ADHD, AI, and the case for a four-day workweek (with journalist Jared Lindzon)

Jared Lindzon has reported on the future of work for more than a decade. Then, at 33, he was diagnosed with ADHD, and the story got personal. Jared, a freelance journalist for publications like Fast Company and co-author of the book Do More in Four, joins Nathan Friedman to explore what neurodivergent workers need from the workplace of tomorrow. The two revisit recent moments that showed how hungry people are for this conversation, including a standing-room-only neurodiversity panel at Advertising Week New York and an emotional gathering of ADHD creators at Paris Hilton’s home. Jared also shares personal habits he uses to manage his ADHD at home and work.

Nathan Friedman: Welcome to "Minds at Work", the podcast for leaders who embrace neurodiversity in business. I'm your host, Nathan Friedman, co-president and chief marketing officer of Understood.org, the leading organization for anyone navigating neurodivergence.

Each week we're here exploring how neurodiversity sparks innovation, and how we as leaders across industries can create a more inclusive future for all.

Today, I'm talking with Jared Lindzon. Jared is a freelance journalist who has written extensively about the future of work. He's a regular contributor at "Fast Company", but you'll also find his writing in "Time" magazine, "Rolling Stone", "The Globe and Mail", and lots of other publications.

Jared is also a public speaker and author, and his first book, "Do More in Four", which he co-wrote, makes the case for why it's time we move to a shorter workweek.

A few years ago, when he was 33, Jared was diagnosed with ADHD, and that diagnosis has helped him to better understand the career choices he made and the choices of others like him.

I recently had the pleasure of appearing with Jared on a panel about neurodiversity and creativity at Advertising Week New York, and I'm excited to talk to him about that today, as well as about the future of work, particularly as it pertains to neurodivergent folks. Jared, welcome to "Minds at Work".

Jared Lindzon: Thanks so much for having me, Nathan.

Nathan: It seems like this is a weekly meetup for us over the past few months. We've met in various cities around the US.

Jared: We've gone from having never met to having weekly conversations, sometimes in person, sometimes on different sides of the continent over the last four or five weeks, I think. So I've had a crash course in Nathan.

Nathan: Yeah, and a lot of what we talked about — the majority of what we've talked about, I would say — is around neurodivergence, right? I know you've covered the future of work for more than a decade. When did neurodivergence and ADHD start showing up in your reporting, and how did that come to be?

(02:02) Jared discusses how his personal mental health journey and ADHD diagnosis influenced his reporting on the future of work.

Jared: As you mentioned, I've been in this space reporting on the future of work for a really long time. I also concurrently and very occasionally would open up in my reporting about my own mental health.

That started well before I started reporting on neurodiversity. I had an episode where I was struggling with depression, and the craziest thing happened: I went skydiving in Dubai, and my depression disappeared.

It was pretty dramatic, the change from who I was going into the airplane and who I was on the other side when I stood up after parachuting down. I started to investigate what had happened, and it turns out that there is a strong link between extreme sports and mental health, and that I wasn't the only one who had experienced this. As a reporter, I thought, "This is something I need to tell the world about."

So I wrote this article for "The New York Times" — my first and only in "The New York Times" — called "How Skydiving Cured My Depression". That was, I believe it published days before my 30th birthday, and that was the first time I opened up about mental health in any capacity, and really the first personal story I had written that publicly. I was writing about the workplace; I wasn't writing about my own mental health.

Once I crossed that chasm, a few years later when I was diagnosed with ADHD, it felt like the table was set to kind of bring that into my reporting, because I had already opened up about my own mental health.

I started learning things about myself that applied to my work. Again, being a reporter, I wanted to investigate this further. One of the first things I came to understand about ADHD is that there's a high proportion of people who are entrepreneurs and self-employed who have ADHD. As a freelance journalist, I am self-employed, I'm rather entrepreneurial, at least among journalists.

When I saw that connection, I wrote an article about it, did a lot of research, and spoke to some other folks who have been experts in this space. I would say it kind of just grew from there.

Nathan: And I think there's a lot of sensitivity and engagement around neurodiversity now, both sensitivity not in a negative way, but in a, "Oh, this is something that I experience, too," way, and it evokes some responses.

