Most of us adults with ADHD know pretty much everything there is to know about ADHD. We’ve done all the research, read all the books, watched the main influencers on the social medias and the YouTuberoonis. We had our come to Jesus moment of grief and relief as we were saddened by what we could’ve done if we only knew back then…and we feel relief to finally have an answer that isn’t “I’m a lazy piece of shit.”

And yet….and yet! Even thought we know, many of us are still not getting shit done.

If that’s you, let me try and help real quick.

I did a webinar on this and you can get the replay here if you want a deeper dive into it all: How ADHDers Can Do Shitty Things

The main thing for us to understand is situational variability. AI does a good job of explaining it, so here ya go…thanks robots!

Situational variability is a factor that can cause performance inconsistencies, and can be influenced by a number of factors, including: 

• Interest: Whether a task is interesting or not 

• Strengths: Whether a situation plays to a person's strengths 

• Structure: Finding the right balance of structure and flexibility 

• Environment: Whether a person is in a positive or negative environment 

In ADHD land, what this means to me is that I may be able to do a thing one day, and the next day I’m unable to do that exact same task.

Perhaps you’ve been told in your life “But I’ve seen you do this before! Just do what you did before!”

I developed a way to deal with this, and it’s with a simple graphic that explains the relationship between interest to ADHD tool requirements.

This chart shows that to the degree we are interested in a task is the degree to which we need assistance to get started. Notice how if they interest level is high, we don’t require help. This might even be considered hyperfocus where me might actually need help stopping!

And at the bottom, where there is literally no interest in the task, we need to throw the kitchen sink at the task with as many ADHD tools as possible.

So rather than looking at tasks as “doable” or “not doable”, we have to look at who we are in the moment. Doing the dishes may require many tools, like a timer, easy point of entry, body doubling…and another day we might magically be in the mood and we require no tools.

The big takeaway from this, for me, is in being cool with myself about it. Being ok with needing a “tool” for a remedial task that is easy to do. That isn’t always the easiest thing to do. But over the years, the more I’ve accepted needing ADHD specific tools, my life has gotten so much more “doable!”

What are your UGH tasks? (Mine is anything cleaning related! Dishes are sucktastic!)

Want to hear an ADHD Big Brother podcast episode that would pair nicely with this article? Here ya go:

Click to Hear Episode 66

How the hell can an online community fix my ADHD problems? Every time I buy some kind of service, I never use it. Every time I buy a course, I just browse it or leave it unfinished. Every time I download a productivity app, I stop after the exhaustive (but fun and hopeful) ‘setup’ phase.

How the fuck can an online community be different? I’ve been a member of an online communtiy. They are Facebook groups and end up mostly being about who can share the funniest meme about ADHD. Or people saying hi and then you never see them again. There’s no structure to it.

This is how it looks when it’s done right

A software platform, in and of itself will not fix your ADHD. But one that is structured effectively, and has the right kind of members…this is where transformations can happen.

The absolute best kind of online software, to me, is the online community. Fuck Facebook. That’s not what I’m talking about. A private place for fellow ADHDers to connect and “do stuff!”

There are two components to an online community that are important, but only one tends to get the attention. The relatability, the ‘not alone’ness, the shared struggle…that is instrinsic to an ADHD community. You put a bunch of us in a room and we automatically get each other, love each other, support each other. You don’t have to work at this, because it just exists.

The second component is the structure; the purpose of the community. The ADHD skill building portion required to manage this disorder needs to be part of this equation. Unless you don’t need anything changed, in which case…you can stop reading, I’m wasting your time.

At some point we need to deal with the doing part of this process.

The way that we’ve seen this work inside ADHDBB is one day at a time. My structure/process is all about visibility, accountability, vulnerability, and curiosity. I modeled our structure after a nicotine quit group I was part of that helped me with a 20 year nicotine addiction. When we are in recovery, we handle life one day at a time. No big systems, just today. What does it take today? And at ADHDBB we use that for our productivity. What do we want to get done today? What does it take to get the laundry done today?

This literally only takes a couple minutes. Here are the steps:

1. Open browser to ADHDBB

2. Click on the Daily Accountability post for todays date

3. Leave a comment about what I want to achieve

4. If you have an extra minute, look at what other people are committed to for the day. Get inspired. Get insights.

That’s the bare minimum. In and out.

And with this little process, followed by an increasing day streak count and badges we give to gamify it (yes, we do make the shitty stuff as fun as we can…but we don’t rely on it) people are consistently closing the gap between stopping and starting again.

The visibility of the post helps us to increase the tension to NOT doing the thing we said.

The accountability of not wanting to post day 1 and tell people we ‘failed’ again because we didn’t do the thing…that increases the tension to NOT doing the thing we said.

The vulnerability of sharing what got in the way (when we inevitably fail at something and have to post day 1 again) and the curiosity of what it will take to get to day 2 is what helps us get active support from other members. You would not believe how much easier it is to get on the other end of a struggle, when you are a community that actively invites unsolicited coaching/ideas. We all get to be who we are and say what we want to say!

I remember how much I hated Facebook groups that said you had to wait for people to specifically ask for advice before you give it. Really? Do we want change or not? In our community, we are structured different. I encourage our members to please, please, please share every dumb idea you have whenever you want and because we are all grown ups, and we can politely say “thank you” and then choose not to take the advice. We MUST get comfortable sharing ideas we think are dumb. Because they are absolute gold for someone. And besides, not everyone is comfortable asking for advice.

While there is a lot more to ADHDBB than the Daily Accountability Club, it is the beating heart of our community. It continues to get recognition on the Circle.so community platform when they write about how to increase community engagement. They even awarded us a Platinum Award for engagement.

When you are looking at solutions for your ADHD, when you are looking to hire a coach, or sign up for a program, please ensure that there is an “other people” component to it, not just a dead message board. If it’s a course, who are you taking it with, and what are the skills you are building that you are practicing?

If you don’t have answers to that… well consider yourself invited to join ADHDBB and use us as your vehicle to doing the work of that program. We can be your accountability while you are practicing the Mel Robbins stuff, or the Brian Tracy stuff, or if you are trying to do the Atomic Habits stuff, or the Ali Abdaal stuff.

Ramble complete.

You can experience our epic daily accountability club as a test for 10 days for $10. Get the entirety of the ADHDBB community and all it offers. No auto-sign ups. You are auto-cancelled after 10 days where you can decide on your own if we are your people. Financial hardship? Reach out about our scholarships. We have 5 spots. We cycle them every 4 months. Inquire if there is an open spot by contacting me through www.adhdbigbrother.com

Give me 10 Days for $10

We know what it is we ‘should’ be doing, that we decided we were going to do today, and we can’t activate.

We get lost in the self critique that we are somehow broken because we know how to do the damn thing, so why aren’t we doing it?!

We know it’s ADHD, and we take 3 pills for it and it still isn’t making us do the thing.

We did all the research, we read a buttload of books, watched videos, and bought courses, and we had a billion “aha” moments and we are convinced we are going to try the solution, but we don’t practice them, forget them, and nothing comes to us in the moment when we actually need them.

We live in an era of infinite information. We can ask our AI bot anything we want, and it’ll give us 1000 options. But the email to Troy still swirls in the head as a ‘to do’ we keep punting foward, and get anxious about it every time we think about it.

There is a much faster way to get to the actual physical doing of these things that we want to do.

Daily Accountability.

Sounds awful, doesn’t it. EVERY day?! WTF

My life is so busy, chaotic, stressful, overwhelmed, and now you want me to add a fucking chore EVERY day?!

Yep! I’m a monster, I know. But isn’t the whole point of this to get activated, take action, do the thing?

You have ADHD and you learned a trick on what might work, and you never tried it. You rarely, if ever, practiced it. It’s like showing up to play viola in the LA Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl with the declaration that you only practice during performances. WHAT?! Nobody ever became great because they read about a solution one day. We have to practice stupid, boring, dumb shit over and over and over again. And that is sooooo anti-ADHD brain.

We can make it fun, though, I promise!

We do the stupid, boring shit together inside ADHD Big Brother. Here’s what one of the members said in a recent review on Trust Pilot:

What daily accountability is and is not

First, what it is. It is checking in with someone else to declare your intentions. The actual task of checking in, depending on your method, ranges from 30 seconds to 2 minutes. The remaining 23 hours and 58 minutes can be chaotic and free! It’s a small ask.

For my 1:1 clients, it’s a quick text message. For my membership community, it’s in our daily accountability space. Got a buddy, spouse, colleague you can text/check in with? Great! If not, join our team already!

Sometimes people think that the very act of checking in will magically gift us the motivation to do the thing. NOPE! Great if it happens, but typically NOPE!

What it does is it makes you a little more likely to do it, because someone else is aware.

But accountability isn’t about doing it right or doing it wrong. It’s not about winning at it or losing at it.

It’s all about ongoing visibility, even though!

You declared your intentions and still failed at doing the thing. That’s normal. That’s also embarassing. Egg on the face. Shame. Guilt. Self loathing. All the gross feelings. This doesn’t mean that accountability doesn’t work. REFRAME: it means that you get the opportunity to look at, talk about, brainstorm, and ultimately overcome an obstacle. If you can be curious, and if your accountability partner can be supportive and nonjudgmental, then you have a great opportunity to see what got in the way, and redeclare your intention with a new strategy.

