INSPIRATION / JESSICA McCABE
The reader
belongs here.
Useful advice respects the person trying to use it.
By Rob Urban
Much of the world’s advice arrives with a hidden prerequisite: first become the sort of person who does not need the advice.
Buy a planner and remember to open it. Build a routine and repeat it consistently. Read this long explanation about attention without letting your attention wander. When the system fails, the user is often told to apply more discipline to the same design.
Jessica McCabe built How to ADHD around a better question. What if the instructions changed?
That question is easy to mistake for a slogan. In her work, it becomes an editorial and design decision. The material is organized into parts of life such as home, school, work, relationships and the self. Her book uses summaries and reading shortcuts. The voice addresses “brains” without making the person sound like a defective machine. The recurring premise is not that effort is useless. It is that effort works differently when the environment and method fit the person doing the work.
The distinction is both humane and demanding. A kind explanation that nobody can use is still an unusable explanation.
Advice has
an interface.
McCabe founded the How to ADHD channel in 2015. The official book account describes her diagnosis at twelve and her later search through research and expert knowledge. She shared what she learned on YouTube, then brought that work into How to ADHD: An Insider’s Guide to Working with Your Brain (Not Against It).
Her reason for choosing YouTube was wonderfully practical. In an August 2024 conversation with Understood’s Laura Key, McCabe explained that she wanted to keep what she learned somewhere she could find it again. Books, pens, notebooks and phones could disappear. She knew how to get back to YouTube.
I love that beginning. The creator was also the first person the resource needed to help. A place to return to became a place other people could return to as well.
Video can show a tool in use. A short segment can isolate one difficulty without requiring a reader to hold a whole chapter in working memory. Playlists can sort material by the situation that brought someone there. Humor can lower the cost of beginning without pretending the subject is trivial.
On the current How to ADHD site, visitors are greeted with topic paths and a direct acknowledgment that people whose brains work differently may need to work differently. Even the email invitation jokes about forgetting to read or send the messages. That is not merely brand personality. It signals that forgetting will not be treated as a moral offense.
This is where McCabe’s work becomes useful beyond its subject. Information always has an interface. A teacher, manager, writer or designer can be factually correct and still build a door the intended audience cannot open.
A place to land.
The publisher’s description of McCabe’s book notes chapter summaries, shortcuts for reading and contributions from her online community. Those choices place the reader inside the construction of the book rather than at the far end of it.
That is a different model of authority. It does not require an author to pretend every experience is universal. McCabe contributes lived experience and the work of translation. Researchers and clinicians contribute different expertise. Community members contribute patterns and language that one person’s story cannot supply alone.
Those contributions give a reader several ways into the material: an explanation of a concept, someone’s account of encountering it and a structure that helps the reader return to it.
Consider what a chapter summary does. A reader who has lost the thread can find the main point without starting over. A returning reader can locate an idea without rereading everything around it. The same content becomes easier to re-enter.
That is an editorial choice with practical consequences. A book can quietly punish interruption by making its reader reconstruct the entire argument each time. A well-placed summary gives that reader a place to land.
McCabe’s use of summaries and reading shortcuts interests me for exactly that reason. The design anticipates a reader who may arrive tired, get interrupted or return after a gap. That reader is part of the intended audience from the beginning.
“I didn’t open it”
is useful information.
The common instruction to “try harder” sounds practical because it contains a verb. It can also conceal a refusal to inspect the system.
Imagine a planner that stays closed on a desk while its owner keeps the day’s reminders on a phone. Buying a more elaborate planner would preserve the mismatch. Asking where the person actually looks for information changes the design problem.
The useful observation is specific: the reminder was in a place the person did not check. That gives the next attempt something to change. Calling the person disorganized gives the next attempt very little.
I like an explanation that leaves room to report a failed attempt honestly. “I didn’t open it” is valuable information about how a tool met a real day. It should be possible to say that without having to defend one’s character first.
McCabe’s tone is part of the engineering. Friendly language, visible structure and permission to approach material out of order are not extras added after the serious content. They are how the content reaches the person it was made for.
WRITING THE BOOK
The tools were
for her, too.
McCabe’s published introduction gives this idea another turn. She describes drawing on the book’s own tools and returning to its chapter-ending stories for encouragement while trying to finish writing it.
There is something deeply reassuring about an author who still has a use for her own advice. She can acknowledge difficulty from inside the work. The finished book does not require her to pretend the process was effortless.
That is part of why I admire her. She makes room for competence that needs support. Someone can produce careful, generous work and still need reminders, encouragement or another way into the task. Those needs can inform the work and make it more considerate.
Clear to whom?
“Different” is sometimes marketed as a charming shortcut. In practice, it can require more observation than simply repeating the accepted method.
You have to notice where the process breaks. A system can look organized and still be hard to enter. A beautifully labeled folder can become the place information disappears. An elaborate checklist can add enough work that nobody wants to begin. Looking closely at the point of abandonment is more useful than admiring the system from a distance.
What I value in McCabe’s work is the invitation to examine that mismatch. The person using a resource gets to be part of the explanation for why it works or fails. Their experience becomes information the design has to consider.
The next time I encounter an instruction that seems perfectly clear, that is the question I want to bring to it: clear to whom, at what moment, with how much attention available?
McCabe makes the reader part of the design brief. A person returning halfway through, after an interruption, still deserves a way in.
About Jessica McCabe
Who created How to ADHD?
Jessica McCabe created How to ADHD, a YouTube channel founded in 2015 that shares information and tools for people with ADHD.
When was Jessica McCabe’s book first published?
The US hardcover and ebook editions of How to ADHD: An Insider’s Guide to Working with Your Brain (Not Against It) were published on January 2, 2024.
How is the book designed for its readers?
The publisher describes chapter summaries, reading shortcuts and contributions from McCabe’s online community, giving readers several ways to approach and return to the material.
Sources: How to ADHD’s official site and book account; Penguin Random House’s catalog and published introduction; and Understood’s August 2024 interview transcript with Laura Key. Reflections on writing and usable design are Rob Urban’s.
For more of Rob’s writing and approach to consulting, meet Rob.