Challenging Assumptions about Productivity and Success
When Productive Looks Wrong
Welcome. This is a newsletter about two things that are usually kept apart: deploying AI in the real world, and redesigning how humans actually work. I’ve spent twenty years building AI systems for environments where failure is not an option -- defence, nuclear, Formula 1, live sports broadcasting. What I’ve learned is that the technology is rarely the bottleneck. The bottleneck is us: how we decide, how we organise, how we measure productivity, and who we accidentally exclude in the process.
This first post is about the last of those. It’s the article that became the seed of my forthcoming book, Radical Productivity.
(Author's Note: This article was originally published in Issue 11 of The Data & AI Magazine and serves as a foundational primer for my forthcoming book, Radical Productivity.)
What if our entire understanding of productivity is fundamentally flawed?
Right now, I am in the UK. It’s 4am on a Saturday morning and I’m about to start writing. Does this seem unusual to you?
For me, it’s normal. My normal. Last night I went to bed at 10pm, exhausted from my week. I awoke at 2am, chatted with my partner in the USA, and now she’s heading to bed whilst I grab a cup of tea and start writing.
For many others, there are countless different “normals” that jar with majority perception. But when these rhythms collide with workplace expectations, we often punish excellence whilst rewarding conformity.
Several years ago, my best data scientist never seemed to do any work at the office. They’d range from doing nothing to playing games, but come sprint end: boom. Fantastic work, delivered flawlessly.
This was before discussing neurodiversity became career-safe. It took my open admission of being autistic before they felt safe to share they were also neuro-spicy, with crippling social anxiety. Monday mornings were torture.
“Ant, when someone asks how my weekend was, how do I know when to say ‘Fine, thanks’ versus when to engage more?” They’d recently treated a colleague’s announcement of a personal tragedy like small talk. They didn’t intend to be dismissive and were aghast at and confused by the upset that resulted.
This higher anxiety was suddenly too much for them. I suggested a working holiday in Thailand. They found an isolated beach hut with good WiFi and finished their two-week sprint in under four days, then asked for more work.
My best data scientist had just become 150% more productive. They soon left permanently to work from beaches worldwide and remained my most productive team member.
This story illustrates a broader pattern. The productivity systems that failed my colleague aren’t unique to one company. They’re embedded in how we’ve constructed modern work itself.
The system we inherited
The 9-to-5 schedule, the open-plan office, the obsession with immediate responses, the equation of presence with output -- these aren’t natural laws. They’re inherited from 19th-century factories designed around machinery, not minds. Physical presence correlated with productive output when human labour was mechanical. We installed that entire operating system onto knowledge work and never seriously questioned it.
But ideas don’t flow on assembly lines. Innovation doesn’t happen on schedule. Creative breakthroughs can’t be supervised into existence. We’re not failing at productivity. We’re succeeding at industrial productivity whilst pretending we’re doing knowledge work. The systems are perfectly designed for a world that mostly no longer exists.
The hidden casualties
The cost of this inheritance isn’t distributed equally. Neurodivergent adults face unemployment rates of 30--40%, three times higher than people with physical disabilities and eight times higher than the general population. These aren’t statistics about capability. They’re measurements of systemic failure.
The pattern repeats across conditions. ADHD employees experience “hyperfocus burnout” where their natural rhythm of intense focus followed by recovery clashes with expectations of consistent eight-hour output. The prevalence of clinically significant fatigue is around 18% in the general population but as high as 54% among adults with ADHD. Autistic employees who need processing time before meetings get labelled “slow” in cultures that value immediate responses. The workplace environment itself -- fluorescent lighting, ringing phones, open-plan chatter -- becomes an assault that can cause shutdowns, often misunderstood as rudeness.
Even today, a third of neurodivergent people feel they can’t disclose their condition at work. We learn to “mask,” exhausting ourselves by performing palatably for eight hours daily. The cognitive load of constant camouflage leaves us depleted. Many compensate by working evenings and weekends, leading to chronic stress and occupational burnout. They internalise failure that isn’t theirs.