The only difference with ADHD is that the struggles and strategies are different than the normies and the support works better with those that get it.

Daily accountability is fun! At ADHD Big Brother, we log in and set the intentions for the day. How we do it is in a space in my membership community. We have multiple ways of creating action but the daily accountability club is the beating heart of ADHDBB. We give awards for day streaks, and challenges completed.

The bonus for doing this work in our community is that we get to see what other people are getting done, what they are struggling with, and we get to support them while they support us! It’s beautiful!

Picture below: Don’t mind the “likes” that is just a part of the platform. We use the comment section as a means of telling each other that we read and support them. The comments (in the Daily Accountability Club) is where members declare the one thing that they are going to get done today, no matter what. Mic is one of our Australian members, so he experiences (today) first which is why he typically starts the thread!

We also use the daily accountability club to to track our community challenges we are currently doing. It’s all about visibility!

Here was my post for this morning which we all leave in the comment section:

I’m currently on day 16 in a row. Yeah, I fucked up and forgot my one thing 16 days ago. It happens! Even ADHD coaches who have an arsenal of strategies and an entire community backing them with unconditional support can fuck up. No biggie!

But if I were all alone, trying to make changes all on my own, then I would absolutely be prone to beating myself up, escaping into some crappy behavior, calling everything off as a “doesn’t work for me” failure, and then waiting around for some kind of renewed motivation or method to try again.

At ADHDBB we keep this shit visible, we get peers chiming in with solidarity and support, I get to see my no alcohol number go up every day. And look, it all started with a 30-day no alcohol challenge that I started in solidarity with other members who wanted to give up alcohol. This is amazing!

Notice that I have 27 current badges? I reset them all, deleted all my badges on January 1st with the goal of getting 26 by the end of the year. I’ve already beat that! Even though I fucked up 16 days ago, being a member of this community shows us what we are capable of. Check this out:

The badges I’ve earned so far this year

7 Day Daily Accountability Badge (Noodler)
30 Day Daily Accountability Badge (Brain Boiler)
60 Day Daily Accountability Badge (Marinara Mind)
100 Day Daily Accountability Badge (Skull Spaghetti Master)
Tracker (tracking something for 30 days)
Pushup/Pullup Challenge Badge
Booze Buster Badge (30 days no alcohol)
100 Day Booze Buster Badge (100 days no alcohol)
One Year Sober Badge
Dish Wizard (Doing the Dana K. White Challenge)
Attitude of Gratitude (30 days of writing daily gratitude)
Writmo (writing challenge)
30:30 (30 minutes a day for 30 days of the same task)
Participation Trophy (5-6 members collectively failed at a We Win Together challenge, but we finished out the challenge together and gave ourselves a participation trophy for funsies)
Employee of the Month Badge (Pick what your “job” is, create a “shift” and work that shift 20 out of 30 days. Mine was 45 minutes of podcast outreach per day)
Body Doubler Badge - putting in a number of work sessions in our 24/7 body doubling room.
20:25 Challenge - make the same effort for 20 minutes, 25 out of 30 days
NOFO Day and the NOFO Night Badges - No phone rules for 30 days (daytime and nightime versions)
Hands Off The Machine Challenge - NO changing your system/plan for 30 days.
MinMedMaxMove - movement challenge based on varying effort levels.
Linen Legend - making the bed for 30 days in a row
Bedtime Scholar - evening reading for 30 days in a row
Implementation Engines - picking a 30 day plan (for me it was no bread) and posting daily an if x then y every day. For instance, “If I get a craving for bread at night, I’ll have carrot sticks instead).
NO for 30 Badge - Deny something for 30 days.
Mini Milestones Badge - starting super small (put on exercise clothes), then adding the baseline each week(s) until 4 milestones reached.

We currently have over 70 challenges, and they are always growing! Members come up with new challenges that are built to help them overcome an obstacle, kickstart a habit, build a routine…and WE get the opportunity to play along.

Accountability is everything for the adult with ADHD

If you read this far and want to actually experience what we are doing inside ADHDBB, you can have the entire membership for 10 days for $10. No auto-sign up, you are auto-cancelled after 10 days and you can decide on your own time if we are your people and you want to keep it going.

ADHD is a team sport! Come join our team!

Give me 10 days for $10!

How we do stuff when we have all this ADHD swirling in our skull spaghetti. Or, I gues it doesn’t swirl as much as it is how our brain zips and zaps in it’s unique wiring. How do we do stuff? How do we do stuff when we are depressed? How we do stuff when we are anxious. Should we even try?

Let’s not look at this from a forceful productivity standpoint, because I can already feel that after typing that last sentence. Jeez Russ, can I ever just take a break?! I prefer to look at it from a lens of curiosity, rather than expectation. And just so we are all on the same page - I don’t do stuff when I’m depressed. I rarely even half-ass stuff. I go for quarter-assing, or 1/8 assing. I can’t full ass when I’m depressed.

Let’s pull the ‘shoulds’ out of the equation and replace them with ‘wonder what it would take tos’.

What if I turned “I should write a substack article” into “I wonder what it would take for me to write a substack article when I’m currently feeling anxious about life stuff”?

What if I turned “I should do the dishes” to “I wonder what it would take for me to do the dishes when everytime I think about it, I’m filled with tension and my insides are screaming “LATER! NOT NOW!”

What if I turned “I should exercise” to “I wonder what it would take for me to exercise when I feel like I have so much other more important stuff to do.”

Today, I’ll tell you a few ways I am able to do this stuff. But these are the solutions that were born out of my own curiosity about myself. It might be different for you. I’ve been productivity coaching adults with ADHD for years now, and these are a few of the tricks in my trick pouch. It’s like a fun, metaphorical fanny pack that I wear that has all my little ADHD tricks and hacks in them. The ones that work for me.

You are more than welcome to try my fanny pack hacks on your journey to filling up your own, unique pouch.

I know what I’m doing in advance.

Trying to figure out what to do in the moment can be nightmare mode for ADHD. When I know what I’m doing advance, it takes some of the tension out of it. You know that overwhelmed feeling of having so much to do but being unable to decide in the moment what is the right thing to be doing in that moment? This helps with that.

I cage things in time.

Trying to “go until it’s done” is almost always a dealbreaker for me because most shitty tasks feel like they will take forever. It’s very difficult to explain this to a normie who can accurately assess time. People with ADHD and that goddamn time blindness suck at this. I’m talking about myself here. No biggie, though! If I put a task on a timer, say ‘10 minutes of doing dishes’, then I’m more likely to be able to get started.

It doesn’t have to be a timer, either. You can use things that have a time in them, like a pot of coffee brewing or a load of laundry running.

I use the support of others (the right ones)

This is most big. Biggier? Bigliest?..It’s a big deal. It’s very hard to say to the normies in our life, with all the inner drive of a person declaring their intentions to climb a mountain… “I’m doing the dishes today!” That has the potential to get an eye roll, or a “it’s about time” or “you said that yesterday” or “what do you want, a parade?” God love the normies, but they don’t get it.

There are people out there, though, who get how hard this crap can be, and are willing and able to support you. I run one such place, but you know that. I built it because it’s the place I needed. You can learn more about that place here.

Nothing beats the nonjudgmental support of someone that knows exactly what you are going through. It’s glorious. There are a million ways to get that support, in the form of accountability partners, body doubling, or an ongoing declaration of intentions in the effort to make them stick. Games. Dares. Challenges. Something that involves someone else. Try it.

A final word

You will never successfully manage your ADHD inside of your brain. You cannot just learn a thing and suddenly all your problems go away and all the tension of those shitty tasks disappears. You have to practice skills.

It’s just like going to that goddamn gym, or doing those god awful excercises. You cannot just learn how to do them and suddenly you start doing them. You have to practice the skills.

Every. Day.

It’s really shitty marketing to tell you that things are going to be difficult, and you have to do work to manage things, because everybody wants the easy answer that makes things easier. But wouldn’t you rather hear the truth of the matter?

I’m sure you know this on paper. But here’s some comparisons for you.

Just because you read a book about classical music, doesn’t mean you can play the piano. Scales are boring, and you have to play them over and over and over again.

Just because you read “insert your favorite gurus book” doesn’t mean that you are now achieving your dreams. You have to practice the skills in their end of chapter summaries.

You have to practice the skills when you don’t need them. Over and over and over again.

And the best way to do that is with other people. Makes it less shitty.

You’ve got the dream. So who is going to be your team?

ADHD Big Brother is a membership built specifically to help adults with ADHD do the things they want to do but can’t. It is not a course. While we have resources and plenty to educate you, we exist to help you nudge forward. Try us out for 10 days for $10. No auto-renewal, you’ll be automatically cancelled at 10 days, where you can decide for yourself, on your own time, if we are your people. Come see what 70+ others (including myself) are achieving every day. We are struggling together, and we are winning together. Visibility amongst your peers is the secret sauce!

You’re feeling good. Business is going well for the first time in a while. Things are starting to feel steadier; you were able to take a moment and reorganize your desk, something that’s been far down the list with all the fires you were putting out.

