In the tech industry, we obsess over burnout and complex code. We rarely talk about how neurodivergence can turn a "simple" administrative task into an insurmountable hurdle that quietly derails a career.
I am a software engineer. I’ve spent my career designing systems and writing thousands of lines of complex code. But in one of my favorite roles—at a company I truly believed in—I was slowly marginalized, sidelined, and eventually pushed out.
The culprit? A "simple" daily work summary email.
The "Off-Ramp" Paralysis: When OCD and ADHD Collide
When people think of OCD, they often imagine Adrian Monk, obsessed with keeping everything neat and tidy and everything has to be perfect. But my OCD doesn't work that way, it has an off ramp.
If I perceive that a task needs to be perfect, but I also see that it will take hours of exhaustive effort to get there, I don't obsessively work on it, I hit a wall. I lock up. I cannot start. Instead of OCD making me have a tidy desk, I look at the untidiness and decide living with untidiness is favorable than tormenting myself with trying to clean to perfection.
When my manager asked for a "simple" daily status update, my brain would immediately trigger this "death spiral":
The Request: A quick summary of the day.
The Conflict: My OCD rejected the "simple" premise. If the update wasn't exhaustive, it felt untrue. It had to be complete.
The Friction: My ADHD recognized that compiling a complete, accurate list of every task, pull request, and conversation would take an hour of agonizing mental labor.
The Off-Ramp: Faced with a mountain of actual coding work and a "simple" task that felt backbreaking, my brain would lock up. I would push the email aside to do "real work."
The Result: The ADHD reality set in: "Later" never came. Once the task was out of sight, it was also out of mind.
I missed the emails. I appeared uncommunicative. Trust in my professional capability fractured. I wasn't fired, no, it was a much slower, more painful decline. I stopped getting the meaty, interesting projects. I stopped getting the promotions I was working toward. I was eventually sidelined to menial work, even performing receptionist duties when I had been hired to be an engineer.
The irony was brutal: I could solve the company’s hardest technical problems, but I couldn't solve this one administrative one. I eventually resigned, feeling like a failure.
The Long Road Back
Following that resignation, I spent years working for companies where I didn't believe in the mission and didn't enjoy the day-to-day grind. It was a long, unfulfilling chapter, and it took time to find my way back to a role that felt right.
Fortunately, I am now at a company that is fantastic—I believe in our mission, and I love the work I’m doing. It feels good to be back where I belong. This time, however, I’m bringing better tools with me.
The "What If"
Looking back, the most frustrating part is that the technology to solve my administrative hurdle simply didn't exist back then. If I had had access to modern Large Language Models and AI agents years ago, I might have stayed at that first company, working on projects I believed in, as a valued member of the team. I was fighting a battle I couldn't win with the tools of that era.
The "Lazy Programmer" Approach
There is a concept in software development called the "Lazy Programmer." It has nothing to do with being unproductive. It’s about being so averse to tedious, repetitive work that you spend hours writing code to automate it so you never have to touch it again.
I finally stopped trying to force my brain to work in a way it isn't wired to. I leaned into that philosophy and built a tool to do the heavy lifting for me.
I wrote a script that acts as an automated administrative assistant. It uses modular "collectors" to pull data from everywhere I actually work:
Slack: Conversations and context.
Linear: Task status.
Fathom: Meeting transcripts.
Google Calendar: What I actually spent my time on.
GitHub: PR progress.
I feed this data into a Gemini model, along with a context markdown file explaining the company and who I am within it, and then let the AI draft the summary for me.
The Breakthrough
The breakthrough isn't the automation itself; it's the removal of the friction. Since I didn't write the first draft, my OCD doesn't trigger. I don't feel the compulsion to obsess over every detail. If a subtask is missing, I might tweak it, or I might just leave it as "good enough."
What used to take me an hour of soul-crushing frustration now takes seconds.
If you are stuck in a similar cycle, stop trying to force your brain to work in a way it isn't wired to. Sometimes the most professional thing you can do isn't "trying harder"—it’s automating the parts of your job that are designed to break you. My hope is that with this script, I’ll be able to stay in a job I love for the long haul. And heck, if you have a similar problem writing up a report on what you worked on every day, feel free to fork my script from my github.