ADHD and the Inability to Leave Things Alone

I just lost two and a half hours to a warning (well, a subtle suggestion) that didn’t matter. Wasn’t earth shattering.

Not in any real-world sense anyway.

The website loaded fast. Faster than most. Faster than it needed to. Under 1 second on mobile and under half a second on desktop.

Nobody would ever notice the issue – not a visitor, not Google, not a client, not even me if I wasn’t bloody looking for it.

But it existed.

A tiny red flag sitting there in PageSpeed Insights (a tool used to test website performance, SEO and accessibility, etc), quietly accusing me of something. Once I’d seen it, regardless how insignificant it was, that was it. My brain locked on. Everything else stopped being important. This one thing became the thing.

If that sounds familiar, you already know where this is going.

The Mental Itch You Can’t Ignore

There’s a particular kind of mental itch that kicks in when something isn’t quite right. Not broken. Not failing. Just slightly off. A fractional delay. A marginal warning. A theoretical improvement that might shave 0.01 seconds off a load time if the wind’s blowing in the right direction.

For some brains, that’s interesting information. Forgotten instantly. Dismissed as irrelevant.

For others, it’s intolerable.

Mine falls squarely into the second camp. Like the world is about to end.

Once an issue appears on a list like that, it stops being data and starts being a threat. Not to the website, but to my ability to relax. I can’t unsee it. I can’t park it. I can’t say “that’s good enough” and move on. The system isn’t clean, so my head isn’t either.

It doesn’t matter whether I’m being paid for the time or not. It doesn’t matter whether it’s my project or a client’s. The presence of the issue overrides all of that. My brain treats it as unfinished business, and unfinished business feels unsafe.

That’s the bit people who don’t live like this struggle to understand.

It’s Not About Perfection

This isn’t about chasing perfection because it feels good. It doesn’t. It’s exhausting. It’s about chasing relief. Fixing the thing is the only way to quiet the noise. Until it’s dealt with, everything else feels like avoidance.

So I’ll drop whatever I was supposed to be doing. I’ll disappear down a rabbit hole. I’ll tweak, test, retest, second-guess, reload the report, swear at it, and keep going until the red flag finally goes away.

Only then does my brain loosen its grip.

And when I come up for air, I’m left staring at the clock wondering where the morning went.

Tools like PageSpeed Insights are brilliant, but they’re also brutal if you’ve got ADHD tendencies or autistic traits around order and completeness. They don’t tell you what actually matters. They just tell you what isn’t perfect. No weighting. No context. No permission to ignore the insignificant stuff.

If your brain can’t tolerate loose ends, that’s a dangerous combination.

The Guilt Layer

There’s also a quiet guilt layered into it. I care about doing good work. So when a tool flags something, ignoring it feels like cutting a corner, even when it objectively isn’t. That sense of professional responsibility gets tangled up with compulsion, and suddenly unpaid hours feel justified because “it needs fixing”.

That’s not always dedication. Sometimes it’s your nervous system calling the shots.

What makes it worse is how invisible this pattern is from the outside. It looks like thoroughness. It looks like commitment. It looks like someone who really gives a toss. All of which is true, to a point. Inside, it feels like being hijacked by the smallest possible problem while bigger, more important things wait their turn.

You’re Not Alone in This

I know I’m not alone in this. I’ve spoken to enough developers, designers, writers, and technical people who quietly admit the same thing. The smallest warning can derail an entire day. Not because it’s urgent, but because it won’t leave you alone until it’s sorted.

If you’re reading this and nodding along, here’s the uncomfortable truth.

If you don’t decide which red flags you’re allowed to ignore, your tools will decide for you.

• Not every warning deserves your time.
• Not every marginal gain is worth the mental cost.
• Not everything that can be improved needs to be improved right now.

That’s easy to say. Much harder to live by. I’m still learning where that line is, and some days I cross it without even realising.

Setting Your Own Boundaries

But naming the pattern matters. Because this isn’t laziness. It isn’t poor discipline. It isn’t a lack of willpower.

It’s a brain that struggles to leave things unfinished, even when unfinished is perfectly acceptable.

And if that sounds like you, you’re not broken. You’re just wired in a way that needs boundaries, otherwise a tiny red warning will happily eat half your day and ask for more.

Start small if you need to. Set a timer. Write down which warnings you’re going to ignore before you even look at the report. Give yourself permission to close the tab when “good enough” actually is good enough.

Your brain might not like it at first. But it’s better than losing another morning to something that never mattered in the first place.

Anyway… That’s that done. The dog needs a pee and so do I.

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