So, why do you feel your brain starting to buzz with the possibilities of a new offer? Or even a new business entirely!?

It would be amazing, take everything to the next level!

You vacillate between wanting to share this feeling with the world and wanting to hide away and get started now. Lock in, as the kids say, and come out only once you’ve achieved this amazing new feature of the business. You definitely don’t want someone to ask you annoying questions like:

“Does this need to happen?”

“Would this be a distraction from the work you are already doing?”

“Are you basing this shift on good data?”

Nope, no questions needed. Only delightful, dopamine diving into a new adventure.

If this sounds like you, then I have news.

You’re a pivot chaser.

So am I.

Over the past year in the ADHD Skills Lab Podcast, my cofounder and I have recorded 13 hours of podcasts and deep research into the common struggles ADHD founders have, why those struggles exist, and solutions for each of them. And over those hours and across those papers, what we’ve discovered is that ADHD struggles come in largely four types.

The Pivot Chaser

The Overwhelmed Architect

The Last-Minute Hero

The Vision Caster

All-important struggles, but today I want to focus on the first one.

So what happens if we recognize ourselves in this Pivot Chaser role? What’s going on here?

The Pivot Chaser

At its core, ADHD is about impulsivity. If you struggle with ADHD symptoms, chances are your head is on a swivel, and you’re often jumping up to see what’s around the corner or imagining different ways something can be done. This can be a positive if you’re foraging for berries in the woods but not so much if you need to focus (and say write this article without checking your phone).
Being a pivot chaser means your desire for impulsivity is directed at what you do and changing it around when things get boring. Even when it feels boring, that’s actually a sign the business is going well.

Okay, I’m a Pivot Chaser. What Do I Do?

So if you recognize yourself as this Pivot Chaser, what can you do about it?

The number one most useful thing I do and recommend is a pre-mortem.

Let’s assume that you do start that second business… and it dies (sorry, pre-mortem for a reason). What happened? Why didn’t it work out? What could you have done differently?

Asking these questions at the start is a great way to avoid long-term issues before they happen.

If you don’t have someone to do a pre-mortem with, I recommend using AI to help you. It’s saved me from many a massive Saturday-night pivot.

Secondly, develop criteria for when you would make a change to your business. What dip in revenue or inefficiency with hours or opportunity for profit would make you set up that process? And definitely create these criteria before you go down a pivoting rabbit hole. Trust me, you do not want to be doing this when everything in your brain is crying out to buy the fun second business!

And thirdly, under the right circumstances with the right criteria, don’t be afraid to pivot. Just because you are a Pivot Chaser doesn’t mean it’s always a problem. I’ve seen clients double their revenue based on a decision they made in the middle of the night.

So go for it, live your dream! But only under the right circumstances.

Chat soon,

Skye Waterson (MA, PG Cert Public Health)

PS:If you’re an entrepreneur with ADHD who’s tired of being asked “Why don’t you just hire/make a system/delegate?” We’ve gotchu!

Click here for a free copy of my 5-year-tested Focus Filter. Instant relief for work-related overwhelm.

Find out what’s holding you back. I’ll personally build you a simple plan to fix it. Click here to grab one.

Feel like you can never really delegate because you can’t explain how to do it? Struggling to hire someone who feels like a natural fit for your business? Let us handle it for you. We specialize in using our years of ADHD research and practical support to act as your fractional COO, handling the back-end operations in a way that feels light and keeps you focused. Learn more here.

“Just do it!” As I writhe around on the floor, overcome by depression and anxiety at the same exact time. I’m both melancholy about the past and freaked out about the future. Meanwhile the laundry piles up on the floor. “JUST DOOOOO IT!”

But I caaaaaan’t!

We already know that “just doing it” isn’t a real thing for adults with ADHD. Even though we all say it out loud “That’s for the normies, it doesn’t work for us”…secretly, and quietly, we are still beating ourselves up and trying to figure out what it takes to “suck it up and just do it.”

For this article, I’ll share my personal opinion about the just doing of the ‘it’.

If you want to just do something, here’s the ADHD Big Brother method for just doing it.

Step 1. Give up the one man show. ADHD is a team sport. Games are more fun to play with others anyway. Most of us stop here, because for some reason we have such an ingrained belief that certain things in life we should be able to suck it up and just do.

Step 2. Define the thing. What is this thing you are just doing? Not the human being you are becoming, not ‘I’m a guy that just works out’. No, I mean the thing…today…what is the actual thing you are just doing? Go to the gym today?

Step 3. Make that thing visible. Remember step 1? Who’s your team? Make sure they are nonjudgmental and ‘get you’. Share with them that you are going to the gym today. Tell them when. Somebody now knows what you promised. You have gifted yourself some accountability.

Step 4. Go to the gym when you said. This is the point where you just do the thing. Because you’ve successfully done steps 1-3, you are more likely to go to the gym. But what if you don’t?

This is where your team matters most. They aren’t rolling their eyes at you that you can’t even follow through on a simple task. They stay with you. They know how hard this stuff can be. And so you move on to…

Step 5. What got in the way?

Step 6. What will you try today when ‘go to the gym’ time comes so that particular hurdle doesn’t get in the way?

Step 7. Go back to step 2.

There’s quite a lot baked into this, isn’t there?! So many steps. But can I tell you what your next door neighbor will see? He’ll see you getting in the car and going to the gym Wednesday at noon because that’s when you said you were going to the gym. And he’ll marvel because it looks like you are ‘just doing’ the thing.

And when you get in touch with your accountability partner, they’ll high five the shit out of you because you did the thing.

This is the ADHD way.

Your team matters. We have people who have just done the thing over 2 years in a row! And we have members who are just doing the thing for the first time in a long time! Come play with us!

The trick with ADHD management is understanding that there isn’t a system on the planet that makes ‘doing the dishes’ fun. There is no system that can be created that changes the crappy tasks that we struggle with into non-crappy tasks.

If you are like me, then you find the allure of a good system intoxicating. The idea that a system could be put in place and the friction to doing the dumb tasks goes away… Oh my goodness, how glorious! Because I have a system for it! I spoke about this on the ADHD Big Brother podcast recently, talking about how I got frustrated that I didn’t have certain grocery items and I said out loud “I need a fucking system for groceries”.

Then I laughed at myself. I caught myself. Do I really need a system for groceries, or do I need to go grocery shopping? Which one gets the proper groceries in my fridge soonest: building a system for groceries, or going to the store to buy them?

The absolute fastest, most effective way to get to the behavior changes we want, and achieve our goals, is accountability.

I’m not anti-system. But I believe that systems are born out of the doing, over time. Accountability is what helps us with the doing.

The moment I leaned into the power of accountability, that’s when all my biggest, most rewarding changes took place.

I hired a fitness trainer years ago and he was my accountability as I got in the best shape of my life. I would not have done it as effectively, or as fast if I went it alone. I would be cycling through trying to read a book about working out, trying to organize and schedule workouts, falling prey to building a system for it.

When I was building my coaching business at ADHD Big Brother, I hired people to help me with my messaging, and I continue to be a part of masterminds where I’m using our sessions as accountability.

And inside the membership at ADHD Big Brother, I built an entire community based on accountability and offering it to members in all it’s forms; through body doubling rooms, daily accountability clubs, challenges where you earn badges for completing your crappy tasks, monthly goals check-ins over zoom, and we even have a partnering setup where you can get paired with an accountabilibuddy.

I built what I need. Case in point, I’m in the body doubling room with my members almost every day. I make all my goals and plans visible inside the membership so that I can get the accountability that I’m also giving.

So many of us are people pleasers. Let’s use that to our advantage!

It has to be done with the right people, which is why ADHD Big Brother is so badass. I care what my members think of me, and I also know that they won’t judge me if I screw up. There are plenty of days where I screw up and forget to honor my commitment, or I’m in a depressive episode and I just don’t care…and my members never judge. They are there to offer nonjudgmental support. As I am for them.

This is genius, and I am inviting you to be a part of it for a few months.

I’m going to be taking my members through a behavior change journey.

For me, this is about my physical health. I’m going to discuss my particular behavior change, I’m doing the pro/con list and making it public to my members. I will create the behavior change schedule, for me it’s 150 minutes of physical exercise per week. That’s my behavior change. This is all homework, and homework sucks. So it’s best done with others.

You are invited to make a behavior change alongside me. We will meet on our bi-monthly zoom calls in the community to discuss where we are at, what is working, what needs iterating, and we will use our daily accountability club to keep everything visible.

This is how behavior change sticks. Accountability. I’m not creating a system to get 150 minutes of exercise in. I’m going to make every day visible, and I’m going to have a number to go after. The visibility and the community will get me there. Maybe an exercise system comes to be, as I learn what times work best, what times suck the most, what exercises I prefer and which ones suck.

This effort requires the courage to make your struggle visible. I know how hard it is to admit that some basic, stupid aspect of life is hard…the dishes for example. That’s one of mine. I hate that the dishes requires so much scaffolding for me sometimes.

And this requires the right people. Many of us can’t use people close to us for this kind of accountability. That’s a big reason why I built ADHD Big Brother. We need our place to safely publicize our struggle and our ongoing effort to make change.

