Most productivity advice treats energy as a single thing. You have it, or you don’t. You need more sleep, more exercise, a better morning routine.
If you have ADHD, you already know this misses the point entirely. And yet you likely still tell yourself “I should be able to do more”.
It’s not that you run low on energy. It’s that certain tasks drain you in a way that feels completely disproportionate to what they actually are. A thirty-minute admin task can leave you more depleted than two hours of deep strategic thinking. A meeting that looks simple on the calendar can take the rest of the afternoon to recover from.
The switch from considering time management and instead looking at energy management is crucial for ADHD and AuDHD brains.
This isn’t a discipline problem. It’s a cognitive architecture problem. And once you see it clearly, you can start designing around it.
That’s what RAG is for.
What RAG Actually Measures
RAG stands for Red, Amber, and Green. It’s a framework for mapping your work by cognitive energy cost — not importance, not difficulty, not time required. Just: what does this actually cost your brain?
The insight at the centre of it is simple but easy to miss. What’s Red for your ADHD brain might be completely fine for a neurotypical colleague. What feels effortless to you might be genuinely hard for someone else. This isn’t about capability. It’s about the specific cognitive load that ADHD creates for particular kinds of work.
Red: The tasks that cost you far more than they should
Red tasks drain you disproportionately. They tend to share certain features — high working memory load, lots of small decisions stacking up across a session, sustained attention without novelty, or emotional friction like shame, overwhelm, or that specific dread that makes you open your email for the fourth time instead of starting the thing.
Your neurotypical colleages? They have red tasks too. They’re almost the polar opposites of yours.
The part that trips people up: you can be excellent at a Red task and still find it exhausting. Red doesn’t mean you’re bad at it. It means the cognitive price is high — higher than it would be for most people, and higher than it looks from the outside.
Amber: Manageable, but not restorative
Amber tasks are fine in isolation. In sequence, they compound. Three Amber meetings back-to-back can leave you as depleted as a single Red task — which explains why some days look completely reasonable on paper and feel completely destroyed by 4pm.
Green: Where your brain breathes
Green tasks feel like they come with a sense of ease. Low decision load, often high novelty or genuine interest. They don’t demand the executive function that Red tasks burn through.
Here’s the part that surprises most people: what’s Green for an ADHD brain is often Red for a neurotypical one.
The creative synthesis, the strategic thinking, the connecting of apparently unrelated ideas into something coherent — that energises you. It exhausts plenty of other people.
The thing you’ve been apologising for being good at is often the thing your brain finds genuinely restorative.
You Likely Already Know Your RAG Map
When I ask founders and executives to map their week by RAG, they always know immediately.
No one needs to be taught. The nervous system has been sending this information for years — through procrastination, through afternoon crashes, through that specific Sunday dread about a particular task that somehow makes Monday morning feel heavier before it’s even started.
RAG doesn’t give you new information. It makes the existing information visible and gives you language to work with it.
What people tend to discover when they map honestly:
- Almost every day is built around Red and Amber tasks, with no recovery time
- Things they’ve been calling procrastination — the rabbit holes, the creative tangents — were actually the Green buffers their brain was trying to build in
- They’ve been clumping their most draining tasks together without realising it, and wondering why they crash
- Some meetings they’d written off as “just part of the job” are Red every single time
Think about the last genuinely good week you had — one where you felt capable and clear. What was actually in it? And how different does it look from your average week?
The Lie We Tell Ourselves About Red Tasks
This is where RAG gets uncomfortable.
Most people, when they first start mapping, quietly downgrade their Red tasks. “It’s not that bad, really.” “I did it once and it was fine.” “I should be able to handle this — other people manage it.”
This isn’t dishonesty. It’s self-protection.
If you admit a task is genuinely Red, you have to face what comes next — that you can’t sustain doing it indefinitely, that something needs to change, that you might need to ask for help or redesign how you work. For founders especially, that can trigger a whole chain of uncomfortable thoughts about competence and what the team will think.
So the task gets downgraded. The exhaustion continues. And the explanation stays just out of reach.
The RAG map only works if you trust your first instinct. Your nervous system knows. The second answer — the rationalised, minimised version — is usually the lie.
What We’re Actually Trying to Do
RAG isn’t about eliminating everything hard from your week. That’s neither realistic nor the point.
The goal is to spread the cognitive load so your brain has room to regulate — and from there, to think clearly, decide well, and do the work that actually matters at a level you’re capable of.
Most ADHD founders and executives aren’t making their best decisions. They’re making decisions from the bottom of the tank, with whatever’s left over after a day of Red and Amber tasks. The quality of their thinking isn’t the problem. The conditions are.
Targeted Changes In Your Week
When you start building Green recovery into your week — not as a luxury, but as the thing that makes everything else possible — a few things shift.
Decisions that felt murky start to feel obvious. Not because the situation changed, but because you’re finally making them with enough cognitive capacity to actually think.
The low-level avoidance that was quietly eating hours starts to reduce. Not through discipline, but because the friction was structural and you’ve started addressing it structurally.
And something harder to name: a lot of people describe feeling like themselves again at work. Like they’ve stopped fighting their own brain and started working with it.
When you made your last significant decision, what state were you in? Full tank, or scraping the sides?
Where to Start
Pick one day from last week. Go through it task by task — every meeting, every piece of work, every piece of admin. Ask yourself: Red, Amber, or Green?
Trust your first answer. Notice the pattern.
That’s the RAG map. And for most people, just seeing it clearly is the beginning of something changing.
If you’re an ADHD founder or executive and this resonates, this is the kind of work I do.