My Neurodivergence Doesn’t Care About Your Productivity Hacks

The Chaos Goblin Method

I know what you’re thinking. If I’m writing a post like this, I must be one of those beautifully organised humans with a colour-coded Trello board, a planner for every mood, and an aesthetic morning routine involving turmeric shots and 5am journalling*. But here’s the twist: I’m not. I’m a type-A girlie through and through. I get things done, never miss a deadline, and somehow manage to keep all the plates spinning, but if you actually watched me work? You’d be horrified.

There are no systems. No apps. No beautifully curated productivity tools. Just me, barefoot and pacing the kitchen at 3pm, muttering ideas to myself while I wait for the kettle to boil. Blog posts get written in chaotic 40-minute frenzies while laundry tumbles and Lulu tries to eat my toes. I’ve never had a workflow, just wild bursts of hyper-focus that leave me dazed and victorious.

People often ask me for tips. “How do you stay so productive?” “What planner do you use?” And when I answer, they look at me like I’ve admitted to licking batteries. The truth is, I don’t use anything. No planners, no digital calendars, no sticky notes. I tried once, I really did. I bought the cutest diary you’ve ever seen**, and I even labelled the months. And… I never wrote a single thing in it.

*Ick.
**Yes, the infamous kikki-k.

Neurospicy and Not Sorry

See, the thing they don’t tell you about being neurodivergent is that productivity looks different for us. Give me a list of things to do, and I will do everything except the first thing on that list. Tell me to tidy my desk and suddenly I’m deep-cleaning the windows, labelling my spice rack with cute chalkboard stickers, and investigating the nutritional value of pimento-stuffed olives.

It’s not because we’re lazy. Far from it. Most of us are doing more in a day than we should. We just do it in weird, roundabout, deeply inefficient-looking ways. The world says, “Follow this structure and you will be productive.” Our brains say, “That’s cute,” and promptly launch into a three-hour hyperfocus session on a task no one asked us to do, that somehow fixes a completely unrelated problem.

And yes, we’re proud of it. Because when our nervous systems let us enter that magical portal of focus, we make magic happen. It doesn’t look tidy, and it doesn’t follow a Pinterest productivity board, but it works. Mostly. Unless it doesn’t. In which case we take a nap and hope the next burst comes soon.

Resting is Not Procrastination

Here’s the other thing: I used to beat myself up for not being consistent. For not sticking to the routines all the gurus say you need. I thought something was wrong with me. Why couldn’t I keep up? Why did my body seem to reject every planner, every system, every beautiful morning routine* I tried to adopt?

Then I realised that my nervous system just doesn’t work like that. I live in cycles. Some days I’m a machine, writing thousands of words and knocking over tasks like dominoes. Other days, I stare into space and rewatch the same five comfort shows until my brain catches up. I used to think this was procrastination, but I now know it’s recovery. It’s how my body and mind reset before the next wild sprint.

So if you’re like me and you’re tired of being told that rest is a weakness or that you need to just try harder, please hear this: you are not broken. You’re just not wired for the nine-to-five grind. You’re not built for linear progress or hustle culture. Quite frankly, you’re built for something more fluid, something that honours your rhythms.

*Okay, fine, I do have a morning routine now – if you can call it that. It’s really just a frantic 20-minute scramble involving steaming clothes, doing a 5-step skincare routine, attempting makeup with one eye open, feeding Lulu before he stages a protest, sculling a kombucha, and then flouncing dramatically out the door like I’ve got my life together. It’s chaos. But somehow, it works.

Productivity Isn’t Always Visible

Sometimes productivity doesn’t look like a ticked-off to-do list. Instead, it looks like sitting in silence, letting an idea brew quietly at the back of your mind until it’s ready. It looks like crying in the shower, making a cup of tea, and starting again. And sometimes? It’s a voice note recorded during an evening stroll in the rain, because you forgot your umbrella and accidentally stumbled into the perfect life metaphor that demands to become a blog post. That counts too.