Wanna join me?! Some marketing stuff below with a coupon for you.

I cannot stress enough how important ‘other people’ are to your journey with ADHD. Who are your other people? Hire your coach. Work with your therapist. Have heart to hearts with your significant others. Create accountability partnerships with your colleagues and friends.

…or you can partner up with me inside ADHDBB. If you want to join this particular behavior change push I’m making, witness how it’s done in real time, and get support for your own behavior change, then make sure you use coupon code CHANGE when you sign up for the quarterly plan. (This is good until the beginning of August) And your first 3 months is 20% off. That’s barely over $100 to get 3 months of active behavior change support…including a free coaching call with me to get you acclimated and ready to go! Let’s play!! Click here to sign up and I’ll be personally emailing you within 24 hours!

As many of you know, I modeled ADHDBB (my membership community) after the concept of a ‘one day at a time’ quit group I was in that helped me kick nicotine. I believe it is at the core of managing ADHD as well.

First off, because we need other people. The accountability that peers (the right peers) provide is a necessity for ADHD. This is my belief; my very strong opinion.

Secondly, we operate in the moment. We are ‘now’ and ‘not now’ people. So it is my very strong opinion that we must stack the deck in favor of our ‘now’. One day at a time does this.

Maybe we do the long term planning, the monthly goals, the weekly plan, but it all comes down to ‘now’. All our best plans go out the door if the ‘now’ has tension or feels off.

One day at a time, as a collective effort, allows us to safely suffer through the awful ‘now’ moment.

Here’s how that works for ADHD and doing stuff. What is the one thing we want to do today? Not the fun thing that we don’t need help with. I’m talking about the thing that frustrates us, the thing we need to do but don’t want to do, the thing we have yucky feelings about…what is that thing?

And while the rest of our day can be chaotic, wonderful, whim chasing, squirrel chasing, shiny object fun…for that one thing we will allow ourselves momentary suffering.

This is how my journey with managing ADHD has been. I do it will the help of everyone in our membership.

If I didn’t have my 400 days of no alcohol visible to the community, I would have had some whiskey MANY, MANY times since I earned my 100 day badge. I miss it. I enjoyed it. I still want to enjoy a drink. I want to be a guy that drinks in moderation! I want to have a drink when I go out with Emily (although she LOOVES that she has a permanent designated driver!) I want to have a drink when I have a bad day. I want to have a drink when I have a great day!

I miss the act of “unwinding”. How awesome it would be if I could just be a guy that has a drink on the weekend. How cool it would be if I could just be a guy that doesn’t keep alcohol in the house but whenever I go out, it’s cool. That all sounds really good on paper.

There are some things, however, that I don’t miss about drinking alcohol.

I don’t miss the expense. Whiskey costs money! There’s the shitty night sleep. There’s also the motivation it sucked out of me.

And yet, if I didn’t have my day streak visible to someone(s), I would have easily had a drink. Many of us feel like this makes us weak, that this is our character flaw, that this is something we need to fix about ourselves. I don’t think that anymore. It is so much easier for me to accept that I need support for stuff, and claim that support. Shame-free.

ADHD is not a gift. That ‘gift’ bullshit is so dumb and gaslighty. ADHD makes life extremely difficult because we are impulsive and we are prey to the ‘now’ moment. So, in a world that does not tee up perfectly perfect ‘now’ moments, and offers us a UNIVERSE of debilitating options to let us escape the discomfort (drugs, alcohol, nicotine, porn, instagram, junk food, etc) we MUST do what we gotta do to make the slog easier…and more fun; by supporting each other!

Let’s root for each other! Let’s hang out and talk about what the struggle is and get on the other end of it.

I’m 400 days without alcohol ONLY because I’m a member of my community, and ONLY because I decided to join up with other members who were saying they wanted to give up alcohol. I started the process our of solidarity to help someone else, and my desire to not let them down. This works. Visibility works!

Challenge for you! You got something you want to give up? We have a variety of challenges here (inside ADHDBB) that offer badges when you complete them. I encourage you to fail at the challenges as many times as it takes to win the challenge! Our support will never waiver.

It’s not about doing it right out of the gate. It’s about staying visible through the frustrating parts. It’s about allowing support.

Here’s a few of the over 70 challenges we have going on that you can start at any time that relate to this:

No more coffee challenge

No for 30 challenge - this is saying no to something for 30 days.

No alcohol for 30 days - also have badges for 100 days and 1 year.

From FOMO to NOFO - this is a 30 day digital detox situation.

Got something you really want to give up? I encourage you to join ADHDBB for a month and make it visible! Tell us what you want to work on, and watch the tsunami of support and ideas come flooding in. Everybody who joins gets a free coaching session with me, and I’d be supremely excited to help come up with a unique 30 day challenge!

See you in there! In the meantime, please share this article with anyone you think would benefit from it!

I’m off now to have my 401st day without alcohol! WOOHOO!

And rather than just tell you what you need to do, I would like to share with you many of the ways in which I manage my ADHD with other people. Yes, I have a community for this, so quite a bit of this support is super easy for me to access, but just know that you are always invited to be a part of ADHDBB and get the same support I get.

How I Leverage Other People To Help Me Manage My ADHD

These are all the ways in which someone else is a part of my productive journey.

• I meet with my friend Bryan every Sunday to go on a long walk.

• I use ADHDBB every day to announce my big thing that I want to make sure I get done that day. This is me getting support from 60+ people. That’s 60+ people I have to face the next day to tell them I didn’t get it done, which is something I have done!

• I am part of a weekly mastermind of coaches where I make commitments on moving my business forward. This is me getting support/insights from 5 other individuals.

• I have a girlfriend that I want to impress, so I make sure my place is nice and clean when I invite her over for dinner.

• I have two kids that motivate me by just existing, to work hard so I can provide for them.

• I have a body doubling room at ADHDBB (that I’m in right now with ADHDBB member Ryan) that helps me to stay on track with admin, writing, and computer related crap.

How I Have Leveraged Other People in the Past to Help Me

• I hired a trainer to teach me how to get fit and hold me accountable to workouts and diet.

• I joined the Sanford Meisner Center in my 20s to spend two years of aggressively learning the craft of acting, with extreme accountability on being prepared. This was the accountability of not letting a scene partner down, and not showing up unprepared and being embarrassed in front of the class.

• I have hired multiple coaches and therapists in the past to offer me insights and I was accountable to them weekly. (could’ve used daily accountability for these, but it was what it was)

• I joined a sketch comedy group and we held each other accountable to writing and being prepared for performing.

• Any time I joined ‘a thing’ and had a deadline for that thing, this was me being accountable to other people. Alone, I could have/would have let myself down. But this would have been me letting someone else down. So whether or not I waited to the last minute, I delivered because of ‘other people’.

Who is the person that does everything solo and needs no help?

Who is this fantasy person that needs no help from someone else? Are we that impressed by the person who wakes up before everyone else, goes for a 5 mile run, and then by themselves handles everything, completes everything, asks for no help, wants no help, and then goes home by themselves and takes care of everything by themselves, does the dishes by themselves, cleans up their home by themselves…and then…

I mean, clearly this person has no children and no spouse. Because then there would be some ‘other people’. Or does this person have kids and they don’t do anything for their spouse or their kids, they just exist to handle life on their own and when they say they are going to do something, they give zero shits about anybodies praise, and they give zero shits about being accountable to anyone because they only care about their own opinion about themselves.

This is not an ideal person. Not to me.

If the point of being on earth is to flex how amazing we are at not needing other people, then I think we might have missed the whole point of being human. We are social animals. Co-regulation is a thing. Accountability works magically, and it feels amazing to share successes and iterate/learn from failures in a safe, judgment-free, other people type of setting.

I like that I care about other people’s feelings. I like that I care about whether or not I let someone down. It fuels my desire to be a better human. I also helps me get shit done.

I like bringing other people into my world and leveraging them, in a good way, to help me achieve my goals. The arrangement is that I’m available for them to leverage me to help them!

I like turning that leverage into a game and making this slog of life more fun.

People over 50 NEED other people

Something worth addressing here. I might actually be able to accomplish any of the above things on my own. I’m completely capable of doing them on my own, in terms of physical and mental capability. I know how to do them on my own. Will they actually happen, though, if I tried to do them without accountability? Maybe…but….

Many of us who are older, 50+ years old, with a fierce catalog of loopholes and excuses and justifiable reasons to NOT do stuff, are in dire need of other people.

Many of us who are 50+ are embarrassed that we can’t do basic life things, even though we know how to do the basic life things. What the hell is wrong with us?! Why can’t we just suck it up and get this stuff done?! Our brain is wired to treat us like pieces of trash. We have spent an entire life beating ourselves up…so rather than beating ourselves up about the fact that we keep beating ourselves up, rather than look for some new way of thinking (which is worthwhile, but a LOOOONG GAME!) I propose we find some other people who are in our same situation and get the accountability we need to do those things. And do them! Wouldn’t that be awesome?!

That’s all.

In summary. We need other people. ADHD is not a solo effort. (I’d say life for anyone is not a solo effort).

