Why Documentation Breaks ADHD Brains (and What I Do Instead)

How I Automate Handoffs Without Melting My Brain

There’s a very specific moment every designer knows.

You just came off a great sprint.

The UI sings.
The flows click.
The problem actually feels solved.

You’re riding that high when someone asks a completely reasonable question.

“Can you write up the specs?”
“Can you update the Jira tickets?”
“Can you document this for handoff?”

And your brain immediately tries to escape your body.

If you’ve ever wondered why this part of the job feels so stupidly hard, this article is for you.

Because what’s happening in that moment isn’t laziness.

It isn’t lack of discipline.

And it definitely isn’t a character flaw.

It’s a dopamine crash caused by task switching.

You’re being asked to move from high stimulation, visual problem solving into low stimulation, linear translation. For an ADHD brain, that switch is chemically expensive.

In this piece, I’m going to explain why documentation feels so wrong, why forcing yourself through it only makes things worse, and the exact low dopamine workflow I use to automate design handoffs with AI.

I’ll show you how I go from a messy, rambling walkthrough of a Figma file to clean, professional Jira tickets without staring at a blank text field or hating myself in the process.

Because documentation is part of the job.

White knuckling your way through it doesn’t have to be.

The Post Creative Crash

Design is high stimulation work.

It’s visual.
It’s spatial.
It’s relational.
It’s pattern heavy.

Documentation is the opposite.

Linear text.
Precision language.
Abstract reasoning.
Low novelty.
Low reward.

So when people frame this as “just part of the job” or tell you to be more disciplined, they miss the real problem.

For an ADHD brain, translating visual systems into linear text is chemically painful.

Not metaphorically.
Chemically.

It’s Not Laziness. It’s Translation Cost

This is not about motivation.

It’s about task switching.

Design and documentation use different brain gears. Design is associative. Documentation is sequential.

When you finish designing, your brain is depleted from one mode and is being asked to immediately spin up another with no buffer and no reward.

That switch has a cost.

Executive function cost.
Energy cost.
Mood cost.

So the solution is not trying harder.

The solution is removing the translation burden.

You don’t need to become a better documenter. You need a translator.

That translator is AI.

Once I stopped treating documentation as a discipline problem and started treating it as a translation problem, everything changed.