Have you ever found yourself paralyzed by procrastination, knowing exactly what needs to be done but unable to do it? I’ve been there.

Hey, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach, and this is my podcast "The Weeniecast!"

Pssssst! If after listening to this episode you want my help overcoming the challenges mentioned, here's the link to the free download - https://weeniecast.com/procrastination-worksheet

Now, back to the episode!

In this episode we're getting deep into the murky waters of ADHD and procrastination!

A common challenge for us ADHD business owners.

One pressing question I receive frequently is: "Katie, how do I prevent myself from procrastinating?"

The truth is, I don’t always succeed.

As a business owner with ADHD, I face the same battles as my clients.

In this episode, I highlight some of the major challenges ADHD entrepreneurs face, from the pressures of self-imposed perfectionism to the frustrating cycle of executive dysfunction.

By sharing my vulnerabilities and the shame that comes from missed deadlines and unmet expectations, I aim to reassure you that you're not alone in this struggle and to provide tips that have helped me along the way.

After listening, you’ll gain valuable insights into managing your energy and building a more ADHD-friendly business.

You'll learn the importance of quitting work at the right time, so you can maximize your dopamine supply.

We’ll also explore the challenges of hiring the right people and how to bounce back when you've hired wrong.

And most importantly, we'll discuss how to shake off the toxic belief that rest must be earned—a concept that goes hand-in-hand with creating a sustainable, successful business.

Listen in for strategies that can help you turn your procrastination from a crippling hurdle into a manageable part of your entrepreneurial journey.

Timestamped summary

00:00 Struggle of running a business with ADHD.

04:13 Reward motivates, small tweaks lead to success.

08:54 Organizing tasks by dopamine levels improves productivity.

12:24 Trust emotions in decision-making and avoid impulsive spending.

14:56 ADHD-friendly membership, support, rest, and understanding.

17:20 Community support for shared experiences and coaching.

Your next steps after listening

Download my free procrastination worksheet -

https://weeniecast.com/procrastination-worksheet

Realizing it's time to work with me? Book your free initial strategy call with me - weeniecast.com/strategycall

Get more support in your ADHD entrepreneur life by joining my hyperfocus community! - https://weeniecast.com/hyperfocus

Wanna get this content earlier, and totally unbleeped? Subscribe to the Apple Podcasts premium version of this show - https://weeniecast.com/winners

Want to just buy me a coffee in return for some helpful insight? Thank you! Here's where you can do that - https://www.buymeacoffee.com/katiethecoach

Mentioned in this episode:

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Join the Hyperfocused Community

In this episode, I'm going to tell you about the support

I wish I had to help me bypass some serious

procrastination. Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business

strategist and money mindset coach, and welcome to the

Weeniecast. A question I get an

annoying amount of times is how do I prevent myself from

procrastinating? How do I get everything done on my to do list

and on and on and on. And let me tell you, I don't.

One of the challenges of being a coach who works with

ADHD business owners is that I am also an ADHD

business owner. And the challenges don't change when you know

better. Just because I help other people figure out how to overcome their

challenges with their ADHD in starting and growing their businesses

doesn't mean I have it all figured out myself. For me and my

business, far from it, knowing all the different

strategies that can work for other people creates an immense amount of pressure on

me to just be perfect at all this stuff

because I teach on it after all, right, I should be perfect.

I fail in managing my ADHD every single day in

my business and I know the shame that goes along with it. I know the

frustration and sometimes it's not a big deal, you know, sometimes I

don't post to LinkedIn and okay, cool, I'll post

tomorrow. Sometimes my newsletter. Oh, no, that's a bad

example. I'm very bad at having a newsletter, so that's an ongoing problem.

I've actually, I'm gonna start outsourcing that to someone

so we won't even touch upon the newsletter. Just don't pay attention to that part

of this podcast. I know Neal's not going to edit this out, so,

you know, I'll accidentally book an appointment at 02:00 in the afternoon

and then I'll just be in waiting mode all morning and all through lunch

and then right until 02:00 p.m. Until I have that meeting

because I'm afraid that I'll miss it. And then the rest of the day I'll

still be in executive dysfunction, not able to do anything because I'm disappointed

in myself for not getting more done in the morning. So I know the shame

that goes into running a business when you have

ADHD. I know how hard it is to

sit there in executive dysfunction, knowing all the things that you need to

do that you want to do and not being able to get up and just

do it. I understand the sinking feeling of

shame when your well meaning neurotypical loved

ones are like, well, just do it. Just, just start.

And it'll be so simple when you start, as if it's easy.