For our listeners out there, you can't tell, but I'm in a blue shirt, Jared's in a pink shirt, and the pink is actually reminding me of where we last saw each other, which I think was last week at Paris Hilton's house. I never thought that would be a sentence I would say: "I saw you last week at Paris's house" for "Untapped", which was — we gathered more than 200, almost 300, ADHD creators and talked. Sharing stories and learning about each other was super important.

Jared: First of all, the pink shirt was intentional. This is actually what I should have worn last week, because when I got there, I realized that basically everybody, yourself included, was in pink, and I was in gray and black. I feel like the goth at the princess party right now.

Nathan: Literally everything was — it was an amazing event, but everything was pink. The alpacas were dressed in pink.

Jared: Yes, even the alpacas were more appropriately dressed for the occasion than I. So I'm making up for it with my pink shirt here today. Yes, was there a question there about the event, or just want to reflect on how awesome it was?

Nathan: I mean, yes and yes. 11:11 Media threw an amazing event, and they've been great partners. The event itself was interesting for me for a few reasons, right? It showed there's actually a lot of people who felt seen at that event, and other people — which means their audiences — are feeling seen by what those creators are doing, which has been really important. Were there any key takeaways you had at that event or from that event that you see as really resonating with you today?

Jared: There was a lot of powerful moments at that event, but by far the one that resonates is when individuals were given a microphone and most barely even got any words out before the tears started coming, and just talking about the challenges that they've faced growing up with ADHD or some other difference, and how amazing it was to feel seen in this way, to be addressing Paris Hilton directly in her home — who is for many of them a hero and an advocate — and to be surrounded by hundreds of other people who also feel the same way.

I think that moment also came immediately after a session that Sarah led where we were asked to raise our hands if, you know, this describes you. It was some pretty specific experiences that I think a lot of people in the room, myself included, felt like were unique to us. Just to see everybody raising their hand to say that they had experienced the same kind of challenges, I feel like everybody felt seen and felt like they were home.

Immediately after that, people were trying to articulate that feeling and barely getting the words out. It was very emotional, and I did not expect that a party in pink at Paris Hilton's house would have the whole group in tears.

Nathan: That particular moment resonated with me as well. For those who may not know, Sarah — when Jared is referring to Sarah — is Sarah Greenberg, a licensed clinician, and she's on Understood's team leading a lot of our work with experts. She brought people through this journey that people thought they were alone in, and then they came to realize they were not alone.

Jared: I know one of them was about rejection sensitive dysphoria. She didn't use those words exactly, but said, "Have you ever run home crying because you thought someone said something mean about you, and then found out later that you misconstrued the situation?" Or she asked, "How many struggled in school?"

Nathan: And some of them were related to work. Some of them were like, "Have you ever felt significant anxiety after looking at your analytics?"

Jared: Right. Yes, that was a big one, too, because it's a room full of creators and that's a tough one for folks, especially dealing with rejection sensitive dysphoria where if the numbers aren't great, that can be really tough. I think for the creators in the room to see that that's something that they all go through was really important and powerful.

Nathan: Completely. Paris had a lot of the same things.

Jared: Yeah.

(09:24) The conversation turns to Advertising Week New York and discussions surrounding neurodiversity, consumer behavior, and the four-day workweek.

Nathan: In addition to seeing you last week, I saw you two weeks ago at Advertising Week. We were on a different stage in front of a different audience talking about neurodiversity and creativity. That creativity thread that we saw at Paris's was also present on the stage there.

What stuck with you from that conversation? You moderated, and so there were clearly some interesting takeaways that we discussed after, but I would love for you to share that with our listeners.

Jared: Absolutely. In New York when we met up previous to the LA meetup at New York Advertising Week, I was very honored and thrilled to have been chosen to moderate that panel. There was a lot of interesting insights there. I thought it was a really good mix of panelists.

You were bringing a lot of the evidence and a lot of the facts that underpinned the conversation. Riqia Reynolds was able to speak very well from personal experience as an entrepreneur with ADHD. A lot of what she said really resonated with me specifically because I am also an entrepreneur with ADHD.

