Seedlabs

Interest-Based Attention Mapper for ADHD Knowledge Workers

A logging tool for employees with ADHD to map when they focus best and plan their workday around it.

A two-week self-logging tool that learns an ADHD employee's personal attention pattern — when interest drives intense focus and when it fades — and turns it into a concrete task-matching plan for their workday.

MedicineAttention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity DisorderWorkplace productivity and accommodation software for neurodivergent knowledge workers

Concept

A self-management tool for adults with ADHD at work. Over roughly two weeks the user logs everyday tasks in a lightweight interface, tagging each with interest level, time of day, context, and the attention outcome that followed (deep, absorbed focus vs. drift vs. avoidance). The tool then produces a plain-language personal interest-attention profile — the pattern the new research names intensity and interest-based variable attention — and a task-matching plan: protect peak-intensity windows for high-interest deep work; attach interest hooks (novelty, a deadline, an audience, body-doubling, personal meaning) to mandatory low-interest tasks such as admin; batch or hand off what consistently fails. ADHD coaches use the profile as a structured intake and review instrument, and employers can offer the tool as a low-cost neurodiversity accommodation. The wedge is a single capability: map your attention pattern, get a matched workday.

Why now

The new paper [0] documents, from ADHDers' own collective first-person accounts, that attention in ADHD is variable and interest-driven, that intensity (deep, absorbing engagement — colloquially hyperfocus) is a genuine strength-with-challenges facet of the condition, and that simply naming this pattern increased self-awareness and self-support. That supplies the construct the tool measures: it treats interest-based attention as a personal pattern to be mapped, not a uniform deficit to be suppressed. The market is established by the older corpus: adult ADHD prevalence is around 2.5% worldwide and up to 70% of childhood cases retain impairing symptoms into adulthood [1], so millions of adults manage this attention pattern at work every day. Every existing idea in this catalog theme is clinical — diagnosis, screening, routing, care pathways — and none addresses the daily problem of working with variable attention. Because the evidence is qualitative lived experience, version 1 is positioned as a profiling and planning aid whose productivity effects are measured in use rather than assumed.

Written by GLM · 9 Oct 2026

AI assessment

Backed by 2 papers91

A focused, high-utility productivity tool that transforms qualitative ADHD research into a practical workday optimization system for knowledge workers.

Evidence strength
4/5
The idea directly operationalizes the 'interest-based variable attention' construct from the provided research, moving from a qualitative finding to a quantitative mapping tool.
Market pull
4/5
There is a strong, underserved market of neurodivergent professionals and a growing corporate trend toward providing specific neurodiversity accommodations.
Novelty & moat
5/5
Unlike the listed clinical or educational tools, this is the first to address the daily operational productivity of adult ADHDers using a non-deficit, interest-based framework.
Feasibility
5/5
The MVP is a simple logging and pattern-recognition interface that requires no complex hardware or clinical validation to provide immediate value.
Wedge clarity
5/5
The 'map your attention, get a matched workday' wedge is sharp, specific, and provides a clear immediate value proposition.
Simplicity / focus
5/5
The product avoids 'platform creep' by focusing on a single loop: logging, profiling, and task-matching.

Scored by Gemma 4 · 9 Oct 2026. Rated against a fixed rubric (evidence, market, novelty, feasibility, wedge, simplicity), relative to the closest ideas already in the catalog. A prior estimate to compare ideas before real-world signal arrives.

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Who benefits

  • ADD Coach Academy (ADDCA)company

    It trains and certifies ADHD coaches worldwide; the mapper gives those coaches a structured, framework-grounded intake instrument and a repeatable client review artifact rather than ad-hoc questioning.

  • Dr. William Dodsonindividual

    The ADHD psychiatrist who popularized the 'interest-based nervous system' framing; this tool turns his clinical framing into a usable, measurable product for his readership and patients.

  • Understood.orgorganization

    It produces practical ADHD resources for adults and could license and distribute the mapper to its large audience seeking work-management help.

  • ADDitudecompany

    The largest ADHD media brand; its adult readership actively seeks evidence-informed self-management tools, making it a natural distribution and validation partner.

  • Microsoftcompany

    It runs a neurodiversity hiring program and employs neurodivergent staff; the tool offers a concrete, low-cost workplace support for ADHD employees beyond generic productivity software.

Research it builds on

  1. Attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder ( ADHD ) in adults: evidence base, uncertainties and controversies
    Samuele Cortese, Mark A. Bellgrove, Isabell Brikell et al. · 2025 · 66 citations
    All ideas from this paper →
  2. Intensity and Variable Attention: Counter Narrating ADHD, from ADHD Deficits to ADHD Difference
    Hanna Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, Lill Hultman, Sofia Österborg Wiklund et al. · 2023 · 44 citations
    All ideas from this paper →
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