You didn't do less work. You did work nobody budgeted.

For about eight years I had a 2 PM steering call, and for about eight years I wrote out what I was going to say in it beforehand. Not notes. Sentences. The two lines about the slipped milestone, in the order I meant to say them, because I had learned that if I improvised I would either lose the thread halfway through or say the whole thing in a rush and sound like I was apologising for something.

Nobody on that call knew. What they saw was a project manager who was unusually prepared. The prep was real, the delivery was real, and the reconciliation work my team shipped for Bank of America landed correctly. I want to be precise about that, because there is a version of this story that reads as a confession and it isn't one. I was good at the job. The job just cost me more than it said on the invoice.

Twenty minutes here. Fifteen there. Every day, for a decade, on top of the work itself.

Two studies published this year finally put a shape on those twenty minutes. Researchers at Simon Fraser University surveyed 202 adults with a clinical ADHD diagnosis and found that 91.6% reported masking their traits — hiding, suppressing or compensating — and that people paid for it in exhaustion, anxiety, depression and identity disturbance, sometimes needing days to recover.^[2][3] Separately, a team analysed 277 r/ADHD threads about work — 39,750 comments, 1.2 million words — and named one of its three themes like a line item on a budget: employees with ADHD are investing additional efforts that are not required of neurotypical employees.^[1]

One participant in that data described it in a single word I have not been able to stop thinking about: "I have a worksona that I maintain."^[1]

Maintain. Like a building, or a server, or a car. Something with a running cost.

Two caveats before I build anything on this. The Reddit study is qualitative — it names patterns in how a community talks about work, and its authors say plainly that it should be treated as hypothesis-generating rather than as a basis for organisational design conclusions.^[1] It reports no frequencies, and I won't invent any. And masking isn't only an ADHD thing; a 2024 comparison found adults with ADHD do camouflage, though less than autistic adults do.^[4] What follows is a mechanism, not a measurement.

§1Why the usual advice can't reach this

Search for ADHD masking at work and you will find a wall of pages explaining what masking is, listing signs you might be doing it, and suggesting that you consider unmasking. I read a dozen of them. They are mostly accurate and mostly useless to somebody with a 2 PM steering call, for one reason: they treat masking as a feeling to be recognised, and it is also a quantity to be accounted for.

"Consider unmasking at work" is advice that assumes the mask is the whole cost. But the mask is only the packaging. Underneath it is a stack of actual tasks — real, effortful, time-consuming tasks — that you perform every day and that appear on no plan anywhere. You could unmask completely, tell everyone, and still be doing all of them.

So the question I care about isn't am I masking. It's what exactly am I doing during those twenty minutes, and where did the twenty minutes come from.

§2What the hidden hour is made of

Here is the part that changed how I look at my own calendar. When I catalogued what actually filled that hidden time, none of it was "trying harder". All of it was converting information from a format my brain drops into a format it can hold.

Four conversions, over and over:

• Spoken into written. A decision arrives in a meeting, out loud, once. It has to become text or it is gone. One participant in the study put it flatly: "I cannot process verbal info during meetings."^[1]
• Assumed into explicit. Everyone else is carrying the context of the last three weeks in their heads. You rebuild it from the thread each time, because you did not retain it, and rebuilding is not free.
• Filed into found. The document exists. You saved it. Locating it again is its own small project, repeated weekly.
• Felt into rehearsed. You know what you think. Getting it out of your mouth in the right order, without the wrong tone, takes a draft first — my 2 PM sentences.

Notice what all four have in common. They produce no output anybody can see. Nothing ships. No deliverable moves. At the end of an hour of pure conversion work you have exactly as much to show as when you started, which is why it feels like laziness while it is happening, and why the word people reach for afterwards is "overcompensating" — as another participant did: "The reality is that I am overcompensating for being forgetful."^[1]

It is not overcompensation. It is a conversion layer, and the work depends on it — remove it and the job genuinely does not get done. That is a strange kind of relief to arrive at: the invisible thing you have been privately ashamed of is a component.

§3The project-management diagnosis

This is where a decade of running delivery for banks turns out to be useful in a way I would not have predicted.

In planning terms, conversion work is not a character flaw or even a symptom. It is scope that never entered the plan — and unbudgeted scope has a completely predictable behaviour, which is the reason I find this framing calming rather than bleak.

Every estimate covers the deliverable. Write the status report: 40 minutes. What the estimate does not cover is re-reading the thread to find what changed, turning Tuesday's call into written notes, re-finding the file, and rehearsing the two sentences about the slip. Add those and the same task costs 87 minutes. The deliverable was estimated honestly. The job was not.

And here is the rule that matters, the one every project manager learns early: work that isn't in the plan still gets done — it just gets paid out of the buffer. On a programme, the buffer is float, contingency, someone's weekend. In a working life with ADHD, the buffer is your evening. That is the entire trick of it. The hours do not disappear. They relocate to the only place with no governance on it.

Watch the same 40-minute task twice:

There's a knock-on effect in the study data that makes this worse over time, and it deserves naming because it is the part people blame themselves for hardest. Two participants describe it: "If you finish a project early you are rewarded with… more work", and "Working hard and wowing managers does not actually make my life better."^[1]

Read that as a systems problem and it is almost funny. You absorb the conversion cost privately so the output looks effortless. The output looking effortless is read as spare capacity. Spare capacity is filled. Now you are converting more, still privately, at a higher volume. The mask succeeded, and success is what raised the rent.

The authors' own conclusion sits exactly here: work outcomes, they write, "may reflect misalignment between job requirements and available support rather than deficits in capability."^[1] Misalignment. Not deficit. That is a design finding, and design findings have fixes.

§4Five fixes, no disclosure required

Every one of these works without telling anybody anything about your brain. They are ordinary professional habits that happen to move hours out of your evening and into the plan. Run them badly and they still help — that is the only test I hold any of this to now.

§5What changed

I still rehearse. I have stopped grading myself for it.

What actually changed is smaller and more clerical than any of the advice I used to read. The conversion work is on my calendar now, in a slot with a boring name, and because it is on the calendar it is finite. It ends. There is a version of me that used to do that same work at 9pm from a decaying memory of a conversation, badly, and then read the badness as evidence about my character. Both the 9pm and the evidence are gone. Only the fifteen minutes are left, and they are in daylight.

The thing I did not expect was what came back. For years there was a text message from a friend I left unanswered for three weeks — not because I didn't care, but because by 7pm there was nothing left to answer it with. The conversion work had already spent it. Moving those hours into the plan did not make me more disciplined. It gave me back the part of the evening that used to go to unpaid overhead.

If you have spent years quietly suspecting that your job costs you more than it costs everyone else — you are probably right, and the number is knowable. Write down what actually fills the gap between the estimate and the finish. It isn't a flaw in you. It's a line item, and line items can be budgeted, priced and handed back.