I want you to come experience what ‘other people’ feels like when it’s done right. ADHDBB is the most effective way to get your ADHD managed, especially for you late in lifers, and all you have to do is show up. And if showing up is your struggle, then absolutely join right now, and I’ll personally teach you how. Join here.

Inside ADHD Big Brother we have a Daily Accountability Club. This is the beating heart of ADHD Big Brother and where all kinds of amazing transformations are happening. If you think ‘transformation’ is a bullshit term, then I invite you into our community to talk to the members directly. People are giving up addictions, people are achieving personal goals, people are actually making the behavior changes that we spent decades putting in a journal and wishing they’d come true.

But daily accountability is not without it’s confusion and concern. So I put this out to my membership to alleviate some of those. When I talk about Daily Accountability Club, that is the specific space on our Circle community platform where we post the one thing we’d like to get done that day no matter what. Modeled after a nicotine quit group I was a member of where you are building a day streak off of a ‘one day at a time’ effort. Except for us, that one thing can be different each day.

Here is part of that email:

Reminders About Daily Accountability

The importance of daily accountability is visibility.

It is not about ‘can I do this right’ or ‘can I do this perfectly’. You can’t and/or you won’t. You will fail at this (at some point…for some of us - at many points). You are expected to fail at this. We are all waiting for the day that you fail at this. Be cool with that.

I built ADHDBB as a safe place to suck at things…on our journey to not sucking at them.

We need proximity to support to win at this. ADHDBB offers this. Take advantage.

Daily accountability is about making your intentions (not all of them) known. This is what I mean by visibility. We can’t support you if we don’t know what you need support with.

Daily accountability was not built as a public to do list (although some are successfully using it for that). It was built as a place for you to say out loud the thing you won’t do, the thing you keep not doing, the thing you can’t be accountable to yourself for, the thing you are working on.

Experience the embarrassment, the shame, the anger, the frustration, the hopelessness, all of it. Show up anyway. We are experiencing it as well and have insights and support for you.

It is about practicing the skill of achieving one thing that you said you were going to do, even though (insert ADHD struggle).

Daily Accountability is THE aspect of ADHD coaching that is the most important and yet it’s the hardest pill to swallow for many of us.

For some, that’s practicing time management skills. For some, that’s practicing doing a thing while it feels ‘wrong in the moment’. For some, it’s practicing the art of getting started.

Some people are practicing the skill of showing up. That’s it. Some people are challenging themselves to juggle multiple things.

Daily accountability is about closing the gap between stopping and starting.

Daily accountability is about feeling the sting of failing at your promise and safely showing up the next day, admitting it, learning from it, and going after it again.

ADHD is not a thing where if you solve your mood state, then you suddenly have the motivation and desire to do your dishes. The dishes will always suck.

If you are serious about getting your ADHD managed and under your control, then get your proximity support in the daily accountability club. Start failing today!

How’s that for a marketing pitch? LOL! You’re gonna suck! Suck with us!

Aren’t we sick of marketing that promises that you are going to be amazing, and that your ADHD is your superpower and that you just aren’t doing your ADHD right?

I’m an ADHD coach, and I’m around other ADHD coaches, and I’m friends with therapists because I LOVE therapists, and everybody understands how mission critical other people are to successfully managing ADHD. So why are we so hell bent on figuring out how to do this on our own, privately, without any help (this was me in my 20s and 30s!)…the world was built for connection. Let’s use that!

Got something you need help accomplishing? Who will you make it visible to?

Ready to suck at this stuff; out loud and in front of an audience?! It’s gotta be the right, supportive, nonjudgmental audience. And I built one for you - it’s the one I built for me, and you’re invited! Here’s the link to learn more about ADHDBB

Behavior change, to me, usually required feeling discomfort, struggling to hold a boundary with myself, and genuinely experiencing misery.

Let’s add to this that knowing that the reward is coming and I’ll enjoy that reward doesn’t compel me into action in the moment. Thanks ADHD!

The behavior change model that I use and keep top of mind when I’m coaching is from James and Janice Prochaska. You can read about it in their book “Changing to Thrive”. I highly recommend this book if you are someone who has some big behaviors to change and are wondering why it’s not happenings. This model provides a nice roadmap to assess where you are at with things and what you need to do to move to the next phase.

I’ll summarize:

There are 5 stages of behavior change according to their Transtheoretical Model.

1. Precontemplation = 6+ months from making a change in behavior. Person doesn’t think there’s a problem. “Smoking helps me chill out.”

2. Contemplation = within 6 months from making a change in behavior. Person has more pros than cons to making the change.

3. Preparation = Ready to make a change within 30 days. Person is making plans!

4. Action = Taking action! Person is going after it!

5. Maintenance = been taking action consistently for 6 months +.

When it comes to ADHD, what I see and have experienced many times is that we can we spend a shitload of time in the preparation mode. We build systems. We prepare the hell out of things and then when we take action…something inevitably doesn’t go right.

So we give everything up, and drop down into contemplation. We’ve determined we need to make the change, but hang out in contemplation, beating ourselves up.

By understanding that this isn’t a straight one-way only process, can help us make the behavior change stick.

When we take action, and something doesn’t work…we drop down to preparation, do some new preparing (iterating an idea, consciously overcoming an obstacle, etc). Then we take action again.

Maintenance is when we are in auto-pilot for this new behavior. This is that dream that we all have when we think “Oh, I’ll do a thing for 21 days and then it will be a ‘habit’!” Habit, to me, means that I don’t think about it, and that I feel like something is missing if I don’t do the thing.

Action is when we are in that effortful phase of having to make a conscious decision to do this new behavior.

The struggle for adults with ADHD is that it takes executive function juice to stay in the action phase. And it takes a lot to not drop down from an action failure all the way to contemplation. It helps me when I’m struggling with a behavior change to check in with what stage I’m at and to understand that this isn’t meant to be easy just because I made the decision. For that reason, I use the accountability and support of my team.

My question to you: what phase are you at with a behavior change you are trying to make? What can/will you do to move from that phase to the next one?

We read Changing to Thrive in the ADHD Big Brother book club, and we are incorporating it in our membership every day. ADHD is not a solo effort, it’s a team sport. You are invited to see if we are your kind of team. Until July 3rd we are offering 10 days inside ADHDBB for $10. Here’s the link to learn more and…take action!

I can feel pushback on this word need, so let’s explore for a paragraph or two.

It’s Friday and my boss has said she wants the report on her desk by 5:00pm. It’s noon. Do I need to work on that report? Maybe not. Maybe it only takes 3 hours to get done and it’s only noon. But what about 4:00pm? Do I need to? Maybe not, because it’ll be the first time we dropped the ball this big so we’ll probably just get in mild trouble.

‘Need’ to an ADHDer is a thing where there is a known, immediate consequence. This is my take on ‘need’. We will say things like “I need to start working out”. But we don’t actually need to today. Nothing bad happens today, literally, if we don’t start working out.

When there is truly a need, we will act. Because it’s urgent and we know that creates action in ADHDers.

So what about those things that we don’t want to do, and we don’t need to do? That’s pretty much everything that is good for us in life, isn’t it?! On the Eisenhower matrix, that’s the Not Urgent/Important quadrant.

On the ADHD matrix it would be everything in the NOT NOW!!! quadrant.

There is a huge abyss between our want items and our need items.

My focus is in helping adults with ADHD take care of those items. We think that the answer lies somewhere in the name it to tame it, and I disagree. Name it and your ADHD doesn’t go away.

The world we live in has a specific name for pretty much everything. Is it a sleep thing, a dopamine thing, a diet thing, an environment thing, a trauma thing, a depression thing, an anxiety thing, an ocd thing, an autism thing, did I mention sleep…yeah that’s worth looking at again. Trying to do the homework to figure it all out just keeps us in research mode. And the homework keeps getting more difficult!

The one thing that is static and unchanging is the one thing, the task. What is it for you? The laundry? The resume? The organizing?

My belief is that while you are doing the work to figure out how to name it to tame it…do the tasks. Don’t chicken and egg it. What does it take today, to do the task today, even though [insert obstacle]. Not what is the secret one way/system for you to do every task in every situation with every mood state…that is dark magic and doesn’t exist. The way that an adult with ADHD can successfully do the task is using/having a team.

ADHD is not a solo show. As much as we wish it was. The people that accept that and lean into it are the ones that get on the other end of this shit so much quicker. Right now, as I type this, I’m in the body doubling room at ADHD Big Brother with Lise and Rae. Because it’s morning, and I’m distractable, there’s no pressure to write a substack article, and I want to do something else. I was in our body doubling room yesterday doing all my admin crap with a few members. It works!

So many of us struggle with the millions of tasks that live between want and need. We often call them ‘shoulds’. If we know what those tasks are, and if we are good ADHDers and schedule a time to get those particular crappy tasks done, then the only missing ingredient is support.

Support looks like many things, but it must include another human being. Your AI can tell you what to do, but that still is just you being accountable to you.

When you have the right support in place, whether it’s body doubling buddies, accountabilibuddies, weekly check in calls, daily texts…whatever it is, when you have that in place, that’s when things really start to take shape.

