Hey y’all,

There’s a research finding from a journal called European Psychiatry that I want to put in front of you because I think it changes the conversation a lot of women in their thirties and forties are having with themselves alone.

A team of researchers trained a machine-learning model on routine medical records. The model learned to identify adults who were likely to be diagnosed with ADHD — months before the formal diagnosis happened. The model didn’t read a personal essay or interview the patient; it looked at the pattern of what showed up across a series of 15-minute visits over a period of years.

I want to be careful about what this means and what it doesn’t mean. The AI is a predictive tool, not a diagnostic tool. It flags people whose records match the pattern of those who eventually got diagnosed. Whether the diagnosis is correct still requires a real assessment by a real clinician. But I think the flag itself is the biggest news.

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Here’s why I think this matters to you.

Adult ADHD in women is one of the most under-diagnosed things in medicine (70-80% of women diagnosed with ADHD didn’t receive a diagnosis until adulthood). And the symptoms in adult women just happen to look like the things women are told they should feel anyway: exhausted, never quite caught up, managing a million things… and even the stereotype of a flighty/ditzy or agitated woman.

Those symptoms (fatigued, brain fog, scattered, agitated, forgetful, overwhelmed, etc.) are dismissed in a 15-minute primary care appointment as “it’s anxiety,” “have you tried meditation,” “let’s talk about your sleep,” or “have you tried losing weight.” They rarely get the response, “Let me refer you to someone who can assess this.”

This is the gap the model is finding. The model doesn’t know you’re a woman in your forties whose mother told her that everyone feels this way. The model doesn’t know that you are good at your job and so you have learned to compensate and mask. The model doesn’t have the bias of a 15-minute appointment in which you only mention the most acceptable version of what’s going on. The model is looking at a longer record than any single appointment can hold, and it is matching patterns the clinician’s schedule didn’t leave time to see.

What I want you to do with this — if you’ve been wondering for a while whether the way you’ve been struggling has a name — is not to chase the model. The model lives in a research paper, not at your doctor’s office. You can’t ask for the score, unfortunately.

What you can do is take the finding as permission. Permission to ask the question out loud. Permission to call a clinician who does adult ADHD assessments — not your primary, the kind of clinician this is the actual job of — and to describe what your life has actually been like, not the version of it you’ve been able to function inside.

I’m not making a diagnosis from a newsletter. The thing I’m pointing at is that the system has been missing this in women like me and you for decades, yet apparently even a relatively simple pattern-matching tool can see it. If a model trained on routine records can flag the pattern, your own description of your life — given to the right clinician — is a stronger signal than anything the model has.

The permission is no longer just from a stranger on the internet. It’s from a research model that sees the pattern faster than the average doctor’s appointment is built to detect it.

A question for you:

When did you first wonder if the way you’ve been struggling has a name?

— Rachel

P.S. — PsyPost has the lay summary; the paper itself is in European Psychiatry. Search the journal for “predictive model adult ADHD electronic health records 2026” if you want the primary source.

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Hey y’all,

Two independent surveys, different methodologies, different geography, same population finding.

• EY’s Global Neuroinclusion at Work Study 2025

  • Surveyed over 2,000 professionals across 22 countries and 8 sectors. It reports that 79% of neurodivergent professionals already use AI at work and are 55% more likely to use AI than their neurotypical colleagues.

• The Understood 2026 Neurodiversity at Work Survey

  • Run by The Harris Poll across 2,073 U.S. adults, found 78% of neurodivergent employees use AI tools versus 59% of neurotypical employees.

If you’re an ADHD adult who started using AI in the last two years and felt something land — something specific, something that wasn’t there before, something you didn’t have a word for — those numbers are naming a population. The thing you felt is felt by most people whose brains work like yours and mine.

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Here’s what I think is happening underneath the numbers.

1. AI is async.

The EY survey reports 71% of neurodivergent users find AI very or extremely effective at facilitating asynchronous working practices. You write when you’re ready. The meeting doesn’t have to have started. The room doesn’t have to be ready. Nobody’s emotional state has to be navigated while you think out loud. Async is the format the ADHD brain has always wanted.

