ADHD and Working Memory: Why Trying to Stay Organised Can Work Against You

By Dr Floriana Reinikis, Consultant Clinical Psychologist | Oasis Psychological Services | Ashford, Kent

Oasis Psychological Services Blog | 30 April 2026

Here is something that happened to me this week, and I want to write about it because I think it will sound familiar to a lot of you.

I was coming to the end of a long working day. I still had things I wanted to finish before leaving my office, and the tiredness was starting to show. I opened Zoom to create a link for a supervision session I had the day after with a colleague. I created the link, sent it to her by email, and felt the small satisfaction of having got it done.

Then I went back into Zoom to set up a different link for a client. And there, sitting quietly in my meeting list, was another Zoom link. For exactly the same supervision session. Created two weeks earlier. Which I had, apparently, also sent to her at the time.

So I had now sent my colleague two separate emails, with two separate links, for the same meeting. I had to write a third email to apologise and explain which link to use. Then I went into Zoom to delete the original one.

And by the time I got there, I could not remember which link I had decided to delete.

This is ADHD and working memory in action. The very task I had just set myself had slipped out before I could complete it. Not because I was not paying attention. Not because I did not care. Because working memory, the system that holds a plan in mind long enough to act on it, had already moved on.

I am a Consultant Clinical Psychologist and an accredited ADHD Coach. I train other clinicians in ADHD assessments and post-diagnostic. I have spent over twenty years working in the field of Autism and ADHD. I also have ADHD. And at the end of a long, tiring day, none of that protected me from this particular moment.

I want to write about why that happens, because I think understanding it changes how we relate to it.

When Trying to Be Organised Backfires

There is a particular irony that many people with ADHD will recognise. The very strategies we develop to stay on top of things can sometimes create their own kind of chaos. We create reminders because we know we will forget, and then we forget we created the first reminder and create another one. We make lists to capture tasks, and then create a second list because we cannot find the first. We set things up in advance precisely because we know our future selves will need the support, and then our past selves and future selves end up in conflict with each other.

This is not carelessness. It is a working memory issue. And when I went to Zoom to delete the link, that is exactly what happened. The problem was not that I had forgotten there were two links. I had just sent the email about it. The problem was that by the time I arrived at the screen, the working memory trace had already faded. The brain had moved on. And without that trace, I was standing in front of a list of meetings with no reliable way of knowing which one I had intended to remove.

What Working Memory Actually Is

Working memory is the cognitive system that temporarily holds and manipulates information while we are actively using it. A helpful way to think about it is as the brain’s mental desk, the surface where you lay out the things you are currently working with. It is not the same as long-term memory, the filing cabinet where past experiences and learned knowledge are stored. Working memory is what is live right now, what you are tracking, holding, and acting on in this moment.

The psychologist Alan Baddeley, whose model of working memory has been foundational in cognitive science since the 1970s, described it as having several components working together. There is a central executive, which acts as a kind of manager or director, deciding where attention goes and coordinating what gets held in mind. There is a phonological loop, which holds verbal and sound-based information, the inner voice that rehearses a phone number before you can write it down. And there is a visuospatial sketchpad, which holds visual and spatial information, the mental picture you form when you try to remember where you left something. These systems work together in the background of almost everything we do, from following a conversation to managing a to-do list to navigating a supermarket. When they are working smoothly, they are invisible. When they are not, the impact is felt everywhere.

In ADHD, working memory is one of the most reliably affected areas of cognitive functioning. Research has found that between 62% and 85% of children with ADHD show significant working memory deficits, and these difficulties persist into adulthood (Barkley, 2012). Crucially, working memory capacity in ADHD is not related to intelligence. Studies that have carefully matched groups for IQ have found that the difference lies specifically in how much information the brain can hold and use at once, not in how clever someone is or how hard they are trying. This is a distinction that matters enormously, because many adults with ADHD have spent years interpreting their working memory difficulties as evidence of laziness, carelessness, or not being good enough. The research tells a very different story.

Working memory difficulties in ADHD show up across many areas of daily life. They make it harder to follow multi-step instructions without losing track partway through. They make conversations more effortful because holding what was just said, processing it, and forming a response all draw on the same limited resource. They affect the ability to stay oriented in a task when interrupted, to remember why you walked into a room, to carry out the intention you formed thirty seconds ago. They also have an emotional dimension that is less often discussed: when working memory is struggling, the experience can feel like confusion, incompetence, or being somehow broken, even when none of those things are true.

How Fatigue Makes Working Memory Harder

I want to say something about the context of this, because context is not incidental. It is central.

ADHD does not present at a fixed level. It fluctuates, sometimes dramatically, depending on fatigue, stress, cognitive load, time of day, and emotional state. The prefrontal cortex, which is the area most closely involved in working memory and executive function, is particularly sensitive to depletion. When mental resources are low, the functions that are already effortful become even harder. Working memory capacity, which in ADHD is already reduced, shrinks further under the pressure of a long and demanding day.

I had had a long and full day. I was tired. I wanted to finish and go home. And I was also trying to be responsible, to make sure tomorrow’s supervision was properly set up before I left. That combination, tiredness plus a genuine effort to do the right thing, created exactly the conditions in which working memory is most likely to let you down.