What is something that you want to get done, something that would feel great to say you accomplished, but you don’t ever want to do it? And you don’t need to do it. Decide what that is, then commit to someone that you are going to work on it, and check in with each other about it. Even though you have all kinds of trauma because you have a history of saying you’ll do stuff and don’t do it and you don’t like the feeling it gives you thinking about it. (This is why the right someone else is important).

Go for it! Let me know how it goes.

if you want a whole bunch of right someone else’s, myself included, to be in your corner and support your journey, join ADHDBB.

People hire assistants to delegate their weaknesses. People hire coaches to help them with certain areas of their lives. Fitness trainers, nutritionists, ADHD coaches, executive coaches. We hire doctors to help us with our aches and pains. We hire house cleaners to take care of the stuff we hate to do. We rely on the pressure from our bosses to move the needle on work. We rely on the mechanic to fix our car. We use our supportive spouses. We utilize the accountability that our children provide.

Nobody in the history of ADHD has hunkered into a room in isolation and ‘thought’ their way into fixing it all. I have never seen an adult with ADHD build a system and execute it from the outset. At least no one that I’m aware of. Maybe it works for the first couple weeks because it’s exciting. But after that….

In order to win at this, we need our team.

The team is the second part of my coaching philosophy. I was tasked in a mastermind that I belong to to build the pillars of my coaching philosophy.

While our dreams and goals and our particular life and history is individual, there has to come a point in your process when you recognize that doing this alone doesn’t work. There is a blending of both an individualistic approach, and the cooperative approach of using the accountability and visibility of a teammate. The idea of silently and quietly fixing yourself while nobody watches so that you can emerge a butterfly having changed all your ineffective behavior and having magically and instantly adopting all manner of ADHD skills…that’s not real.

That’s a tough thing to admit. My ego really didn’t want that to be true for me. It is not easy to say out loud to someone “I can’t seem to do these dishes without all kinds of support”. How trivial! I know HOW to do the dishes! What kind of a weak, pathetic loser can’t ‘just do the fucking dishes!’?

Same for looking for jobs, same for replying to emails, same for cleaning the house, same for invoicing clients, same for exercising.

Let’s just say, for the sake of this article, that you have shelved the ego and whatever character indictment you have of yourself and are on board with the idea that we can achieve our personal successes faster and more efficiently with a team. With that:

What makes a good teammate?

The qualities you are looking for in a team member is someone who:

• is nonjudgmental about your goals/plans/efforts etc.

• has no stake in whether or not you win or lose. Yes, they will be excited when you succeed, but they are not affected by you if you fail. Your team member should not be the person that loaned you $5000 and wants their money back yesterday.

• understands how your brain works.

• knows how to inquire with curiosity.

• is available to meet on a weekly basis over zoom or phone or in person.

This is the ADHD Big Brother way. I cannot speak highly enough about the power of having another person alongside you on your journey; whether it’s for a short stint of accoutability, or a longer term partnership of achieving bigger goals. And it can be multiple people! I, personally, am a member of two masterminds, I am a member of multiple communities, and I also run a community for adults with ADHD that is built on this very partnering/accountability.

I will share the other pillars of my process in the coming weeks. Or you can reach out and we can chat about it. I warn you, I can talk at length about my process!

Before you hunker down again to create your elaborate system, I challenge you to find your tribe, find your accountability partner, find the person that is going to support you on this journey. Watch how practicing the skills, repeatedly, forges your unique system.

This is how those elusive systems are born, btw. They are not created first and then implemented. They come from consistent effort over time.

for a prebuilt team of adults with ADHD who are actively supporting, giving support, partnering, and meeting with each other, join myself and others at ADHDBB.

I’ve had a lifetime of self-loathing, trying to do things like everyone else, wondering why I’d be so excited about things one day and then they’d be completely purposeless and impossible the next.

Finding ADHD later in life, the ship sailed for me on the whole “Let’s find the gifts of this! Let’s turn it into a superpower!” That just feels like gaslighting. That’s not my reality, so why try and get me to see it that way?

It’s ok to think that ADHD sucks. I mean, we take pills for it for godssake! Any other gifts out there we are medicating?

My belief is that ADHD sucks, and at the same time we can absolutely succeed at managing the shit show.

I come at this from the productivity lens. We learn how to manage our ADHD through the doing of things. There are a million reasons that we can point to about why we aren’t able to do a thing: low dopamine, depression, ADHD, autism, AuDHD, anxiety, shitty sleep, shitty diet, disregulated emotions/attitudes/mindsets/etc. And what that thing is and who we are can be different every single day. My mood state today may not be my mood state tomorrow.

I believe that all of these journeys to self discovery are amazing, good, worthwhile, and we should be in therapy, hiring coaches, and being curious about ourselves. That said, the fastest way to make this as easy as possible is to put our attention on the task. What is this task we are trying to do?

The task is the same. No matter what we are going through, the task is still the task. Doing the laundry. Emailing a coworker. Filing taxes. Cleaning. Looking for a job. Tasks require time and effort. And they exist regardless of how we feel about them.

To me, the fastest way to learn how to get things done and to learn about my own unique way of doing and being in the world is in doing the task, regardless of mood state.

WAY easier said than done. So let’s talk about what this takes. I dare not ever say to an ADHDer “You just have to do it!” Let’s try out some “HOW do I do it”s.

The way that I’ve seen this work done most effectively is with proximity to support. Behavior change is miserable. So if there’s misery involved, why not get company? Misery loves company, right?!

Yes, we all wish we could just learn a thing and do it. I’m more for what’s real, and what’s quicker. For me, personally, I use ADHDBB (this is my online ADHD support and accountability space). I built the thing I need and that I use every day.

There is no shortage of information out there on “how to”. Everybody has a system, a cool technique, a cool way of presenting the realities of ADHD. And they all work. Nobody writes a book about a shitty system. But most adults with ADHD don’t ever take the information beyond the beautiful epiphany that the book/podcast/youtube video provided. Most of us just nod our head and go “I see how that can work, I should try that some time”. And then the idea goes into the black void of nothingness, never to return.

Or they try the idea out one time and then forget about it.

Or they try the idea out two times and then the second time it doesn’t work, so it goes into the “I suck, nothing works for me” bin.

I’m a strong advocate of the community track. I’m your guy for those adults with ADHD who are fed up with trying to slog this out alone with crappy results.

I’m going to give you the template I give to our community members at ADHDBB. This is the Weekly Planning Meeting Template. It’s free. You can have it. It’s all there. Enjoy. But do this in partnership with someone else.

In our community, we partner up with folks for weekly planning accountability. When you verbalize your week to someone else, someone who gets you, then the chore of planning a week becomes less gruesome. Because you are doing it with someone!

And you are more likely to do the thing(s) you planned because you know that you will have to speak to it the following week. Tasks left undone don’t quietly slip away to live as an “Ugh, when will I ever get my shit together and do this stupid thing” inside the brain. We are more likely to do that task because someone is going to ask us about it.

This is the same concept I use when I do group coaching. I lead these 4 person max groups in a higher touch planning/coaching session. We pick 3-4 things to get done during the week, and then we use those tasks to work on our ADHD skills. We use them to work on our time management, our inability to get started, our internal tantrums, our finishing what we start, our time blindness, OUR ADHD!

It’s through the doing of the bullshit tasks in our lives that we become proficient at managing our ADHD. And we get experience being curious about ourselves in a judgment-free way. We get to see what we are like when we do a task happy, sad, angry, depressed, etc. And from that, we learn how to create and adopt unique techniques that are born from the doing of the tasks.

If you have a partner and you want a template to guide the conversation, here you go. This is the link to get the template. This is how I do it, and how the members inside ADHDBB are going after their weekly planning. We have people already successfully partnered up and surprise, surprise: They are getting shit done!! Pretty freakin rad.

Need someone who you can partner up with, join ADHDBB! We’ve got you. There’s never a right time to do this work, so it may as well be now!

There was no rock bottom situation. But there was also no moderation for me. I’m an addict. I don’t know what the language is, and I care very little for semantics, but I am a person who will find himself addicted to things quite easily.

On the negative side of things, that showed itself as a 20+ year addiction to nicotine in the form of chewing tobacco and cigarettes. If manifested in the form of video games for many hours at a time. There was a period of a year or so where I smoked weed every single day. Once something good happens, or a good feeling happens, I lock in and must repeat it every day until the end of time.

I remember in my 20s, I got a philly cheesesteak combo at a restaurant called Quickies and as a result, that became my lunch every, single, day. Until I had a come to Jesus with my budget.

When it comes to alcohol, if I had alcohol in the home, I was drinking. If I didn’t have alcohol in the home, I wasn’t drinking. I had alcohol in the home most of the time.

Whiskey is my alcohol of choice. And when I would go out to a restaurant, my go-to drink was an old fashioned. I always got so excited to taste how people made their old fashioned. If it was good, I’d have two. That’s funny that I wrote that…as if I wouldn’t have two if it was shitty. I’d still have the second one, I just might order a whiskey instead of the cocktail.

I loved talking about whiskey with people. I don’t actually know how it’s made, and I still don’t fully understand the differences with scotch or bourbon. I just know I like when it burns on the back of my throat. I love a good throat stinger. Maybe I should clarify; I like listening to people talk about whiskey.