2. The social cost of asking drops to zero.

You can ask the dumb question, ask the same question four ways, change your mind, come back tomorrow and ask the same thing again because you forgot. No friend with a face is wondering why you keep asking. Lowering the social cost of asking is lowering one of the most exhausting taxes ADHD adults pay all day.

3. Revision becomes free.

EY’s earlier collaboration with Microsoft found 80% of neurodivergent users report AI improves their written communication. You can rewrite the draft fourteen times; the fourteenth time, the AI is just as engaged as the first. If you ask a human to read multiple drafts, by draft three, they’re gently and reasonably done with you. Infinite patience matters because perfectionism without infinite patience is a stalemate, and ADHD adults often live inside that stalemate.

4. The system holds the context for you.

The same EY/Microsoft work found that 59% of neurodivergent users report AI improves memory and recall. You don’t have to remember what you said yesterday or re-establish the thread. You can come back to the project after a week of focus drift, and the model will still have everything that was true a week ago. AI lowers the mental-load tax of “where was I” is the tax that ADHD makes the heaviest.

5. And it is a tireless first-draft partner.

AI’s advantage is stamina — it will write a hundred drafts to your one. The bottleneck for a lot of ADHD adults is getting started; the blank page is the enemy. A first draft generated in thirty seconds, that you can edit into something good, functions as an accommodation. The accommodation isn’t being marketed that way, but it’s how it works.

I want to be careful not to over-claim. AI does not fix executive function. It does not fix the cost of sustained focus or the social masking that exhausts neurodivergent adults by 2pm.

But the gap between “I could not do this work” and “I could do this work” is meaningful. And that gap is being closed faster for adults with ADHD than for the general workforce, because the design of the tool happens to fit the shape of the brain.

A question for you:

What’s the first thing AI gave you back?

— Rachel

P.S. — Both reports are public. Search “EY Global Neuroinclusion at Work Study 2025” on ey.com and “Understood 2026 Neurodiversity at Work Survey” on understood.org/work. The agreement between two independent surveys is the part of this that surprised me most.

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Hi,

It’s Wednesday. I should be writing to you with something tidy — a small observation from a week that mostly behaved.

I’m writing instead from the residue of Memorial Day weekend, in the particular exhaustion that a lot of women understand and a lot of men do not.

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The official version: three days off. No meetings. No deadlines. Kids around. Open time, on paper.

The actual version: three days of being the operating system for everyone in the house. Breakfast decisions. Sunscreen reapplication windows. Who is bored, who is hungry, who is hot, who is cold, who needs the bathroom right now, versus saying so because the other one said so. Which kid is moving from “playing nicely” to “about to make the other one cry,” and the half-second of intervention you have to land before that crosses over. Snacks. Snacks again. A grocery order because we ran out of the only bread one kid will eat. A round of “who’s going where this afternoon.”

Continuous decision-making with no off switch. O-VER-STIM-U-LATED.

Here’s the thing about ADHD and autism. Executive function — the part of you that gets started, sequences the steps, keeps the right priority on top — runs on external structure. Calendar appointments help. Deadlines help. Other people’s schedules act as scaffolding I clip my own attention onto.

But for me, three-day weekends remove the scaffolding. The kids are home; the schedule is “the schedule we make up as we go”; every decision is fresh; every transition is a negotiation. By Monday night, I was more depleted than I am after a normal workweek, and I had less to show for it.

I used to think the problem was a personality flaw — the kind of person who can’t relax, the kind of person who needs to be told what to do. The actual mechanism is more boring than that. My brain runs on external input. Take the inputs away, and it has to generate them itself, and that generation cost is enormous. At the end of three days of self-generated structure, I am not rested. I am fucking drained.

And I feel guilty for being a mom who was on edge instead of “relaxing” — but it’s really hard being a neurodivergent parent to three neurodivergent kids, okay? I’ve never lived this life before — there’s no instruction manual (other than my decision to do the opposite of my own parents), and every year is my first year having this exact combination of kids at their ages and stages.

