A few years ago during a financially uncertain time for our family, I tried to motivate my husband the same way I motivate myself: with anxiety. I’d paint the worst-case scenario, hoping that fear would make him more engaged with our strained household finances. Fear and anxiety motivate me brilliantly, because I’m an anxious achiever. Fear and anxiety made him check out.
This was a pattern in our marriage, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize I wasn’t dealing with a character flaw or a communication problem; no one was right or wrong. My husband and I are simply wired differently. The engine that ignites my performance isn’t his engine. We are motivated by different things.
Most of us understand this about motivation in a vague way. What we underestimate is how much that mismatch extends into every dimension of how we work, not just what drives us, but when we work best, what conditions we need to give our best attention, and how much control we need over our day to function at all. When those conditions are misaligned—with our job, our manager, our environment—we don’t just underperform. We exhaust ourselves trying to compensate.
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I’ve spent years studying what actually separates leaders who thrive from those who grind and burn out, and I am especially interested in people who feel like work “doesn’t work for them.” I study leaders with different brains: those who might identify as neurodivergent or neurodistinct, who manage diagnoses like ADHD, anxiety, autism, bipolar disorder, or learning differences like dyslexia. Here’s what I know, from hundreds of conversations with leaders and quantitative research with almost 1300 professionals. The struggle almost always comes down to four forces: Time, Attention, Agency, and Motivation—what I call TAAM. Whether you’re neurodivergent or neurotypical, you have a TAAM!
When was the last time I felt energized, attentive, and motivated at work?
TAAM isn’t a personality test or a productivity hack. It’s a framework for understanding your brain’s operating requirements and the specific conditions you need to do your best work and sustain it over time. Everyone has a TAAM profile. Most of us have never articulated ours. And here’s what that costs: when you don’t know what your brain actually needs, you spend years adapting yourself to a work life that isn’t designed for you—and feeling like it’s your fault. And so understanding your TAAM profile is a crucial piece of self-understanding. It’s as simple as knowing that 8:30 a.m. meetings aren’t when you’re going to shine (your Time profile), and as complex as unpacking why you’re at war with your boss who insists on dictating how you manage every step of the project you’re working on (your Agency profile).
Time isn’t just about scheduling. It’s about your chronotype, when your brain actually comes online, and whether your workday is designed around that reality or fighting it. Most of us are expected to come into work in the morning and go straight through until the evening. Very few of us are actually wired to perform that way!
If linear clocktime doesn’t come naturally to you, pacing can be more helpful than scheduling. Many people function better when time is broken into chunks, externalized with tools like timers, alarms, or playlists, and structured around energy rather than the clock. People who feel some agency over their time tend to be happier at work, and it’s not hard to see why. Pacing protects energy. It allows you to mobilize anxiety for moments that require performance—a big meeting, a difficult conversation—while preserving calmer stretches for focused or restorative work. Something as simple as moving a stressful meeting earlier in the day can free up more mental space than any productivity system ever could.
The key insight underneath all of this is that your schedule should fit your brain—not the other way around. Years ago I interviewed entrepreneur Lindy Huang Werges, who grew her financial services staffing firm by 300% in a single year. Werges had one of the most insightful takes on this I’ve encountered. She schedules her day in deliberate bursts—creative work in the mornings, meetings and admin tasks in the afternoons, and a “blackout” period from 4-8 p.m., because her brain is full. She gave me permission I didn’t know I needed: to design my day around my actual presence of mind, not an idealized version of it.
Most workplaces are designed as if everyone runs on the same clock. When your peak hours and your calendar don’t match, you’re not disorganized. You’re working against yourself. Ask yourself: What time of day do I have the most energy, and when do I feel kaput?
Attention is more complex than focus. It’s about the conditions under which your mind can actually engage—and what it costs you when those conditions are missing. I don’t know about you, but most days I feel like I simply cannot pay attention for a minute, because there’s so much incoming information and interruption in the day. That’s a recipe for burnout and misery.
