Startup Lessons Learned — ADHD 🧠

I want to preface this by saying that I have only a mild case of ADHD, eg I don’t take any medication.

I get regularly asked about my recommendations regarding processes with ADHD.

Here what i usually recommend:

Dont fight it. See it as superpower. Create systems that ensure you don’t drop balls.

How?

In a perfect world, you only work on stuff that excites and focuses you. Try to optimize for that. Your distraction can be a spam-filter or search-engine for more interesting stuff.

You might live in this perfect world, most likely you are not.

The exhausting thing about ADHD is needing to remember stuff and not getting back into what’s important once you got distracted. Find systems for that.

Systems

Systems to not drop balls / get back into correct topic:

Your goal is to be able to forget stuff (because you will) but have it in a system where it pops up once needed. Can be somewhere during the day or year.

Have weekly bullet journals for your tasks

I explained this here: https://yourstack.com/pro-tips/85-do-a-weekly-bullet-journal-for-todos

Have stuff that’s further away in your calendar

Eg yearly reminders, todos that are a few weeks out. Add alerts. Add them so that you can forget.

Make it cheap to do stuff quickly

If you can do stuff instantly you don’t need to remember stuff at all.

There is multiple productivity hacks.

My favorites are:

  • Optimize your email
  • Use text-snippets for building blocks of common things you type (i got 20 of those)
    • I am always surprised how few people use this… Are you really typing all of this repetitive stuff all the time?
  • Add small products that allow you to do stuff you do regularly quicker
  • Structure your decision making processes around important topics
    • eg how you hire, interact with your team, invest etc
  • Have stuff you write regularly as copypaste
    • eg this used to be copypaste.

Put stuff public

Stuff that you repeat too frequently for 1on1 copypaste you want to put on a public website

Eg this blogpost.

But not only this post, any stuff that I commonly need to talk about. That way I sent a link instead of talking people to death.

  • and a ton more…

Read this book:

Last but not least…

https://www.amazon.com/Driven-Distraction-Revised-Recognizing-Attention-ebook/dp/B005GFII62/

hope that helps ✌️

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