Then Alison Lambrouza was able to provide some very real-world examples of how the neurodiverse community intersects with the economy in practical ways, in terms of how they buy differently, how they travel differently specifically, because she's from Tripadvisor in that regard.

One thing that she said that really struck me was just talking about the data around brand loyalty. I immediately was like, "Yes, I've noticed that now that you say it." It's very hard to switch from something that's comfortable and known, and so it makes sense that there's a high degree of brand loyalty.

She also talked about how parents and families with neurodivergent individuals just travel differently. They look for different things, and searches for neurodiverse-friendly travel is up significantly. She also mentioned that she is working on a project with Tampa Bay to provide more inclusive travel experiences.

Going along the panel, it went from the data that you were bringing, then the real-world lived experiences, and then how it's playing out in the economy. I thought that that combination worked really well.

More than anything else, the fact of the panel, that we were sitting on a stage — the sort of biggest stage at New York Advertising Week, a pretty big event in the industry — talking about neurodiversity, and had a packed room, and had people waiting on standby to get in, that speaks volumes. The fact that the panel happened in this venue and was so well received as a subject before we even started speaking, I think that might be what resonates most.

Nathan: The standing room only, the heat in the room because it was so packed — all of those things not only tell the importance, but underscore the need for these types of conversations. Whether it's Cannes Lions, whether it's Advertising Week, we see a dramatic increase in interest in the topic.

Particularly when it comes to creativity, we talked about creativity, but not only how it manifests through entrepreneurship or how it can progress to consumer experiences with the Tampa Bay visitors bureau, but also how it impacts people at work, right?

I know you've done a lot of thinking around that and a lot of reporting. You also wrote a book around that. "Do More in Four" makes that case for a four-day workweek, which I personally like, but not everybody is in that vibe. Tell us a bit more about the research and what conclusions you pointed to.

(13:08) Jared breaks down the research behind the four-day workweek and its unique advantages for neurodivergent employees.

Jared: Oh boy, where to even begin? The five-day workweek is a sort of hangover from the Industrial Revolution that was never really intended to be permanent and doesn't necessarily suit the modern economy.

I teamed up with a guy named Joe O'Connor, my co-author. He has conducted pilots all around the world, including in North America — hundreds of companies — and he helps them switch to a four-day workweek, not just by taking a day off the week and expecting the same results, but by methodically changing the way work is accomplished in order to actually cut out a lot of the waste that exists and allow companies to get more done in less time.

Through hundreds of pilots with tens of thousands of workers, 96% of the participating organizations have maintained the four-day workweek policy. He's sitting on a mountain of data and anecdotes about this thing that clearly works in practice.

The benefits for employees, I don't even necessarily need to say because I think we can all understand how our lives would be dramatically better if we were working a four-day workweek. But in terms of the workplace context: lower absenteeism, lower turnover rates, much less spent on recruiting and retention, more motivation, higher camaraderie.

All of these metrics that organizations actually invest a lot of money in trying to improve and don't generally see results have significant improvements. By helping staff get to a place where they can actually get their work done in four days instead of five, there's all of these additional benefits for the organization: higher productivity, less turnover.

There's a whole range of benefits for individuals, for organizations, and then we also get into the book about the benefits for society and what a four-day workweek world would look like in terms of gender equality, in terms of environmental sustainability. There's all of these knock-on benefits that would help us address some of our biggest collective problems as individuals, as organizations, as a society, and an economy.

There's just so much there that makes sense in so many ways, but it's such a hard concept to get people to latch onto because the nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday schedule is just so deeply ingrained in our lives that it's a really hard habit to shake.

Nathan: It is, and some of the interesting points you brought up relative to lower turnover, higher productivity, etc., are some of the benefits that neurodivergent employees bring to the workforce, which is interesting, right?

The lens I'm looking at it through: whether you have ADHD, dyslexia, or other neurodivergent conditions, there's a potential for saying, "I can't do it in four days. I need more time, I need more flexibility." Is there a thought you have around, if you are neurodivergent, how that would impact a four-day workweek? Would it benefit? Would there be other constraints or opportunities?

