Are you:

• Someone who can hold an entire codebase in your head, and deep dive into its details any time, but writing an email feels impossible?
• Someone who is an excellent firefighter, capable of helping out all of your team members whenever duty calls, but you get to the end of the week, and you still haven't made progress on the big picture strategy work?
• Someone who falls into both of these modes?

I know these patterns well: they describe my life, but they are also challenges I often see in my coaching clients. Classic neurodiverse brain behaviour! Complicated tasks that would make even angels weep are things you think nothing of, but starting a simple day-to-day task feels impossible even when you know it must get done. Or those days where you promise yourself you'll protect time to do the important task, but there seems to be a never-ending stream of alerts and interruptions, and time dissolves.

This is the challenge of executive function in a brain wired differently. While sometimes this is a great strength (cool-headed in a crisis, or great at seeing cross-functional connections), unfortunately, in leadership, this can turn you into an organisational bottleneck. Your team is waiting for an email or a document, which you desperately would like to give them, but your brain is refusing to let you start.

Traditional productivity hacks like ruthless prioritisation, planners, and "eat the frog" are often designed for neurotypical brains. When these fail, we feel guilty and assume we just haven't tried hard enough. To compensate, we either dive into "doing-mode", running faster and harder, which generates a lot of activity but often still doesn't shift the stuck task; or we find we can only activate to get it done when it's crisis-level urgent and adrenaline kicks in. Neither of these leaves us feeling good, and they can lead to burnout long-term.

The problem is not that we are lazy, or unmotivated, or bad at prioritisation. It's that, at a biological level, pushing ourselves to work against our brains' normal executive function behaviours, is incredibly difficult and downright exhausting. So to move from bottleneck to multiplier, we have to rebuild our tools, processes and thinking, to work with how our brains actually easily initiate tasks and keep our energy flowing.

I've compiled a bunch of strategies that can work in different situations, depending on what's keeping you stuck. That might have to wait for a future newsletter, but if this resonated with you and you'd like to tackle your to-do list with less guilt and more ease, let's chat!

~ Nicola

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What’s been happening?

EOFY coaching packages

A technical director we worked with put it better than we could:

Elle and Lachlan's feedback and advice have been instrumental in navigating my director role and helping us shape our engineering culture.

That's what coaching is for. Not a course you sit through, but a thought partner who has held the role and can help you think through the specific thing in front of you right now.

We have three packages for senior leaders, for tech leads, and for small groups. Our EOFY coaching packages are 15% off when you book and pay before 30 June. Sessions start whenever you're ready.

What are we reading?

• AI is a hype-fuelled dumpster fire — Chris Simon at Programmable 2025, asks if we considered a harm matrix when using AI, and discusses issues aorund copyright theft, data workers, energy usage, bias and descrimination, factually incorrect information and psycho-social harm.
• The Engineering Leadership Report 2026 — LeadDev's survey of 600 engineering leaders exploring how their role is evolving, where the challenges lie, and what the future holds for the job.
• Slow is smooth, smooth is fast — Tolkien wrote that about hobbits taking an unfamiliar path through the woods. We've watched it play out in software teams for years.
• Technical interviews reject the wrong engineers — 20 years of observation, 50 years of research, and a framework for measuring the interview instead of the candidate.

What are we cooking?

Cauliflower pasta

This is Elle's mum recipe, and we haven't made it in ages. I guess I know what we're making this week.

Ingredients

• 500gr penne pasta (or rigatoni)
• 1 cauliflower
• 1/2 cup oil
• 6 small onions, chopped roughly
• 50g pine nuts
• 1 can of diced tomatoes
• 2 cans of anchovies in oil (50g in a can). Strain the oil and chop.
• 50gr sultanas
• Saffron
• 1 tbsp dried oregano
• Salt and pepper (preferably white)
• Caciocavallo (kashkaval) - or mozzarella, or parmesan

Instructions

1. Fill a pot with water and salt. Bring to a boil and cook the cauliflower for about 5 minutes until soft. Keep aside both the cauliflower and the water to cook the pasta in.
2. Bring the water to a boil again, and cook the pasta al dente. Put the pasta aside and keep one cup of the cooking water.
3. In a deep pot, fry the onion until it becomes translucent, add the pine nuts for a minute and then add the tomatoes. Dilute it with a bit of water and mix well. Add the anchovies, saffron, oregano and season with salt and pepper. Add the cauliflower to the pot, and stir.
4. In a baking dish, add the pasta and the sauce and mix. Mix in the cup of cooking water we saved earlier. Cover and cook in the oven for about 20 minutes.
5. Before serving, sprinkle the dish with cheese and bake for 5 more minutes to allow the cheese to melt.

And we’re out

Thank you for showing an interest in our newsletter and we hope that you enjoyed the read. Feel free to contact us if you have any feedback, a burning question, or just a recipe that you would like to share.

Until next time, keep learning!

Everyone at Blackmill