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On Sunday, a friend sent me this Thread:

We laughed and agreed that these long holiday weekends actually feel like punishment for parents of toddlers (she and I each have a 2-year-old; I also have a 4-year-old and almost-7-year-old). It’s hazing, really. A humiliation ritual.

“On duty” is the closest word I have for what most long weekends feel like once kids and a household and a startup are in the mix at once.

I don’t have a clean ending for this post. I think the recognition is the thing. If you came out of the long weekend feeling like you should be more rested than you are, and instead you came out drained — you were probably on duty. The math is mathing.

A question for you:

What’s the work in your life that gets called “rest” by everyone else and feels like work to you?

— Rachel

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I signed up to be the snack parent for my daughter’s softball team because our local Little League requires parents to volunteer or pay a $50 fee. That is the entire decision tree. I was registering her for softball in the parent portal, and it said, “volunteer for one of these open spots or pay the $50 shame fine.” Okay the “shame” was implied because the whole premise is punishment. But also my ADHD loves to say “yes”.

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There’s no way I was going to volunteer to be a coach, and the only other options were (a) Little League board member, or (b) snack parent. I chose snack parent because organizing a snack rotation among the families is something I can bust out in 10 minutes.

This is the part of the email where I’m supposed to tell you that being snack parent has been a beautiful exercise in community and presence. It hasn’t. I had the parents select which games they’d be available to bring the snacks (via Google Forms) and then ran the answers through Claude to populate a schedule. Easy. But then some parents had qualms with the schedule and others were surprised they weren’t assigned snack duty even though they didn’t fill out the form. Cool.

I’m also, in the same season, trying to ship a piece of software into a regulated industry. The two jobs do not feel like they belong to the same person. One job rewards precision. The other one rewards picking up your phone fast enough to confirm that yes, you are bringing the orange slices. There is no version of me that is good at both at the same time.

The job you said yes to in a moment of impulsivity is still a real job. My ADHD brain wants to treat the softball texts like background noise because they aren’t the “real” work. But they are real. The parents who reply within ten minutes are paying attention. The ones who don’t are being judged, even if no one is saying it out loud. I have been on both sides of that. And it’s weird social dynamics that I don’t respect, to be honest.

The part I didn’t expect: the snack parent thing was the only thing in my life where the deliverable is small and finite.

Confirm the snack. Print the roster. Send the reminder. There is no audit. There is no investor. There are just orange slices, and then it’s done, and the dopamine hit is real.

I think I needed something where the success criteria fit on one line. The startup doesn’t have that. The newsletter doesn’t have that. My law practice definitely doesn’t have that. But the snack rotation does, and apparently, I will take my wins where I can find them.

The softball season ended early for my kid, who decided it wasn’t her thing after a month or so. For some reason, the parents acted like the snack schedule would need to be “redone” just because I wasn’t involved anymore… I still don’t understand the logic there (you all know your assigned dates for the remainder of the season, why are you panicking?)

A question for you:

What’s the small, finite job you took on by accident that turned out to be the only thing in your week with a clean ending? I want to hear about it. Reply to this email — I read everything.

— Rachel

P.S. — We’re back to gymnastics, and the girls have missed the last two weeks because of childcare issues while I’m at work events. I’m telling you this because I’ve been thinking about it and I need to externalize my guilt.

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Two Wednesdays ago, I wrote an essay called “Why I’m Letting You See More of Me” — the first one in this column — and a little while later, I got the first real subscriber reply I’ve ever gotten. Someone I’d never met, cheering me on. I read it three times standing at the kitchen counter.

And then I went silent.

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I haven’t sent you a Margins in two weeks. I haven’t sent you a Workshop since April 19. Same reason for both — I needed a break, and I was using the systems.

I want to tell you what that means. Not because I owe you an explanation — you signed up for a newsletter, not a confessional — but because the reason I went dark is also the reason I’m writing today.

