How do we have the same ADHD?

Someone hands you a new piece of work. What's the first thing you do? Some people write out the steps before they touch anything. Some go and find out who else is involved and what's already been decided. Some just start and work it out on the way. I explore. If you've ever watched someone work the exact opposite way to you and quietly thought how, you already understand why work styles exist. This is the reasoning behind them, why Koala starts from behaviour rather than from a diagnosis, and what a work style actually changes once you have one.

The comparison that never adds up

You know the person. Up early, inbox cleared, gym done, three meetings prepped, most of the day finished before noon. The systems are immaculate. And then they mention, quite openly, that they have ADHD. Meanwhile you're reading that at half three having not started the thing you meant to start at ten.

That question sat badly with me for a long time. Either they'd found something I hadn't or I was doing my own brain wrong. Usually there's more going on than the label, since anxiety, autism and plenty else often sit alongside ADHD and change the shape of it completely. But even setting all of that aside, two people can meet exactly the same criteria and share almost nothing.

Two lists of nine

The diagnostic criteria for ADHD is two lists of nine. Nine symptoms of inattention, nine of hyperactivity and impulsivity. As an adult you need to meet five on either list to cross the threshold. Under seventeen it's six.

Five out of nine means there are 256 different combinations of the inattentive symptoms alone that all clear the bar. Put the co-occurring conditions back on top, along with the environments people grew up in and everything they learned to do to get by. What you end up with is a label that's accurate and still doesn't tell you what to do on Monday morning.

I was diagnosed three years ago

I've had ADHD my whole life. Nothing about the way I worked changed when I got the letter. The all-nighters were already there. So were the meetings where I understood everything perfectly and then forgot almost all of it the second I walked out. So were the notes that read like another language a week later.

What changed was that I finally had a word for it. What didn't change was that I'd needed help long before anyone gave me one.

A diagnosis takes time, money and access. Waiting lists run for years. Plenty of people never get there. Plenty more have no idea there's anything to get assessed for in the first place.

But you don't need a diagnosis to know that you can't start until it's urgent, or that you lose the thread the moment a meeting ends. That's behaviour. It's available right now, to anyone, for free. If something had looked at how I actually worked instead of waiting for someone to assess me, I could have had support years earlier. That's the first reason work styles exist.

The bit that doesn't make it into the policy

The second reason is that even once I knew, I didn't tell anyone at work. I was scared of how I'd be treated afterwards.

I'm not unusual in that. Plenty of people never disclose. That silence is a risk calculation about a specific manager and a specific team, and it's a bad deal for everyone involved: you carry the whole thing on your own while your employer sincerely believes their inclusion policy is working.

Work styles change the first move. Everyone has a work style, so talking about yours discloses nothing. It hands a team a shared language for something they otherwise have no words for and makes the difference between two people an ordinary thing to discuss rather than an admission. Once that's normal, asking for a formal adjustment is a much smaller step than making it from silence.

Where the four styles come from

I didn't invent this from nothing.

The Driver

Action-led. Comes alive when there's momentum.

The Visionary

Big-picture. Works best exploring possibilities.

The Connector

Collaborative. Does best when everyone's aligned.

The Analyst

Detail-led. Does best with time to go deep.

Work styles sit on established frameworks that have been used in workplaces for decades, with a large body of research behind them and a vocabulary plenty of companies already speak. We used all of it to build the map and then kept it out of the product. What we added on top is a lens those frameworks don't carry: regulation.

It reads behaviour. You're never asked what you're like. You're asked how you start a task, what slows you down and how you prefer to get information. None of the framework language reaches you or turns up in your result.

Everyone is a mix. You get a primary style that leads and a secondary that flavours it. The order matters: a Driver with an Analyst side and an Analyst with a Driver side are not the same person. Four styles, sixteen ways to land.

Regulation decides which version turns up. Nobody is one thing permanently. Regulated, you work from your base style. Dysregulated, you shift into something else that has its own shape rather than being a broken version of the first. Building Koala, I'm a Visionary with an Analyst side. Put me back in a corporate environment and I slide the other way round. That drift is information. Reading it for you automatically is still in development.

What a work style is

A work style describes how you work. You can have ADHD, autism, dyslexia, dyspraxia, several of those at once or none of them and still have one, since everyone does.

It's behavioural, so it can't diagnose you and it won't replace an assessment or the formal adjustments you're entitled to at work. What it does is flavour things.

What it actually changes

Inside Koala, your style shapes how your work comes back to you. It sets your starting capacity and how finely your actions get broken down, then changes the framing and the order of the steps themselves. An Analyst-leaning plan leads with the criteria and the detail. A Visionary-leaning one leads with momentum and keeps the framing light. Same work, handed back in a shape you can actually pick up.

Outside Koala, you get a Work Style Support Profile. It's a PDF with your name on it, written in the first person so you're not left doing the translating.

• How I work
• How this shows up
• What drains me
• What my secondary style does to all of that
• The challenges I flagged

It's yours. Take it to a manager, use it in a one-to-one, send it ahead of a new job or show it to nobody at all.

It's the difference between "I have ADHD, please adjust something" and "here's how I work, here's what drains me, here's what helps." One of those asks you to disclose a condition. The other doesn't.

Mine says I need to see the whole shape of a thing before I can start any part of it. This guide was fourteen open tabs and a rambling voice note before it was a guide.

Sources: American Psychiatric Association, DSM-5-TR diagnostic criteria for ADHD: nine inattentive and nine hyperactive-impulsive symptoms, five required from either list in adulthood and six under 17. The 256 figure is the number of subsets of five or more from a list of nine.