Summary: This paper concerns the controller design for continuous-time linear systems with time-varying delay and process disturbance. A novel adaptive sliding mode control law is mainly proposed to attract the sliding mode to first-order sliding surface within a finite time; afterwards, the uniformly ultimately bounded stability of the closed-loop system on the sliding surface is simultaneously guaranteed. In addition, the chattering phenomena can be conveniently excluded if the disturbance is a low-intensity process. Once the high-intensity disturbance is involved, the state variation can be significantly reduced as well. Furthermore, by the technique of a novel exponential free-matrix technique, the convergence rate of the closed-loop system can be conveniently preregulated. Numerical example is provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.