About 6 months ago, I started doing three things at the same time that I had no business doing at the same time. I was preparing to open my freelance law practice. I was building Batesly. I was debugging Codie. And somewhere in the middle of those things, I was also trying to be the kind of mother I want my kids to be proud of — present, organized, not eyeing my phone during school pickup. I was failing at one of those three on most days.

For a while, I told myself the problem was just volume. Three jobs is too many jobs — of course I was failing. But on the afternoons I had a clear two-hour block, I'd still fail at small things. Fifteen minutes to write a LinkedIn post on my way to a networking thing, and the post wouldn't get written. Twenty minutes between client calls to respond to the school email, and the email would sit. So it wasn't the minutes. Something else was wrong.

What I eventually figured out is that every task started from zero — I'd sit down with the fifteen minutes I had and spend the first five rebuilding what I already knew. What my voice sounded like that day, trying to pick up from where I left off. Who I'd already said what to. Which kid had an extracurricular that evening. What my standing answer was to the request for another volunteer gig something-or-other for the PTA. The minutes weren't missing; I just couldn’t get started (it’s hard to be inspired to write when you’re running on fumes).

So I built two AI systems for myself.

One that holds my voice — a Claude project that knows how I write, what I sound like, what I’d never say. Another that holds my life — a Claude project that knows my family, my vendors, my decisions, my rhythms. The first brainstorms with me and the second keeps organized.

The two weeks I spent away from this newsletter, I was using both of them to clear two weeks’ worth of accumulated everything. Email drafts I’d been putting off. School logistics I’d been winging. A memo I’d been promising myself I’d write. LinkedIn posts. An update for Batesly. A vendor renegotiation for the cleaning service. And — I’m noting this without irony — a stretch of actual rest, on purpose, for the first time in a millennia.

The part that I sat on for a while: I think a lot of the women I know would want these too.

I’m offering to build them for you, too.

Two offerings, in plain English

AI Writing System.

I build you a Claude project trained on your voice — your samples, your style, your patterns, your “I would never say that.” It writes LinkedIn posts, About sections, newsletters, recruiter replies, networking notes, conference bios — anything you’d rather not start from scratch every time. It knows you, brainstorms ideas, and drafts content for you to review and edit, saving you time. It gives you a significant jump start without being the automated "AI wrote this generic thing for me.”

• The Build ($2,550, ~one week) is the core buildout.

• The Build + The Reclaim ($3,150) adds a post-event LinkedIn refresh — new headline, About, three posts — done together in the handoff meeting.

• The Upkeep (starting at $950/month) keeps it tuned over time: quarterly voice-sample refresh, new prompts, async support.

AI Chief of Staff.

I build you a Claude project trained on your life — your family, your vendors, your standing decisions, your patterns, your activities. It coordinates the calendar, manages the vendors, drafts the school emails, holds the recurring decisions, runs your standing cadences. The Chief of Staff function your business has, for everything else.

• The Briefing ($1,550) is the strategic diagnostic — pre-call intake questionnaire, a 90-minute consultation, and a written 10–15 page Briefing on what’s working, what’s leaking time, and what a Chief of Staff would change first. Most clients move from The Briefing into The Onboarding. Some take the document and run with it themselves.

• The Onboarding ($7,500, 4–6 weeks) is the full buildout. Briefing memory, calendar coordination, vendor management, decision support, communication drafting, project coordination, standing cadences.

• The Standing ($1,250/month) is the ongoing relationship — monthly working session, quarterly Best Days refresh, new use cases as your life evolves.

Both live on rachelbender.co. Click Work With Me in the nav.

The Writing System is for professionals who write a lot but write the same things over and over. The Chief of Staff is for working mothers (or any parent) running businesses and households.

If you're not sure which one to choose (or whether either is a good fit), there's a free 15-minute discovery call. I'll point you to the right one — or tell you it's not a fit, in which case at least you'll know.

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Why this lands in The Margins, not in a Workshop

Because I built both of these for me first. Not as products, but as scaffolding.

The product version exists because enough people have asked some version of how do you actually do all of this? — and the honest answer is, I don’t. The systems do a third of it. That’s a Margins story, not a Workshop story. The Workshop will catch up later with the tactical breakdown of how I built them.

