“Could you be a bit more normal?”

I wrote last week about working in sprints – I only just realised that that’s an autistic thing. I got lots of feedback on social media from autistic people saying they work in sprints too, but also from people who had tried to explain this to their bosses and been told the kind of thing I put in my first paragraph. “You might get the work done to the agreed timeframe and quality, but I need you to do it steadily over a period of time rather than all in a rush (= a sprint) at the end.”

I can see how a manager might think: “hmmm, employee appears to be doing nothing for two weeks and then gets the work done in a rush on the last day – that’s not good”. And in the case of many people it wouldn’t be – the “doing your homework at 10pm on Sunday night” paradigm isn’t a sign of diligence and high standards. But that’s from the perspective of a neurotypical brain. In the sprint working autistic people seem to do (judging from my own experience and the feedback I’ve received from many others), what is actually happening is that the work is going on subconsciously throughout the period where nothing seems to be happening, and then just crystalises suddenly at the end.