Jared: It's hard to paint with a wide brush because it really depends on what kind of situation we're talking about. I think for some people — neurodivergent people in particular — the waste that exists in an organization in terms of timewaste and in terms of just inefficiencies that they see every day are painful to watch at times. The four-day workweek is this redesign project that tries to attack those inefficiencies.

I think people who are very work-oriented and productive and efficient love this concept because it gets everyone moving at the same pace.

There's also a lot of research into the importance of flexibility for folks who are neurodivergent. Part of the reason why I'm self-employed is because I need to be able to adjust my schedule. As I think I've told you before, my biggest ADHD challenge is insomnia. There are nights where I just don't sleep and need to cancel all of my morning meetings the next day, not because I want to, but because I will be completely useless in those meetings. Having the freedom to do that as someone who is self-employed is super helpful.

If I was employed traditionally, having more flexibility and having a four-day workweek would actually really help me overcome that challenge. At least it would reduce the sleep anxiety that I feel because I know that there's another day where I can kind of catch up.

Everyone's story is different and everyone's challenges are different. But overall, more flexibility and more internal efficiency and well-defined communication strategies — which is something that we advocate for — more asynchronous communication, which we also advocate for as a way to help reduce timewaste, these are all things that also tend to appeal to neurodivergent workers.

(18:31) Nathan and Jared examine the intersection of artificial intelligence, workplace productivity, and ADHD.

Nathan: One of the other things that has evolved and is obviously consistently evolving — and I'd be remiss if I didn't use the two letters "AI" in this conversation — that also plays a role here. You can do more with less time now given some of the efficiencies of what can be done through large language models or LLMs. Did you take that into account, or is that something that's going to be an addendum to this new book?

Jared: We actually had a chapter on AI's impact. It was written in late 2024, so the model efficiency might not be — we were very speculative in where the technology was going. It turns out that most of it, if not all of it, holds up pretty well today.

What didn't translate that we suspected would was that we believed in a world where we have these tools that statistically reduce the amount of time workers need to spend on tasks. Depending on the industry, depending on the task, people are saving hours, days by offloading some of their tasks to AI. We were pretty confident when writing the book that that would create a world in which people would get some of that time back, in which there would be excess time, that we'd be thinking, "What should we do with all of this spare time that thank God AI has delivered to us?"

The reality has been dramatically different. People are working more, not less, in an age of AI — go figure. People are very concerned about job loss and feel greater pressure to be more efficient, to onboard these tools, and to adapt the way that they're working. They're not really being rewarded for it; it's kind of like a base-level expectation. The job market is such that there's a looming threat of job loss hanging over their heads at all times.

So the circumstances in which AI arrives, particularly economic and labor market circumstances, we didn't think would be this bad, and we didn't think that the impact — we thought the impacts of AI would be a lot more positive on the average worker, whereas the data shows that it's actually having the opposite effect: work intensification.

Nathan: Work intensification is quite interesting. I think it really depends on the industry and the type of role, whether you're a manager, individual contributor, as well as if you're an engineer versus somebody who does a lot of in-person engagement.

I think there's also the expectation of adoption within workflows, and I think there's two philosophies on that. You've seen companies use AI in one instance to cull workforce, but one could argue they were bloated to begin with, so was the culling actually because of AI or is it because they actually needed to do that?

The second is efficiency and velocity, right? You have different companies trying to say, "We can speed up and do more with the same headcount or the same individual, upskill those workers so they can do different tasks in this new environment while also getting the core tenants of their job done."

I think neurodivergent thinkers are some of the earlier adopters to AI because you've seen that with the ability to not have that blank sheet of paper syndrome, right, where you look and think, "How do I start?" Taking over reminders and task settings, and doing some of the automated stuff that people don't want to do.

As a journalist with ADHD, what's your relationship with AI at work? How do you use it, or do you use it?

Jared: It's interesting because as a freelancer, I work for a lot of different publications, and many of them have different AI policies. But most of the larger, more reputable ones have a pretty strict ban on AI usage in anything that is being included in a published article. I'm very happy with that. I don't want AI to be writing the news for a lot of reasons.