Today is the announcement.

If one of these sounds like you — check out my website link above. If it doesn't, but you know a woman who'd recognize herself in this essay, please forward it to her.

What’s on your mind?

I want to hear from you on this one. If you’ve thought about hiring help — a human assistant, a coach, a chief of staff, a ghostwriter — and bounced off because of cost, fit, or trust, I want to know what stopped you. Reply to this email; I read every one. I’ll likely write the next Margins about what you tell me.

To the subscriber who replied after the first Margins: thank you. Your message was the first real sign that someone was reading. It's part of the reason I came back to this column instead of letting it lapse.

— Rachel

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Why I’m Letting You See More of Me

I almost didn’t send this one.

For two months, Vibes & Verdicts has been a Sunday thing. One email a week. Legal tech, vibe coding, Batesly war stories. Tight scope. Clean category.

And every single week, I’ve sat down to write it and had to cut things out.

Not because they weren’t interesting. Because they weren’t on topic.

The time my kid climbed onto my lap mid-demo and asked “why are the robots sad?” while I was showing an AI-generated contract review to a prospect — cut.

The morning I shipped a feature at 6:14 AM and immediately cried on the kitchen floor because I’d been awake since 3:40 AM and I still had to get the kids ready for school — cut.

The meeting where a male founder, who had never practiced law a day in his life, “explained” contract law to me. I am an attorney. This happened. Cut.

The ADHD-brain moment where I forgot I had a board call and was discovered in a store dressing room, making decisions about a five-figure annual contract on my phone while my kid tried on a Bluey dress. Extremely cut.

I kept cutting because I thought you signed up for legal tech opinions and AI takes, and I didn’t want to waste your inbox on the rest of it.

But the rest of it is the whole thing.

WHY “THE MARGINS”?

In law school, we read everything with a pen in our hand. The good students — the ones who ended up in Biglaw with six-figure clerkships — underlined things in the main body. The great students wrote in the margins.

The margins were where the real analysis happened. The “wait, this doesn’t hold up” moments. The “this conflicts with the case from three weeks ago” connections. The professor’s actual thinking, before it got sanitized into a casebook footnote.

That’s what Wednesday is.

• The Workshop (Sundays) is still the main body. Tactical. On-topic. Built for you to forward to your CTO when you want to argue that vibe coding is real.

• The Margins (Wednesdays) is the pen work. The connective tissue. The part where I tell you what it actually looks like to run a law practice while building a startup while raising kids while having an ADHD brain that treats deadlines like polite suggestions.

You don’t have to read both. You can mute Wednesdays in your settings. I won’t know, I won’t be offended, and the Sunday edition stays exactly the way it was.

But if you want the rest of it — the part I’ve been cutting — it’s here now.

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What it won’t be

It won’t be a mommy blog. I don’t have the patience to write those, and you don’t have the patience to read one from me.

It won’t be polished. I’ll probably send a few I regret. I’ll definitely send one with a typo. I’m writing these on Tuesday nights after the kids go down, and you’ll be able to tell.

But it’ll be honest. That’s the only commitment I’m making.

What I’m actually hoping for

I want the women in this list to stop feeling like they’re the only ones whose “work-life balance” is actually “barely holding it together while pretending to be a professional.” Fuck that.

I want the parents to know that building a company and raising humans at the same time is genuinely insane, and that insanity is a feature, not a bug.

I want the ADHD brains to stop apologizing for the way they work.

I want the people who’ve been told they can’t — by an industry, by a mentor, by a board member, by their own internal monologue — to see what “doing it anyway” actually looks like from the inside.

Mostly I want to stop cutting things.

What’s on your mind?

Hit reply. Tell me something. This column works better if it’s a two-way street, so here’s the first question:

What’s the thing you’ve been cutting out of your own professional brand?

Not the version you put on LinkedIn. The version you’d tell a friend over drinks but would never put in an email blast. The thing that doesn’t fit.

I read every reply. I’ll write about some of them — anonymously, and only with permission.

— Rachel