This is something I see regularly in clinic, and it matters clinically. The person who manages reasonably well most of the time but falls apart during exam season, or in the weeks after a baby is born, or during a particularly demanding stretch at work, is not managing fine. They are compensating, often at significant cost, and the compensation has limits. Understanding those limits is part of understanding ADHD honestly.

The Myth of Fixing It Once and For All

I want to address something directly, because I think it causes a lot of unnecessary suffering.

There is a version of the ADHD story that goes something like this: you get diagnosed, you learn about your brain, you find the right strategies, you may get medication and then you are largely on top of it. You have cracked the code. You should not still be having moments like the one I just described.

That version is not accurate. And holding it as a standard creates a framework in which every difficult moment becomes evidence of personal failure rather than evidence of a neurological reality.

As Barkley (2012) has described, ADHD is fundamentally a problem of performance rather than knowledge. People with ADHD often know what to do. The difficulty is doing it consistently, at the right time, under the right conditions. Strategy helps. Coaching helps. Therapy helps. Medication helps. But none of these things eliminate working memory differences. They reduce the impact, build compensatory systems, and change the relationship you have with the difficulties. That is different from making the difficulties disappear.

What changes with understanding, with good ADHD coaching, with adapted CBT, and with self-compassion work, is not the presence of ADHD. It is the story you tell when it shows up. It is the speed with which you recover and move on, rather than spiralling into self-criticism, that costs far more energy than the original mistake.

The Work Is Ongoing. That Is Not a Failure.

After the Zoom link situation, I did what I have learned to do. I noticed what had happened. I dealt with it practically, sent the clarifying email, and found the humour in it. I laughed at myself the way you might laugh at a friend who had done exactly the same thing, warmly, without any of the self-criticism hiding underneath. I worked out which link to delete. And I did not spend the rest of the evening ruminating about it and what my colleague would think of me.

What I also want to name is this: I was not holding it as an embarrassment. The colleague involved is a peer. Someone who knows me professionally. And in the past, that would have made it significantly worse. A mistake like that, with someone whose opinion matters to me, would have felt exposing in a way that was hard to shake. I would have replayed it. Wondered what she thought of me. Felt quietly ashamed in a way I could not easily put down. Useless. Disorganised. Embarrassing. All the old familiar words.

That is not what happened this time. I sent the email, I was straightforward about what had occurred, and I moved on. Not because the situation did not matter, but because I have done enough work on myself to know that one chaotic Zoom link at the end of a long day is not evidence of who I am. It is evidence of a tired brain doing its best with reduced working memory capacity under imperfect conditions.

That was not always true of me. For a long time, a moment like that would have been followed by a fairly harsh internal commentary: how can you not remember something you just decided, you have been doing this for years, you should have systems in place for this, and so on. That commentary is extraordinarily common in adults with ADHD who have spent years being told, implicitly or explicitly, that the difficulties are really just a matter of effort.

Kristin Neff’s research on self-compassion has demonstrated that treating oneself with the same kindness one would offer a friend, rather than meeting difficulty with criticism and shame, is associated with better psychological wellbeing and, importantly, with greater motivation and persistence over time (Neff, 2011). For people with ADHD, who often carry a significant history of self-blame, this is not just a nice idea. It is genuinely useful clinical work.

The work I do on myself is ongoing. It is not ongoing because I have not tried hard enough or learned enough. It is ongoing because the context of my life continues to change. Demands shift. Energy fluctuates. New pressures arrive. Hormones play their role. Managing ADHD well is not a destination you arrive at. It is a practice. Some days you do it with more grace than others. The days when it is harder are not evidence that you have failed. They are often evidence that you are tired, or stretched, or navigating something genuinely difficult.

If Any of This Resonates

If you have read this and recognised something of yourself in it, I want to say this: the moments when your systems backfire are not evidence that you are careless, incompetent, or beyond help. They are evidence of a real and well-documented neurological difference interacting with real-world conditions. Understanding that distinction is not just reassuring. It changes what you do next, and it changes how you speak to yourself when things go wrong.

The goal is not to never have ADHD moments. The goal is to build a relationship with your brain that allows you to recover from them without the added weight of shame. Staying curious about your own patterns, rather than being defeated by them, is part of what makes the long-term difference.

At Oasis Psychological Services, we specialise in ADHD assessments in Kent across the lifespan, ADHD Coaching, and therapeutic support. If you would like to get in touch, you can reach us at info@oasispsychologicalservices.co.uk or call 07307 385472.

 

 

References

Baddeley, A. (2000). The episodic buffer: A new component of working memory? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4(11), 417-423.

Barkley, R. A. (2012). Executive functions: What they are, how they work, and why they evolved. Guilford Press.

Neff, K. (2011). Self-compassion: The proven power of being kind to yourself. William Morrow.

Dr Floriana Reinikis is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist, Accredited CBT Psychotherapist, and ADDCA-accredited ADHD Coach. She is the founder of Oasis Psychological Services and a training provider for ADHD assessment to NHS trusts across the UK. She was diagnosed with ADHD in later life.