go digging for them in my scattered brain.

It’s like a ramp for someone who uses a wheelchair, or glasses for someone who is shortsighted. It doesn’t do the “blooming” for you, it just makes it possible to grow what you’ve sown without the unnecessary struggle.

Join me “Behind the Curtain”

If you’ve been curious about how this actually looks in the wild (and how “Seeds” can work for a beautifully scattered brain like yours), I’m opening up the hood this Thursday.

I’m hosting a free webinar: Meet My AI Partner. No “tech-bro” jargon, just a real look at how I use these tools to protect my seeds and organize my brain, my business and my life.

Grab your free spot on Humanitix here:

https://events.humanitix.com/meet-my-ai-partner-how-i-organise-a-beautifully-scattered-brain

Whether you’re an AI sceptic or just someone who is tired of staring at a hand empty of seeds, I’d love to see you there. (And yes, there will be a replay if you run out of seeds by 7pm!)

How many “seeds” do you feel you have to spend each day? And what is the biggest “seed-drainer” in your world right now? I’d love to hear in the comments.

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