I can’t tell you whether “being terrible at emails” is a personal failure, the reality of being a millennial manager, the symptom of a demanding workplace or – and I write this grimacing – because of my ADHD. But I can tell you how I dealt with it: I changed job.

I spent years feeling guilty about not replying quickly enough, feeling I’d personally let down strangers to whom I owed nothing, dreading events at which I’d meet face to face someone I hadn’t answered yet.

I was trapped in a cycle of endless apologising and losing sleep until one day it occurred to me that this didn’t need to be my problem anymore. The emails weren’t going to stop, and my personality transplant had yet to happen, so perhaps it was time to find something else to feel bad about.

I’ve been thinking about this since I heard that, along with the rise in diagnoses for conditions like ADHD, more and more people are disclosing their neurodivergence in their email signatures.

Ostensibly in a bid to reduce workplace stigma and plead patience from the recipient, it is becoming popular to flag that ADHD can affect one’s speed of reply and communication style: making people appear blunt, or even rude, especially given the absence of body language and tone of voice to offset that directness. One email signature, quoted in , reads “My email style can feel a bit direct for some. We’re all good, it’s just AuDHD (autism and ADHD)”. Another signature, shared by a proponent on the UK ADHD subreddit, features a request that senders distil information into bullet points to better aid comprehension for the easily overwhelmed and distractable.

Great idea. If all emails consisted of, say, four bold, simple, bullet points, I might actually consider reading one (the emails I write, by the way, are about 900 words long). But I’ve got an even better suggestion: getting a grip. Nobody who is sincerely perturbed by your “direct” tone (aren’t emails supposed to be direct?) or the lateness of your reply is going to be reassured by an explanatory coda about your ADHD – they’re going to be more annoyed by your avoidance of accountability and the expectation that the rest of the world must accommodate you.

I hear a lot of cynicism about the rise in ADHD diagnoses, especially given the number of young people receiving personal independence payments for ADHD and autism more than tripled last year. I regularly find myself pointing out that, actually, more diagnoses in the long-term means more people should be able to stay in mainstream education, and subsequently find and keep long-term employment. Proper management of this condition can mean a stronger and more productive workforce. But there are people who exploit their diagnosis by brandishing it as an identity upon which they can blame anything that goes wrong. The result is the opposite of reducing stigma – it makes ADHD the butt of the joke.

It is easy to become dismissive of personalised email signatures, but I can perfectly understand why one might choose to state one’s pronouns, for the avoidance of any doubt. And why communication benefits on both sides if someone wants to point out that any typos are because of their dyslexia.

Neither of those signatures, demands anything from the recipient other than consideration. An ADHD signature, on the other hand, carries an implicit warning that the recipient should expect to be inconvenienced. This is a condition with the capacity to be obstructive in the workplace to many more people than the one with the diagnosis – believe me. Those people grow frustrated and their good will gets exhausted fast every time ADHD is wielded as an excuse. Sticking it in your email signature sends a clear signal to the world that you’re content to let ADHD define you and inconvenience others, and aren’t making a sincere attempt to compensate for it.

Employers have a duty to make reasonable adjustments to help everyone to do this, and I have learnt myself just how much noise reduction, lighting, and even the direction a desk is pointed in can transform my ability to focus. But employees, I’m afraid, have a duty to get the job done. If ADHD still renders that responsibility impossible, it’s time to get a new job.