Despite job postings mentioning neurodiversity keywords tripling between 2018 and 2024, only 29% of senior leaders have received any neurodiversity training. We’re creating the appearance of inclusion whilst maintaining exclusionary practices.
And here’s the organisational cost: research shows that autistic professionals can be up to 140% more productive than average employees when properly matched to roles that fit their skills. We’re systematically excluding them, then wondering why innovation stagnates.
What actually works
Rather than forcing square pegs into round holes, what if we redesigned the holes?
Working with natural rhythms. Forward-thinking organisations recognise that human attention has natural rhythms. They structure projects around “seasonal” intensities: periods of deep focus followed by lighter maintenance work. This mirrors how ADHD brains naturally operate. Instead of fighting these patterns, smart managers harness them, scheduling complex problem-solving during peak attention periods and using lower-energy times for routine tasks.
Deep work over fragmented time. The traditional eight-hour day fragmented by meetings and interruptions is productivity theatre. Alternative models prioritise deep work blocks of three to four hours of uninterrupted focus. One software company found that developers produced more high-quality code in a single deep work session than in three days of traditional “collaborative” work.
Asynchronous communication. The tyranny of immediate response expectations crumbles when organisations embrace async. Teams use thoughtful exchanges, recorded video updates, and collaborative documents that allow processing time. Decisions improve when people reflect rather than react. Autistic employees who need time to formulate responses suddenly become the most insightful contributors rather than the “slow” ones.
Sensory-conscious environments. Open-plan offices are productivity killers for everyone, but especially devastating for those with sensory sensitivities. Innovative workplaces provide choice: quiet focus rooms, collaboration spaces, and everything in between. These changes don’t just help neurodivergent employees. They create calmer, more productive environments for all.
Redefining success metrics. Breakthrough innovations rarely emerge from fast thinking. They come from deep thinking. The employee who questions the project brief might seem “difficult,” but if they prevent six months of work in the wrong direction, they’ve created more value than the entire team’s collective output. When we measure what actually matters, different kinds of minds don’t just succeed. They redefine what success means.
The evidence
JPMorgan Chase’s results are stark: neurodivergent employees were 48% more productive within six months compared to established colleagues. In tech roles, they demonstrate 90% to 140% comparative productivity, clearing work queues with zero errors.
SAP’s Autism at Work programme employs over 215 individuals across 16 countries, with neurodivergent team members demonstrating 90% to 140% productivity relative to peers. The programme maintains a 90% retention rate whilst contributing significantly to patent applications across SAP’s product portfolio.
These aren’t feel-good statistics. They’re performance metrics that should make every organisation question what it’s leaving on the table.
What comes next
The question that started this article: what if our entire understanding of productivity is fundamentally flawed? is one I’ve spent the last two decades circling. As an autistic CEO who has built and managed high-performing teams across defence, nuclear, Formula 1, and live sports broadcasting, I’ve seen the same pattern everywhere: the systems we use to measure and manage work are optimised for compliance, not cognition. They reward the appearance of output and punish the conditions under which real output actually happens.
So when I founded Tortoise AI, I decided to stop writing about the problem and start building the solution. No 9-to-5. No open-plan office. No expectation of response outside working hours. Meetings only in the afternoon. Camera optional. Deep work protected by design. Every policy in the company is built around human cognition, not industrial compliance. It’s a living experiment in everything this article argues for.
In the next post, I’ll open up exactly how that works in practice: what we got right, what surprised us, and what the data actually shows when you run a company this way.
My forthcoming book, Radical Productivity, will be the full framework. This newsletter is where those ideas develop in public and we interogate them together.
If that interests you, subscribe. There’s a lot more to say.
I’m Ant Newman, CEO of Tortoise AI. You can find my published research and frameworks at tortoiseai.co.uk/about/ant-newman.
Love this! The research you’ve included really brings the challenges of traditional working patterns for neurodivergent employees to life. There’s so much here that really makes you stop and think.