There are so many challenges that go into managing ADHD, and

one of the big ones is we thrive in structure. Structured

environments are perfect for us. So having a nine to five can actually be really

healthy for us. But a lot of us do not thrive

in the nine to five ness. Like the expectations in the nine to

five don't fit us. And also often the activities that we're doing

every single day in the nine to five don't reflect our gifts, so it

tends to burn us out. So what do we do? We go off and we

start businesses where we have to create the structure, and we

suck at that. We're not good at creating structure for ourselves. And

because we're working on our own and because we're responsible for creating

the structure and it's not going well, we can sometimes

spiral a little bit out of control. We can start punishing

ourselves and overworking. And I do this all the time. And

here's a few ways that I have been working on becoming better at this

myself. Now,

better is by no means perfect, but these are

small things that I've been doing for myself that I do coach my clients

to do. And members of the hyperfocus membership, which is the thing

that brought this whole topic up, because the hyper focus membership has

been on a enrollment pause for the last

nine months. Do you know why? Because I've been

procrastinating, writing the f landing page. It wasn't until about

a month ago where I got a burst of dopamine

and my executive dysfunction decided to off for a little bit, where I

was able to sit down and actually write out this whole

landing page in one sitting. And I want to talk about this because

a oftentimes people think that like, the reward

for doing something is enough for us to be

motivated to start it, to work on it, right? So the

reward for finishing a landing page is what you make money

because people are able to go to the landing page, see what you're

selling, click the buy button, and then all of a sudden their money

becomes your money and you have a client that didn't necessarily work for

me for nine whole months. And I'm convinced

that making these small tweaks in my day to

day are what finally got me to the point where I had the

emotional, mental and dopamine bandwidth

to actually sit down and do this. So the number one

thing that I've been working on in the last handful of months

is to quit work when I'm tired, not exhausted.

As an adhder, I am so used to sitting

down and doing a project all in one sitting. Every single research paper

I did in school, I did the night before, I stayed up all

night and I wrote the paper. And usually I didn't even go

to sleep in the morning because I didn't want to miss the class because once

I fell asleep, then I was dead to the world. Any sewing project I ever

did in high school, because I was really big on making costumes for my friends

and for myself, I would do in one sitting. I would literally just put on

all of the Lord of the Rings movies and have them on the background as

I made these elaborate costumes. And a lot of the things that

I do in my business, I do in one sitting. I have to. It's just

how my brain works. And when you do things in one sitting,

the goal is get it done at any cost, because

usually there is a deadline that you cannot miss. If you miss that

deadline, then none of the work counts. If you're doing a costume for

Halloween and it's the night before Halloween and you don't finish the costume, guess what?

You don't have a costume to wear on Halloween. I mean, certain professors in

university, if you do not finish the paper by the time it's

due, you do not get to submit it late. So when we

grow up that way, when we learn that we have to get things done at

any cost, what we train ourselves to do is work through exhaustion.

And that's all well and good when it's about a paper

or, you know, something silly, because usually you have some time to

recuperate afterwards. But in a business, you don't have that.

In a business, if you work yourself past exhaustion on a

project, that means the next day or two,

you're going to be useless. You're going to have a really hard

time doing any of the daily

tasks in your business because your dopamine is going to be completely

flatlined. And it's really hard to train yourself out of

this because the signal normally to stop working is you finish

the thing or you're so exhausted you cannot put

another two words together. Or like that time in high school when I was

making a Disney princess costume, I accidentally

sewed through one of my fingers on the sewing machine and I had to go

to the emergency room. That's another sign that you need to be done. Not one

I recommend. Is that too gruesome?

When we quit, when we're tired, when we're just starting to slow

down a bit, when our brains are just getting a little bit murky and things

start taking a little longer. What we're basically doing

is keeping a reserve of dopamine that we can utilize the next

day. It feels like you're being lazy when you do this.

It feels like you are being totally self

indulgent because you've had a whole lifetime of

programming of people calling you lazy for not starting the

thing already. And then by the time you start doing it, well,

you know you have to finish it. You did this to yourself. You

procrastinated. So now you have to get it done and you have to stay up

late and you have to punish yourself. One of the hardest lessons I've had to

learn in the six plus years that I've run my business is that,

yes, I set the deadlines for things in my business, but

also those deadlines get to be flexible. And

me missing a self imposed deadline does

not mean that I'm a terrible person. It doesn't mean that I'm unprofessional.

It doesn't mean that this business isn't going to work. It means that I'm a

human, and I'm a human with ADHD. And sometimes that's just

how we work. I did another episode a while back about how

I use my own procrastination as a self care method to

reduce stress. If you want to go and listen to this episode, it's episode

77, and I break down exactly how I take different tasks,

like high dopamine required tasks and low dopamine required

tasks. And I always have them organized in lists so that when

I'm having a high dopamine day, I can say, okay, awesome, I'm ready to get

some shit done. And I look at the list of high dopamine stuff that I

need to do, and I get to pick and choose, and I don't have to

do any of the mental work of planning what needs to be done.

Likewise, on days where I'm just not feeling it, I have no energy.

My dopamine's in the gutter. I'm able to look at those low

dopamine items and say, okay, cool, here's some really

easily accessible things that I can absolutely get done today.