But AI has been hugely beneficial in terms of my own efficiency. The things that I love about this job are talking to people and writing, and I'm doing so much more of those things now and so much less of the stuff that enabled that than ever before.

When I started in this industry 12, 13 years ago — you can even go 15 years back, I was a student newspaper editor in college — I spent so much of my time transcribing interviews. It was just tedious, mindless, painful work. You'd do an hour-long interview, you spend the next two hours taking that audio and turning it into a transcript so you can start pulling out quotes.

I don't do that anymore. That is such a huge time savings. Transcription tools are not new, but that has been the biggest game changer.

Research: before interviewing someone, I used to spend a lot of time on Google reading articles, trying to find different things, coming up with questions. I still come up with my own questions, but I can say to Claude, "I'm about to interview so-and-so for such-and-such publication, and I want it to be on this subject. What do I need to know?" And just get kind of a rundown of some basic ideas and some question suggestions. It sort of takes that background research process from hours down to minutes.

Then there's a lot of emailing and scheduling involved in my job. Every article I write, I'm interviewing two or three people, and so being able to offload some of that email back and forth... It's been a lot of things that have saved me time to get me back to the things that I actually enjoy about this job, which are talking to people and writing about it. That's how I want to spend my time, and the more I utilize AI, the more I get to just do those things.

(25:00) Jared reflects on how receiving an ADHD diagnosis shifted his personal mindset and day-to-day work habits.

Nathan: Those all sound like capacity gains and ability to focus on what you really enjoy and what you're really good at. Are there any other changes in how you've approached work since you've been diagnosed, or anything else in work or life that you want to share with our listeners that really helped to give them concepts that they could apply in their life?

Jared: After I was diagnosed, I came to understand some of the challenges that I've faced and why I've faced them. It sort of helps equip me to approach things differently in the future.

I definitely have a long history of rejection sensitive dysphoria, and I didn't understand what that was until recently. Knowing that — just reading it on the page like, "This is a thing that affects people with ADHD, and the reality is not nearly as bad as the story you're telling in your brain," that really changed my life in a lot of ways, that I can just sort of take a breath before I jump to conclusions.

I would say a lot of it is just logical, like I know that this is happening because of my ADHD, and I know that if I don't act impulsively, if I stop and think and take a breath when I'm emotional or worked up or whatever, I'm much less likely to regret whatever action follows in the future. I think that's been really important.

Professionally, it's little things like having a fidget on my desk at all times that just helps me concentrate. I actually realized that even though AI is transcribing all of my notes, I am aggressively typing notes in every conversation. It's not because I need to anymore; it's because that helps me focus on the conversation in a much deeper way, and I didn't understand that before. My mind would wander in interviews if I wasn't typing down the words that were being spoken to me as they were being spoken.

There's a lot of things like that that without the diagnosis I may have discovered on my own eventually. But having it kind of just gives me the "why" behind some of the quirks in how I do things, and gives me permission to keep doing them without feeling different or weird about it.

Nathan: I appreciate you sharing that. I find that I write everything down. People at work make fun of me for still hand-writing stuff, but that's how I remember.

Jared: Yeah.

Nathan: Thank you so much for today's conversation, and great to reconnect with you.

Jared: Always a pleasure, Nathan.

Nathan: Thanks for tuning in to "Minds at Work". I hope today's conversation inspired you to think differently about how to harness the power of neurodiversity in business. If you want to know more about our guests today or the work we're doing here at Understood.org, please check out the show notes.

For those looking for resources to better advocate for themselves and others, please visit u.org/work.

"Minds at Work" is brought to you by Understood.org, a leading nonprofit helping millions of people navigate neurodivergence with clear guidance, practical tools, and people who get it.

This podcast and other podcasts are made possible by donations from our listeners. To help us continue and expand our work, please donate at u.org/donate. That's the letter u.org/donate.

The show was produced by Julie Subrin, Alison Hochlander, Max MacKenzie, and me, Nathan Friedman. Mixing is by Justin D. Wright. Briana Berry is our production director, and Laura Key is our executive director.

I'm your host, Nathan Friedman. Please join us next time when we'll continue exploring how difference can spark connection and shape a more inclusive and creative future of business.