There is no such thing, for me, as having a bottle of whiskey at home and not having a drink. If I have whiskey at home, then at the end of every day I’m having a whiskey or two. My kids would be at their mom’s on the weekend, so on the weekends I’d have 3 or 4.

It seems responsible. I mean, I don’t drive. I don’t get shit-faced. I could still help with homework. But there’s no moderation.

I didn’t have it on the radar as a thing to stop doing last year, but in my online community there were a couple members who were mentioning that they needed to stop drinking.

I’m also a nerd for a challenge. And the ‘one day at a time’ mentality of a nicotine quit group that I was a member of many years ago, is exactly the foundation of what I built ADHD Big Brother to do. It’s a ‘one day at a time’ for managing our ADHD, for getting shit done; and in this case, for quitting drinking alcohol.

So I jumped in for solidarity. Heck yeah, it was just a 30 day challenge after all. I can suffer for 30 days if it’s going to help support others having better lives. Absolutely, let’s go!

The members and I created a shared Whatsapp that we all said we would use as our lifeline. When anybody is ‘having the feels’ then we could just rage out on the messages. We found ourselves using it to reaffirm our goals. “I’m going to a party and I know that there will be alcohol there! I’m just texting to say that I am going to drink non-alcohol beverages.”

We used it a lot in the beginning. And ultimately we all got our 30 day badges. And then, instead of celebrating with a whiskey, we all challenged ourselves to see if we could get to day 100.

We used the Whatsapp group less. The cravings were less. But they were still there, and we still checked in. I posted my day count inside the community. We have a space for Daily Accoutability, where we are one day at a timing “stuff”…whatever that one thing is that we want to get done today. And I used it to keep visibility on my no alcohol day count.

But there were days when my brain tried to tell me that the challenge was dumb, and that having a whiskey would be perfect for the moment I was in.

There were times when I was around whiskey, and I’d spend all kinds of time going back and forth trying to figure out how I’d break it to my members that I chose alcohol. Could I justify it? They would surely be cool with me and still support me…so what would I say? Those days I was dangerously close to drinking.

But we all made it to 100.

And obviously the next effort was to see if we could go a full year. Why not?! We made it this far.

The remaining 265 days were filled with an absolute lack of desire for alcohol, as well as an absolute yearning for a drink, as well as every possible level in between.

I have truly missed whiskey. I think of it fondly. The nostalgia of an end of day whiskey while I jump on headset and play video games with my kids is huge.

But I miss it like I miss cigarettes and chewing tobacco. When I walk by someone having a cigarette, oh man I’m so excited to get a whiff of yellow tar, toxic chemical laced second-hand smoke. I truly love it. It takes me back in time to all of the wonderful moments of my younger days.

But now, when that nostalgia hits me and I start craving a nicotine, or craving alcohol, I am seasoned at playing it forward. My simple question is “There’s no such thing as just one…so do you want to partake in this thing every day for the rest of your life? What would that look like?

Same with alcohol. I desperately want to have a whiskey. But the same thing applies. I’ve been down the “I’ll just have one for old times sake” so many times. It’s not real for me. I’ve tried to entertain the “I only drink on the weekends.” or “I only drink when I go out to a restaurant.” Those aren’t real for me.

For me, moderation doesn’t exist. As much as I wish it was a thing.

So today I celebrate one year without alcohol. I posted Day 365 in my community. Tomorrow I will post day 366 because I know that the moment remove it from public visibility, the likelihood of me having a drink goes up exponentially. And so it remains.

Are you trying to quit something, start something, stay consistent with something? ADHD is not a part-time struggle, and your support shouldn’t be part-time. Come join myself and others supporting one another 24/7.

The week goes by. We already forgot what we planned on Sunday, and the things we did remember are continually put in the ‘not now’ bucket because we remembered them at an inconvenient time.

I believe there is a fast track to managing your ADHD, and it involves other people. The easy answer is 1:1 ADHD coaching, but that’s not in the cards for everyone.

So let me give you the way that we do that inside ADHDBB, and you can take this and run with it if you have the capacity and community to do it on your own.

Planabilibuddies works!

A planabilibuddy is an accountability buddy for planning your week.

Why we do it at ADHDBB is because I have found in my 1:1 work that clients mention how helpful it is to talk out their week. Verbalizing gets it out of their head and having another person (their coach in this case) asking them questions about their week can sometimes help uncover roadblocks and then you can plan for those obstacles before they happen.

A planabilibuddy that you meet on a weekly cadence will make you more likely to do the few commitments that you made, because of the power of felt accountability. Felt accountability is the subjective perception that your actions and decisions will be evaluated by someone.

If you know you will have to answer for your commitments, if you know that someone will ask you about them, you are way more likely to get it done. No guarantees in life, but oh man does it get you fast tracked to the doing.

I recommend picking only a few things to commit to during the week, because too much felt accountability could lead to burnout/stress/overwhelm/drugs/alcohol/hookers/crime sprees/jail/… stuff like that.

What I personally love about a weekly accountability partnership is that it gives you practice in ADHD skills management. You are practicing picking three things that you have predetermined are important to you to get done; three things that you will practice scheduling a time for and putting in a calendar; three things that you will reflect on and play out obstacles for.

This is why keeping it to three is crucial in my mind. Yes, we could play this out for every task, every project, and create an ornate spreadsheet to block out all of it, but doesn’t that stress you out just thinking about that?! Because it’s homework! And homework sucks. Doing a small homework assignment on a zoom call with your weekly accountabilibuddy makes it easier, makes it more fun.

If you pick 3 things, choose something you probably won’t do if left to your own devices. It doesn’t make sense to tell a planabilibuddy 3 things that you would be doing anyway. The point of this is to practice a skill that you otherwise do not have practice at. The point is to challenge yourself to overcome the obstacles to doing things that you know how to do, that you have deemed important, and yet you can’t do. If you were already going to do it, that feels like standing over the hoop and dropping the ball through the net. I mean, it counts as a basket, but what are we learning? That’s not really free throw practice.

Practice the free throws. Get better at the free throws by shooting them, sucking at shooting them, and ultimately improving your percentage of succe\sses through repetition and tweaking your ‘form’ bit by bit.

The fast path is by doing this with someone else.

Because the right ‘someone else’ doesn’t go through the all the overly critical, self-loathing, judgmental, accusatorial, bullshit reasons why we didn’t do the thing. The right ‘someone else’ can help us get on the other end of our obstacles without all that character flaw judgy bullshit.

I highly recommend getting yourself a weekly planabilibuddy. Meet once a week. Pick 3 things to commit to that week. Then reflect and make new commitments each week. Make your important things more likely to happen!

I had a conversation with an ADHDBB member who is currently participating in our planabilibuddies. If you want to hear about how it works from an actual person who is taking advantage of it, you can listen on the ADHD Big Brother podcast here.

And if you need help finding your ‘someone else’, you are invited to join ADHDBB. We have an automated way of announcing that you are open for a partner, and I offer coaching style templates to help walk you through successfully holding a weekly session with one another. I’m also available inside the community to answer any of your questions.

Adults with ADHD sure do have a hard time holding ourselves accountable. Am I right or am I right or am I right?

One of the bajillion reasons why this may be for an adult with ADHD could be the proximity to support. Here are a few examples of the same task, and the varying proximities to support, and how that translates to the likelihood of follow through.

The task: Calling the Insurance company.

Barf. Probably something we could put off. Nothing bad happens today if we don’t do it, though. We can always do it tomorrow. Nobody is looking? Proximity to support is ZERO. Task = Doesn’t happen.

Sometimes we have a partner, or an assistant to remind us…proximity to support is more than zero…task = more likely to happen, but the track record on this is probably crappy if I’m placing a bet.

Let’s take this all the way to the other end of the spectrum. What if you had someone that is attached to you at the hip, follows you around and their only purpose is to remind you that you have a call to make to the insurance company. Maximum proximity to support = probably gonna happen…if you don’t murder that person first.

Sometimes we hire an ADHD coach or a therapist to help us with this. During the session, our proximity to support is 100%. The second we leave the appointment, what happens? [You can fill in the joke about appointment amnesia here.]

The way we improve on the proximity to support at ADHD Big Brother is through daily accountability. And we also just rolled out accountability partnerships where members can partner with each other and form structured accountabilibuddy partnerships. What this does is creates visibility on what you are working on, and the proximity to support is there every day.

It’s really interesting and sad that when my buddy Bryan cancels on our weekend walk, I don’t go on the walk by myself. He is my support for our walk. He is my accountabilibuddy. When he goes away, I’m released from the contract. Ideally, I’d go on the walk regardless. But I have not chosen a replacement support for that walk…yet.

Off the top of my head, what I might do is post in our daily accountability club in the community on Saturday that I’m going on the walk on Sunday morning no matter what. Then I would put my accountability day streak on the line and force myself to reset it to day 1 if I don’t go on the walk.

Will that guarantee that I go on the walk? No. But because I increased my proximity to support, I have made it more likely.

