My Brain Has 47 Tabs Open: ADHD and the Cognitive Load of Leadership

Most days, my brain feels exactly like my browser.

There are too many tabs open, something is using far more memory than it should, and at least three tabs are playing music that I cannot locate. Some of those tabs are genuinely in my browser. The rest are technical decisions, people I need to check in on, unfinished conversations, project concerns, deadlines and tasks I was absolutely going to remember without writing them down.

I did not remember them.

Leadership seems particularly good at creating tabs. You can begin the day trying to focus on one piece of technical work, get interrupted by a question from the team, remember that you need to follow up with somebody else, see a Slack notification about another project and suddenly realise that the meeting starting in two minutes requires context you last thought about three weeks ago.

None of the tabs disappear while this is happening. They wait patiently in the background, occasionally refreshing themselves to make sure you know they are still there.

For a long time, I thought the answer was to get better at keeping all of them open. I would move rapidly between code, people, planning and whatever Slack had decided was urgent that day. I told myself that I could stay on top of everything because, as a leader, that was what I was supposed to do.

Then one morning, during standup, I reached the point where I simply could not anymore.

It was not one enormous event or a particularly dramatic conversation. It was everything that had already accumulated. All the juggling had pushed me to a place where one more thing was enough to tip me over. I left the meeting, went to the bathroom and ugly cried for a while.

I knew crying would not solve anything, and part of me thought it was stupid that I could not stop. That did not make stopping any easier.

Once I had collected myself enough to communicate in complete sentences, I sent my manager a Slack message. I explained what had happened and warned her that she would probably hear about it. She immediately arranged a call, and we spoke about it.

After that, it was work as usual.

Looking back, that moment had burnout written all over it. It was not simply an ADHD brain having a busy morning. Burnout had been building quietly underneath all the multitasking, context switching and late nights until my ability to carry it disappeared in the middle of an ordinary standup.

That distinction matters to me now. My brain naturally has a lot of tabs open, but not every crowded day means I am burning out. The ADHD chaos is familiar. Burnout felt like the entire browser had stopped responding.

I was diagnosed with ADHD later in life. The diagnosis did not suddenly hand me a perfect system or introduce me to a completely unfamiliar version of myself. By then, I had already spent years finding ways to manage how my brain works. What it gave me was an explanation for many of the little things I had always considered my weird quirks.

I am still learning new things about it. I will notice something I have done for years and realise there is probably a reason my brain prefers it that way. That understanding helps, although it does not magically close any of the tabs.

The systems I use to manage them are not especially glamorous, and they are definitely not permanent.

For a while, I used ByDesign and thought it would become the organisational system that finally fixed everything. It did not work as well as I hoped, so it has since been scrapped. This happens regularly. A new tool feels perfect until the novelty wears off and my brain quietly stops acknowledging its existence.

The A4 notepad has survived.

It is always near me, covered in small notes that made complete sense when I wrote them. When something is finished, I strike it through. It gets messy very quickly, but it works because I can see it and because writing something down gives the thought somewhere else to live.

My calendar also holds a slightly alarming amount of my life. Social plans go into it, because if something is not visible there, I cannot promise it exists. I have also found that creating calendar events for individual tasks works surprisingly well. It is not a beautiful productivity system with colour-coded categories and a soothing dashboard. It is an appointment with myself that says, “Do this thing now.”

Since changing jobs, I no longer need to block focus time in the same way. That change alone has made a difference. In my previous role, calendar blocking helped protect me from the feeling that every Slack message needed an immediate response. Now there is less noise to defend myself against, so the system has changed with the environment.

That is what I have come to accept about managing my brain. The tools will come and go. Some will work for a season, some will be abandoned after a burst of enthusiasm, and one battered notepad will somehow outlive them all.

There are things I genuinely enjoy about how my brain works. When I find the right focus, particularly with techno playing through my headphones, I can disappear into a problem for hours. I can make connections quickly, move between different parts of a system and hold a surprising amount of context at once.

The difficulty is that leadership keeps adding more context.

There are always technical decisions to follow, people who need support, conversations that cannot be forgotten and projects that require attention. Staying on top of everything is part of the job. The trick is recognising when the normal noise has become something heavier.

My standup breakdown was not my brain being quirky. It was my brain telling me that the load had moved beyond what any notepad, calendar or focus playlist could organise.

Most days, the 47 tabs are manageable. A few can be written down, one or two can be closed, and the mysterious music can continue until I accidentally find its source. Some days, the whole thing needs more than a better system.

I still do not run the perfect browser. I doubt I ever will. But I understand it better now, and I have learned to pay attention when the fans start working overtime.