Amy Wilson is a marketing executive who is neurodivergent. She describes the sensory load of busy environments in visceral terms: she’s light-sensitive, sometimes wears sunglasses indoors, and finds certain sensory input physically draining in ways that can consume her cognitive resources before the workday has really begun. The environment drains her attention (I relate—fluorescent lights are like my Kryptonite!). But she’s also developed something remarkable from that same attentional sensitivity—the ability to read a room in real time. In client pitches, she deliberately positions herself to watch the audience rather than present to it, tracking who’s engaged, where attention is drifting, and where to redirect. What could be a liability, managed deliberately, became a strategic advantage.
This is true for many leaders: the attention profile that makes you difficult in one context makes you exceptional in another. The question isn’t how to fix your attention. It’s whether your current work gives it the right conditions. Ask yourself: In what conditions am I at my most attentive? Alone in quiet? With lots of people around? After a run? When I have deep focus, or when I’m feeling really busy?
Agency—the ability to shape when, where, and how you work—turns out to matter more to performance than most people realize. In my survey, it was the single most cited workplace need: nearly two-thirds of respondents named flexibility as their number one requirement.
Research bears this out. People often value autonomy over workload—franchise owners routinely work longer hours than the corporate jobs they left, and report being happier, because control over those hours changes the experience entirely. Agency isn’t a lifestyle preference. For many people, it’s what makes effort feel sustainable rather than suffocating.
Amy Wilson is blunt about her own needs here. She has left jobs when she felt constrained. What’s made her current role work is a CEO who sets clear goals, provides adequate resources, and then gets out of the way. “If he told me, Amy, I want you to do X, Y, Z,” she said, “it would be the first way out the door.”
Agency isn’t about doing whatever you want. It’s about having enough control to align your work with your energy, attention, and motivation, rather than constantly fighting them. Most of us want to be treated with respect and we want to be treated like grownups who can manage our own workflow and decisions. But agency needs vary, and how much autonomy you need at work probably differs from your colleagues. Think about it: When did you last feel genuinely trusted at work, and what did that look like in practice? And if your manager gave you complete control over how you did your work, what would you change first? How do you react when someone gives you an instruction or directive that you think is dumb?
Motivation—the force we most often moralize and misread—is actually a neurobiological process that works differently in different people. Some are driven by meaning and purpose. Some by challenge and novelty. Some by recognition, external accountability, and yes, sometimes fear. The trap is assuming your motivational engine is universal, or that the “right” kind of motivation is purely internal.
In one of my recent focus groups of professionals, a participant captured the challenge precisely: “I’m not motivated by power. I’m motivated by challenge. When performing in positions that value out-of-the-box thinking and tackling complex challenges, I thrive where others struggle.” That’s not a character trait. It’s a motivational profile, and when that person is stuck in a role that rewards consistency over creativity, no amount of willpower will bridge the gap.
My husband is motivated by challenge and novelty. I’m motivated by external recognition and, if I’m honest, anxiety. Neither of us is right. Both of us are legible, once you know what you’re looking for.
Here’s what I’ve learned from years of studying leaders and listening to professionals describe their work lives: many struggles at work are actually TAAM mismatches. The person who seems checked out may be in an attention environment that’s draining them before they even start. The one who resists his manager’s process may have unmet agency needs. The one who can’t seem to get started might be running on a motivational fuel their current work simply doesn’t provide.
The question stops being what’s wrong with me? and becomes which of my operating requirements is out of alignment, and what would bring it back?
Try this: Think about one recurring pattern in your work life that’s frustrated you—something you’ve tried to fix before, or blamed yourself for. Now run it through the TAAM lens. Is this a Time issue? (Are you working at the wrong hour, or in the wrong rhythm?) An Attention issue? (Is your environment draining your focus before you even start?) An Agency issue? (Is something about how your work is structured making you feel controlled rather than engaged?) A Motivation issue? (Is the fuel that actually drives you simply missing from this work?)
Don’t try to solve it yet. Name the mismatch first. That clarity—more than any productivity system—is where real change begins.
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