Where might you get support? If you don’t have an assistant or a nonjudgmental spouse, what could you use? Think in terms of who you wouldn’t want to let down. Some quick obvious ideas of partnerships you could create:

• local groups of folks with shared interest

• Coworkers

• Friends

• Church groups

• your coach/therapist depending on how they operate

In ADHD, we are in service of more likely. Increase your proximity to support, and increase your likelihood of ‘doing the thing’.

Try it and see!

If you need the easy way, and want to be more likely to get shit done, join ADHDBB and massively increase your proximity to support with us.

Pay your taxes on time is a project that is important. But very few human beings are ‘interested’ in it.

For those of us that manage to get our taxes paid on time, the deadline of April 15 gives us that needed urgency. But that means we put it off until that deadline gifts us with the motivation to get started.

Is that an ADHD strength? I don’t really herald that ability to hyperfocus when things are urgent as a strength. We aren’t out hunting with spears anymore. How are we supposed to ‘do or die’ while sitting at a computer? When Gary threatens to fire us? That sucks.

The issue that I experience with this brain of mine is that none of the big self-work matters in the moment of a shitty task. It doesn’t matter how much of the motivating and inspiring work I do, you know all the ‘what’s my purpose’, ‘what’s my why’, ‘what are my strengths’ homework. None of that matters when we sit down to do the taxes.

Taxes, in this case, is the metaphor for anything that is important but we are not interested in.

What we can absolutely rely on, and what I encourage everyone to expect, is that when the time comes that we scheduled for this shitty but important task, we will be met with a sinister task demon.

This demon… sorry, I should be more positive…this unique and beautiful brain wiring we’ve been blessed with will give us every possible loophole out of doing the important task.

And the kicker: it will all be justified!

• We need to get a birthday present for that party tomorrow, and right now is the most convenient time to get in and out of the store. We should go now. Taxes was a bad idea for right now.

• Dinner is going to suck if we don’t get a handle on these dishes, and I suddenly have a burst of motivation to go do that! I should really take advantage of that. Taxes can wait.

• There is just too much resistance to this taxes crap, and it feels like it will take me an eternity of pain to get through it. Tomorrow I won’t feel this resistance, I’m sure of it.

Oooh, here’s an image of the task demon in action! Supplying Margaret with motivation for some other shitty task than the one she said she was going to do, which was work on her taxes with a fountain pen…

Here is an answer for battling the task demon

Don’t battle him. Expect him. Some days he will be loud. Some days he will be subtle. Some days, if we get lucky, he is a no show…and that’s great. But he has a ticket to your show, so he can show up whenever he likes.

If he is going to show, best to be prepared. Try this:

• Know in advance what you are doing with your time. (Not all day, every day). When are you going to ‘work on taxes’? Wednesday at noon? Know it. Schedule it. Calendar it.

• Be thoughtful about when you schedule that time. Don’t just randomly grab a time in the future because it sounds good…”I’ll do it sometime this weekend”…really? Saturday or Sunday? What usually happens on your weekends? Make a go of being specific for your important task.

• Do not plan your task for completion. Plan it for putting in time on the task. When you cage a task inside a finite time window, it makes it easier to get started on.

• Make the task visible to others. When we do this, we are more likely to get started on it. If you tell me that you are going to work on your taxes Wednesday at noon, then when noon rolls around and you are met with the task demon, you are also met with the idea that I might ask about this. Add a little bit of tension to the other side of the equation. We do that inside ADHDBB in our daily accountability club.

• Bring somebody else into the mix. At ADHDBB we use our 24/7 body doubling room. I was in there working on this article. There are apps and websites you can use this and if you have supportive people in your life, you can have them body double with you as well.

This may seem like a lot of work/effort for doing a task, and it probably sounds a lot easier to practice the art of “sucking it up and just doing it.” It is a lot of work/effort.

But this is the journey of being a late diagnosed adult with ADHD. When has behavior change ever been easy? We can absolutely make it easier by surrounding ourselves with support while we practice and fail at this until we finally succeed. We can enjoy the process and complain about the process with others who are going through similar struggles with their skull spaghetti. That’s a core reason I built ADHDBB.

Final Thought/Summary

There is no ADHD world where we suddenly have the willpower to naturally get started on important tasks. We can journal our why and know how it all connects to our big purpose in life, but that will mean nothing when the moment comes and the task demon is in our ear.

Build your scaffolding. Come get your support. Practice the artform of doing stuff when it’s not urgent, one shitty task at a time.

Oh man, and in a community of other ADHDers who are working on getting their shit done…announcing a failure without having to experience an eye roll?

My shame-free, judgment-free failure. That I can laugh at?! GLORIOUS!

I work with adults, and I’m a 50 year old with ADHD…I have an extreme oppositional nature to finding the good in ADHD. I give ADHD zero credit for my talents. I give it no accolades for whatever parts of life I seem to find effortless. That credit goes to me…my spirit, my soul, not the pile of skull spaghetti in my braincase. That goop is so fucking mean to me. My ADHD brain can suck it. I’m here to get shit done, even though.

My mission with the ADHDBB community is in creating the gym for adults with ADHD to ‘do the things.’ The only way for us to succeed at that is by making those things visible that are important. And the only way to make something visible - some big behavior change, some big goal - is to bring in other people’s eyeballs.

Soooooo many of us suck at that.

If you are someone that keeps trying to figure things out on your own, and you continually suck at it, bring in the big guns: other eyeballs.

And this is where the Shame of 1000 Tries comes in. The eyeballs have to be attached to people who understand, relate, can be shame-free, judgment-free accountabilibuddies. Why is that? Great question that I’m pretending you just asked me.

Because we need a safe place to make something visible that we are nervous we are going to suck at and fail at. We need a safe place to put it out there, even though that could happen. We need a safe place to put it out there, even though we know ourselves and we’re just going to fail and we hate the feeling that comes from that failure.

We need a place to openly suck, as we journey toward not sucking.

Wanna play with me? I did this on my podcast last week and it’s been really fun so far hearing what people suck at. It’s been quite freeing sharing back what I suck at, too. Good times!

I got this speakpipe thingy that let’s you record a voice note to me. People use it for fan mail or tell me what’s so great about my podcast, or tell me why I’m changing your life, or give me a suggestion of what to talk about….DO NOT DO THAT!! I’m oppositional, remember!!

Send me a voice note (here’s the link) and tell me your name, where you’re from (cuz that’s neat to know) and what you currently suck at. That’s what I want to know! I will then record a voice note response tell you something that I suck at. And that’s how it’s done!

No fixing. No ‘have you tried….’. No strategies or ideas on how to not suck. Just two people sharing things they suck at. No judgment. No shame. Get some experience at sucking out loud!

I don’t share these. They are just for us. And they’ll get deleted.

I couldn’t pull my shit together to make an objective go at putting my day together. It was mostly an inner scream of “DO ALL OF IT, AND DO ALL OF IT NOW!”

How can a person do 50 things right now? I would just be flapping like a fish out of water, trying to flop frantically towards some body of water, a puddle, anything! Let me complete something…anything! But which thing? All things seem important. I can’t win. No matter what I choose, I lose.

It’s maddening.

It’s super frustrating.

And in my worst of times, in my helpless of times, I would just lay in my bed and give up the fight for finding a puddle.

And that’s when I discovered Lexatroxichloritol! LOL! I’m joking! Just caught myself in what seemed like an ad for a supplement or a medicine.

But there is a “so what the hell do I do, then?” component to this. I’ll share what I do.

I use you. Accountability partners. I use visibility and a desire for change. I am productive as hell now, and while I still suffer the affects of an unmedicated ADHD, depressive disorder and anxiety disorder, I’m no longer white knuckling through life.

I’ve been coaching now for about 6 or 7 years, and what I see quite often is that because we have failed so often, so many times, so many different ways, it feels like we’ve exhausted all possibilities…the only answer seems to be “we can’t.”

What is missing is the other person(s) to help and support. Shame-free. Judgment-free.

What adults with ADHD need is a place to get small wins that build into bigger wins. We need to experience what it’s like to make a commitment, fail at that commitment, and keep that commitment visible, even though it brings up all that inner pain about how much we suck at stuff.

Keeping it visible gives us an opportunity to face the challenges that get in the way of us doing what we say we want to do. Keeping it visible to people that support your journey whether you succeed or fail, with the same gusto and hype no matter how many times you struggle, that is how you win at managing your ADHD. That’s the fast track.

What’s the alternative? The solo track is usually: Get excited about a change, build it up in our head, make a spreadsheet to track it, make a go of it, forget to track one day, life takes us away from it for a couple days, forget it even exists, then feel like shit about ourselves and how nothing works…decide it must be a character flaw, and self-loathe our way into some escapist behavior (alcohol, drugs, porn, doomscrolling, youtube, video games).

Get with other people, keep your change ambitions visible, and watch how quickly you get to being a person who can manage their ADHD life.

And, if you need other people, at ADHDBB we are an already built system ready and waiting to support you. If you are reading this in April of 2026 (and maybe a week or so into May, we’ll see), we are doing our $10 for 10 days so you can test us out inside ADHDBB. No auto-sign up, just 10 days and then you auto-cancel. Makes it easier.

You don’t have to do ADHD alone.