As a neurodivergent person with an ADHD profile, one of my biggest challenges at work isn't skill or motivation — it's managing attention and cognitive load.
Each week, I juggle over fifteen different projects, spread across multiple clients and agencies. Even when I’ve prepared my meetings in advance, I often find myself wondering at the last minute:
“What was that meeting about again? Did I forget something critical? Was I supposed to bring something?”
This need for last-minute contextual reassurance is common among people with ADHD: even when everything is in place, the brain seeks to reassemble key details just before an interaction to feel secure. When repeated 5 to 10 times a day, this becomes a serious productivity drain.
👉 If you’re interested in broader strategies for managing meetings with ADHD, I also wrote about that here: Mindful meeting management: planning meetings with ADHD
🤖 Automating Away the Friction
Rather than creating more reminders or to-dos for myself, I built a small automated workflow using n8n.
It helps relieve the mental load of having to chase context manually.
🎯 The Goal
Automatically send a short message to the organizer of meetings without a description, where I’m just a participant, the day before the meeting.
⚙️ How It Works
Here’s how the n8n workflow is structured:
-
Trigger every morning at 7:30am
→ To scan for the next day’s meetings. -
Read my Google Calendar
→ Retrieve all events between tomorrow 00:00 and 23:59. - Smart Filtering
→ Keep only meetings:- where I’m not the organizer,
- that are non-recurring (to avoid weekly check-ins),
- that have no description (since the description usually provides enough context).
-
Send an automatic email to the organizer
→ Politely asking for a bit of context if it hasn’t been shared yet. - Send a Telegram notification to myself
→ So I know the message went out.
📧 Sample Email Sent
Here's the automated message my colleagues receive:
1
2
3
4
5
6
Hi there 👋🏻<br><br>
🤖 I'm Thibault’s friendly email bot, reaching out to gather a bit of context about our upcoming meeting — it seems there’s no description provided.<br><br>
If the title is self-explanatory, feel free to ignore this message. But if it’s just a project or client name, a short overview would be super helpful 🙏<br><br>
Thibault is currently juggling meetings across ~15 different clients for various agencies, so a quick reminder of what this one’s about would make his prep much smoother ✨<br><br>
Thanks a lot in advance!<br><br>
– Thibault’s email automation bot 🤖
🎁 Benefits
- ✅ Less mental overhead
- ✅ Lower risk of forgetting something important
- ✅ No more procrastination about reaching out
- ✅ Better mental readiness for meetings
💡 What About You?
If you’re neurodivergent — or simply juggling too much context — this kind of automation can make a real difference in your daily comfort.
I’d be happy to share the full n8n workflow or help you adapt it to your stack (Slack, Outlook, Notion, etc.). Feel free to reach out!
Comments