Laziness Doesn't Exist: What an ADHD Coach in Tech Wants You to Know About Burnout, Brain Wiring, and Knowing When to Stop

By, Naina

A few blog posts ago, I spoke with Charity O'Reilly — a trauma therapist and practice owner who rebuilt her entire career after burning out so hard it showed up in her body. That conversation was about what happens when you become your own worst boss.

Today I'm talking to her husband, Tom.

I wanted to speak to both of them separately because they represent two sides of the same reality. Charity came at burnout from the clinical side. Tom comes at it from the inside. He's been through it multiple times — law school, the bar exam, a career in tech, an ADHD diagnosis at 30, a ketamine treatment that cracked something open, and eventually the decision to go part-time. Not because he gave up, but because staying full-time was costing him something he couldn't keep paying.

Tom O'Reilly is an ADHD coach and data migration specialist. He spends his days inside the same kind of complex, high-stakes tech systems that many of our listeners live in — and his other days helping people with ADHD untangle the internal ones. He co-authored a book on ADHD with his wife and has done the kind of inner work most high achievers never get around to.

What he said in this conversation is something this audience doesn't hear often enough: the problem is structural, not personal.

Stumbling Into Tech With an Undiagnosed Brain

Tom didn't grow up dreaming about data migration. He went to law school, burned out before he ever wrote a line of code, and spent five years waiting tables while he figured out what came next. It was during that time that he finally got his ADHD diagnosis — gently nudged by a therapist wife who trusted her instincts before he trusted his own.

"A career in tech would have been absolutely impossible without having some kind of support in place," he said.

Medication was part of that support. And his experience with it reframes a conversation a lot of people avoid. He didn't feel like it changed him. It gave him options he didn't have before — including, simply, the ability to sit in front of a screen for eight hours without YouTube filling the space where focus wasn't.

His entry into tech came through volunteering at his wife's rape crisis center, where a software company liked how he worked and offered him a job. No CS degree. No formal training. Just an ADHD brain that found a problem it wanted to solve.

Going Part-Time: What It Cost and What It Gave Back

Going part-time in tech is not a small decision. For a lot of people in this field, their professional identity and their sense of worth are deeply tangled together. Scaling back can feel like losing something fundamental — and the organizations they work for often make sure it does.

Tom was honest about what it cost him: health insurance eligibility, raises, the subtle exclusions that let you know you're appreciated but not quite one of the team. The transition felt punitive even when it wasn't meant to be.

But here's what the financial calculus often misses. When Tom went part-time, he started cooking his own meals instead of eating out. He had the energy to exercise rather than paying for a gym he'd never use. He no longer needed an ADHD coach to help him manage his own life — because he now had space to manage it himself. The therapy appointments got less frequent. The savings accumulated in ways that made part-time far more affordable than he'd expected.

"You'd have to pay me two or three times as much to go full-time again," he told his employer. Not because he's difficult. Because he's done the math.

The real cost of full-time wasn't on his pay stub. It was everywhere else.

ADHD in Tech: Why the Field Attracts Neurodivergent People

Tom estimates that around 90% of his team had ADHD. Every time he disclosed his diagnosis, someone on the other end disclosed theirs.

That's not a coincidence. Tech offers something a dopamine-starved brain craves — fast, iterative feedback. You change a line of code, you test it, you see the result. That loop is immediate and satisfying in a way that most environments simply aren't.

But the same environment that attracts neurodivergent people is also the one that burns them out fastest. The professional masks everyone wears paper over the systemic harm happening underneath. The perfectionism that looks impressive from the outside is often someone struggling to manage everything they have on their plate.

"We've all developed these professional personas," Tom said. "That's great. But it also has the side effect of covering up systemic harm because we're always keeping our professional faces on."

How ADHD Shows Up Differently in Women — And Why It Gets Missed

This episode got specific about something most conversations gloss over: how ADHD presents in women, particularly high-achieving women in demanding careers, and why it goes undiagnosed for so long.

The DSM criteria, Tom explained, were largely built around the male presentation — hyperactivity, disruptiveness, things that are visible and externally disruptive. Women's symptoms tend to be more inward. Inattentiveness. Social difficulty. Feeling like an outsider in friend groups without being able to name why. None of that draws the kind of attention that gets a child referred for an evaluation.

Then there's the hormonal layer. ADHD symptoms and hormonal symptoms can look identical — which makes it easy to dismiss a pattern as just having good days and bad days. But for women with ADHD, hormonal shifts aren't an explanation. They're an amplifier. Pregnancy, postpartum, perimenopause — each one can stack on top of underlying ADHD and make an already hard system feel impossible.

