I had a client call end at 4:15 on a Tuesday, and by 4:20 I was standing in my kitchen with no idea what I’d just committed to.
I knew the call went well. I knew we’d solved something. The specifics were already gone. Somewhere in a notebook there were four half-sentences I wrote while I was talking, and I knew from experience that by Friday those four fragments would mean nothing to me.
That was a normal Tuesday for about fifteen years.
I have ADHD. For most of my career I treated that as a discipline problem. I bought the planners. I ran the systems that wanted me to track everything and check every box forever. I’d hold the line for nine days, forget the whole thing existed, and then add “can’t stick to anything” to the running list of evidence against myself.
Twenty-three years in business, a Master’s in performance psychology, roughly twenty coaching clients, and I still couldn’t reliably remember what I said on a call ninety minutes earlier.
The systems were built for a brain that stores things. Mine doesn’t.
The filter I run every tool through
Most AI advice right now is about production. Write more posts. Ship more emails. Make ten times the output you made last year.
I tried that first, and it made everything worse. More output meant more open loops, and open loops are the exact thing an ADHD brain cannot hold. I was generating work faster than I could track it.
So I flipped the question. I stopped asking what AI could help me make and started asking what it could take off my plate entirely.
That single change is why the stack below actually stuck. Every tool in it passes one test: does this remove a job my brain is bad at, or does it just add another thing to manage?
Craig Ballantyne taught me an exercise that makes this concrete. Take yesterday and sort every task into three piles: the $10 work, the $100 work, and the $1,000 work. Most entrepreneurs find sixty to seventy percent of their week sitting in the bottom two tiers. That bottom is where AI earns its place.
For a neurodivergent operator, there’s a second layer. Some of that $10 work isn’t just cheap. It’s the specific work your wiring taxes you double for. Remembering. Starting. Deciding. Those three are worth more to offload than anything a virtual assistant could take.
Here’s what I actually use, and what each one replaced.
1. Claude Code, as a business brain that remembers for me
This is the one that changed the most, and it’s the one people skip because of the name.
You hear “Claude Code” and picture a developer in a black terminal window. I did too, for months. I’m a marketer and a coach. I’ve never written a line of code in my life.
I keep my entire business in one folder: client notes, brand documents, frameworks, swipe files, years of thinking. Claude Code reads all of it. So I can ask it things like “what did this client and I decide about their pricing three months ago” or “pull every note where we talked about their hiring problem,” and it answers in seconds.
The real workflow: I record every coaching call. Afterward I hand over the raw transcript and ask for four things: a summary, the client’s core challenge, what we committed to, and the questions I should open with next time. It comes back organized, and it goes into that client’s running file.
That kitchen moment at 4:20 doesn’t happen anymore. I walk into every call with the full history in front of me, and I never open with “remind me where we left off.”
If you have ADHD, the relief of this is hard to overstate. The thing you’ve apologized for your whole career, losing details, dropping threads, stops being a daily tax.
The honest limit: it needs a real setup day. You have to give it your context once, on purpose. That day pays for itself in about two weeks, and almost nobody wants to spend it.
2. Wispr Flow, as a cure for the blank page
My best ideas never arrive at a desk. They arrive on a walk with my dog.
The gap between having a thought and starting the work is where ADHD brains lose the most. Motivation was never going to close that gap for me, so I stopped trying to close it and shortened it instead.
The real workflow: I talk for two minutes into my phone using a program called Wispr Flow. Rough, unstructured, full of tangents. That recording gets transcribed and handed to AI with my voice rules attached, and by the time I’m back at my desk there’s a first draft waiting. A post, a reel script, an outline for a client asset.
I edit instead of originate. Editing is a thing my brain will happily do. Originating from nothing at 9am is not.
The finished work isn’t waiting on a better version of me anymore. It’s waiting on a two-minute walk.
3. A morning brief that makes the first decision for me
Mornings used to cost me twenty minutes of deciding what to do first. Twenty minutes of friction stacked in front of the actual work, which for an ADHD brain is usually enough to lose the whole morning.
The real workflow: a brief lands in my inbox before my feet hit the floor. My calendar for the day, what’s pending across my accounts, and the few things that actually matter. I described what I wanted in plain English and had it built in an afternoon, connecting my calendars, my project boards, and my email.
I’m not technical. That sentence would have sounded absurd to me a year ago.
Decision fatigue doesn’t get to win before 9am.
4. AI as a subtraction audit for your software
This one is a use of the tools that nobody talks about.
I went line by line through everything I was paying for and found I was buying five products to do things I could now do in one place. I cancelled over $400 a month in subscriptions inside thirty days.
The money was the small part. The real win was removing the switching. Ten tabs to complete one task is a specific kind of poison for a brain that loses the thread every time it changes context.
5. The file cleanup nobody wants to do
I had two hundred files with names like “final-v3-actual-final” and folders I was genuinely scared to open.
One instruction: read this folder, find the duplicates, rename everything so I can find it. Sorted in seconds. No dragging, no clicking, no losing a Saturday to admin I resented.
Small, unglamorous, and it removed a low-grade dread I’d carried for years.
What I tried and dropped
Chat interfaces with no memory of my business. I spent more time re-explaining my clients and my voice than I saved.
AI note-takers that transcribed everything and organized nothing. More raw material was never my problem.
Any tool that required daily maintenance to keep working. That’s the honest test for a neurodivergent operator: the best system is one you’re allowed to ignore for a week, and it still works when you come back.
It doesn’t punish me for being human. The brief shows up whether I was consistent or not. The context is still there after I disappear for three days.
Where to start
There’s a gap forming right now between two kinds of business owners. One group is using AI to produce more of the work that’s already burning them out. The other is using it to remove that work. The gap between those two groups is about to get very wide.
Don’t build the whole stack. Pick the offload that hurts most.
For me it was memory. So write down the thing you re-explain most often, once, somewhere your AI can read it. That’s the first offload. The rest follow from it.
Your brain was never the problem. The tools were built for a different one.
Start with the one you dread. Hand it over to AI this week. Then do it again next week.