I’ve written some of my best work while crying, laughing, panicking, and eating jaffles at midnight. Because life isn’t neat, and neither is creativity. And honestly, I wouldn’t have it any other way. The mess is where the magic lives.

So let’s not pretend we’ve got a colour-coded system nailed down. We’re not trying to optimise every second of our day. We’re trying to live it. Feel it. Dance through it barefoot with a half-written blog post open on one tab and fifteen other tabs of research that may or may not get finished. It might not look efficient, but it’s real. And it’s ours.

The World Wasn’t Built For Us

There’s a reason we struggle with the conventional systems. The world wasn’t built with us in mind. It was built by and for people who thrive in structure, who can follow linear steps without getting distracted by the colour of the sky or the texture of their own thoughts. Neurodivergent minds were never the blueprint. We’re the glitch in the matrix. The brilliant, beautiful glitch*.

When we’re told to give 100%, we give everything. Not just our time or energy, but our thoughts, emotions, sensory experience, existential dread, and a sprinkle of hyperfixation. We take things literally. If you ask us to do something, we’ll do it with such intensity that it looks like overkill to everyone else. But that’s our normal. That’s how our brains understand effort.

So no, it might not look productive to the outside world. We might not sit neatly within systems. But what we bring? It’s more. More thorough. More layered. And more honest. Our productivity can’t always be measured in bullet points and spreadsheets. It’s deeper than that. It’s a full-bodied immersion into whatever it is we’ve decided matters most in the moment. And trust me, that kind of focus? That’s a superpower.

*I like to say Neurodivergents built culture. Neurotypicals built capitalism.

My chaos is not a flaw, it’s a feature – and it gets results.

Built Different, Thriving Anyway

Let’s be honest. We were never meant to fit into the boxes they gave us. All those shiny systems and rigid rules? They don’t see us. They don’t know how our minds work, how our energy rises and falls, how much we care. And if you buy the book or pay for the course, the suspiciously perfect-smiled neurotypical sitting on a trust fund will teach you how to master time-blocking, workflows, and tightly-scheduled routines that promise to change your life. Except they won’t – because they weren’t made for us. We were never meant to be palatable or perfectly planned.

This isn’t resistance. It’s recognition. It’s embracing the way our brains work instead of constantly trying to override them. And it’s giving ourselves permission to be intuitive, responsive, and real. Our value doesn’t come from being cogs in a machine. It comes from being exactly who we are.

We don’t need to fight or resist to prove our worth. We just need to honour it. Honour the quiet days, the bursts of brilliance, the sensitivity, the spark. We bring a kind of depth and dimension to productivity that no spreadsheet can measure.

When we embrace our neurodivergence, we stop trying to squeeze into systems that were never designed for us. We start building lives around our strengths, not our supposed shortcomings. That isn’t rebellion. That’s wisdom.

So if all you did today was exist in your own rhythm, you’re doing more than enough. If you’re creating, healing, or simply surviving in your own way, you’re already part of the rebellion. We don’t need to be tidy to be powerful. We just need to be real.

We Need to Stop Clapping for Basic Decency – Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity

In today's episode of Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity, we're unpacking why we need to stop clapping for basic decency. You know the script. A man texts back within twenty-four hours and we're screenshotting it to the group chat. A man plans a date more than three hours in advance and we call him a unicorn. A man manages to listen, pay attention, and behave like a fully formed adult, and our nervous systems short-circuit because we genuinely don't know how to receive it.Here's the truth nobody is saying out loud. The bar has been dragged so low that Satan himself needs a chiropractor after a competitive round of limbo. We've been culturally trained to be grateful for behaviour that should not require gratitude. We've been told these things are bonuses when they're actually the entry requirement. And in the meantime, women have been quietly doing the basic decency thing forever, without applause, while men get standing ovations for outputs we generated for them.Today we're talking about why a great man is genuinely just an average woman, who benefits when the bar stays low, the invisible labour women have been performing for free for centuries, and the friend-test that cuts straight through every excuse we've ever made for mediocre men. Let's get into it.For more visit BryJaimea.com or follow over on IG @BryJaimea

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