"When I had medication for the first time, I realized I had all these options available to me that I didn't have before," Tom said. "And to have gotten so far in life knowing you may have been misdiagnosed because of your gender — that's a hard thing. There's a lot of grief processing that has to happen."

Grief is the right word. Because it's not just about getting a diagnosis late. It's about everything that might have been different if someone had looked sooner.

Laziness Doesn't Exist — And Neither Does the Explanation We've Been Using

This is the reframe this audience most needs to hear.

Tom has never met a lazy person. Not genuinely. What he's met — in his clients, in his own history, in the tech teams he's worked on — is burnout in various degrees of progression. Burnout dressed up as avoidance. Burnout wearing the face of distraction. Burnout that looks, from the outside, like someone who just doesn't care enough.

"If you were lazy, you'd be having a lot more fun," he said.

The gap between what someone wants to do and what they're actually doing isn't a character flaw. It's a signal. When your system is fully resourced and healthy, your desires and your actions line up. When they don't — when you know what you need to do and can't make yourself do it — that gap is the information. Something is wrong, and it deserves curiosity, not criticism.

"Laziness is our lazy explanation to write off what are complex mental health conditions."

Parts Work, Ketamine, and the Boss Who Was Really His Father

Tom does parts work coaching — a modality that treats the self not as a single unified entity, but as a system of subpersonalities, each with their own history, their own survival strategy, and their own agenda. Some parts protect us. Some parts push us. And when those parts are in conflict, the result can look, from the outside, like self-sabotage.

For Tom, that conflict showed up as a loop: push himself to perform, earn approval, then burn out and click away to YouTube for an hour when he should have been working. What looked like distraction was actually a part of him trying to protect him from a pace that wasn't sustainable.

Ketamine therapy gave him access to something he couldn't reach through talk alone — his earliest memories, and the patterns they'd laid down. Including one that tracked clearly: needing his father's approval as a child had quietly become needing his boss's approval as an adult. Once he could see that child part of himself clearly, he could tell it something it had never heard before: you don't have to do that anymore. I'll take care of you.

That shift made it possible to have a bounded relationship with his employer. To ask for what he needed — part-time hours, a different pace — without the child part of him hijacking the conversation.

"When I showed up in a meeting with my boss," he said, "that child part of me wasn't being activated."

For Managers: What Actually Helps

Tom was careful not to offer generic advice, because every ADHD brain is different. But he shared what worked for him — and what it reveals about what effective support actually looks like.

His manager scheduled a weekly meeting where they built his task list together. Not a performance check-in. Not a status update. A collaborative prioritization session where the work got broken into discrete, manageable steps, and his efforts were consistently acknowledged.

Prioritization, it turns out, is one of the core struggles for ADHD brains. Not because they can't see the tasks — but because they struggle to sequence them. A manager who helps break big work into smaller steps isn't babysitting. They're removing the exact friction point that makes the work feel impossible.

And beyond any specific strategy: a shame-free culture. The ability to communicate on a hard day without it being held against you. Permission to say "I don't have capacity right now" — because when a manager models that, everyone below them gets permission to do the same.

"Creating a non-judgmental culture is so helpful," Tom said. "Part of the solution is communication. If I feel safe, I can tell you, and we can adjust."

Where Safety Actually Lives

At the end of the conversation, I asked Tom a question I want every listener to sit with: where do you go when the whole system needs to power down? Not your schedule, not your coping tools — the place or person that lets you just be a human being who doesn't have to produce or prove anything.

For Tom, it's his wife. Not as a strategy. Just as a person he feels safe with — all his parts, not just the polished ones.

That's the goal, he said. Not to have the right system. To have at least one place where all of you is allowed to show up.

Take Your Accomplishments Seriously

Tom closed with something I want to pass directly to this audience.

When we stay in the mindset of "what's next, what's next, what's next" without ever stopping to reflect on what we've actually done, we cut off a longer-lasting source of satisfaction. The dopamine from chasing the next thing is real — but it's short. The dopamine from reflecting on what you've built is more durable. And skipping it entirely is part of why the treadmill never stops feeling fast enough.

You finished something. Sit with it for a moment.

Listen to the full episode

If you're a tech professional noticing signs of burnout — or wondering whether what you've been calling laziness might be something worth looking at more closely — I work with clients one-on-one. Learn more about burnout recovery services.

Find Tom and Charity O'Reilly's book, How to Understand and Deal with ADHD, publishes in August and You Will Get Through This: A Mental Health Toolkit wherever books are sold or at your local public library. Connect with Charity’s work at her practice website and Tom’s website.

Subscribe to Systems Check wherever you listen to podcasts. And please — take care of your system.