And what this does is it gives me the ability to use my own

procrastination to get things done that I need to get done anyway. So

I've been quitting when I'm tired since the beginning of this

year in 2024 and I'm convinced that

by doing that, I have been storing up dopamine throughout the week so

that I don't get to that point of exhaustion where I need a whole day

to recover and where I randomly do get those

really high dopamine spurts. And that's how I finally

finished this damn landing page. The other aspect to this is,

oh, what am I going to say next? Well, you'll have to keep listening to

find out. But first, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel.

The other aspect to this is knowing when to ask for help

and who to ask for help from. One of the most challenging bits

about this project in particular is that I had actually hired

someone to do it for me. I hired someone

who had one really strong recommendation from someone that

I know and trust. She has a really massive following on

social media, and the work this person did for her was

just very successful. And so when I

approached this man to write my landing page for me and to design it and

do all that stuff, you know, he was like, yep, absolutely.

He went and did it, and he wrote a landing page for a completely different

program. It's like he didn't understand any of the

notes that I was giving him about what the hyper focus was, membership was, and

there were just a lot of problems with it. There are a lot of really

basic mistakes that anyone who's done any

studies in copywriting would know not to make. And

when I tried to work with this individual and give him feedback

and just say, hey, you know, like, here's my feedback on the

copy that you wrote here and how it's laid out and this and that and

the other thing. He didn't even understand the basic copywriting terms that

I was using. This kicked off me feeling like a complete

failure. You know, I coach on this stuff, and I hired the wrong

person. You know, I didn't vet him well enough. And

also, I felt like I'd kind of gotten scammed, which basically

I had been, because he was selling a service that he was not

qualified to provide. So of course, this

is for the landing page for hyperfocus. So, of course it created all this

icky energy around the idea of working on it myself.

And I name this not to badmouth anyone. I'm not going to name who this

is because I want you to know that you're going to hire the wrong people.

There are a lot of unscrupulous individuals out there who are

going to gladly take your money to help you do a thing that they

have no ability to help you do. And that's just how the

world works, unfortunately. And when this happens,

you have a couple choices. You can absolutely label yourself as

a failure and make it all doom and gloom and

a foretelling that you're going to fail at this business, or you can take it

as a lesson. Now obviously, I highly recommend

taking it as a lesson, but if you do, you can't take it

as a lesson right away. You have to let the emotions kind of process. You

don't let those emotions process out of you. It's gonna create this,

like, negativity suck around this project and you're never gonna be able to get it

done. There's also a trust element. If you hired someone to do

something and they completely failed at it for you and you're out the

money and you know they're no longer helping you. And

obviously you either have a choice of doing it yourself and you haven't done it

before or hiring someone else when, oh my God, what if I make

the wrong decision again? You have to kind of rebuild trust in other

people, and more importantly, you have to rebuild trust

with yourself to know make good decisions. And here's the lesson that

I think most ADHD business owners need to learn is that

throwing money at a problem is not a for sure way

to fix the problem.

So it's absolutely ironic that in

relaunching the hyperfocus membership, I ran into

pretty much every ADHD obstacle in the

book in getting the landing page up and running

on the landing page, which, if you want to go check it out, it's weenie

cast.com forward slash hyperfocused. And we

also have that listed in the show notes. You'll notice that I actually call myself

out on it. One of the big reasons I launched hyperfocus the

membership is because I wanted there to be an accessible

low ticket offer where folks who maybe aren't ready to work

with me or can't afford to work with me yet can

still get coaching, can still get support. But I also

created it because we all need a place for accountability.

We all need a place to go and say, oh God, guys, this

is what's going on for me. I think I'm really it up and have everyone

pipe up and say, no, you're not just it up. I go through

that too. It's normal. We also need a place to go and ask for

good referrals. I like, literally, I would not have been

able to launch this landing page if it weren't for my team.

And my team is incredibly ADHD. Sensitive.

They know not to nag me about stuff because they know nagging is actually

going to be a surefire way to prevent me from doing it even longer. Because

when you get nagged about something creates more bad energy and

beliefs around it. It makes you feel like you've already failed at it and it

robs you of all the dopamine that you'll get from finishing it. This membership is

designed to help you find people like that who understand how

your brain works and how you can be best supported in all the

ways that you need to be supported in your business. One of the things that

I'm really excited to be rolling out in the early summer is to

have guest trainers. One of the things that I'm vetting for

when I pick these guest trainers is do they have ADHD

friendly methodologies? I'm never going to bring someone into this

community who's going to say, well, just do it. Just power through in

a very neurotypical, condescending kind of way that doesn't belong

here because that's not what's going to be useful to us. It's

also a place where we can be reminded time and time

again that we do not need to earn

rest. How many times have you sat down at the dinner table with your

spouse, your partner, with your family family and been asked,

oh, how was your day? And you list off a gazillion things that you

did in a way that, like subconsciously you're trying to get

their approval. Wow, you did a lot. You deserve to be sitting

down and having dinner and you deserve to watch some tv later, and you

deserve to put on soft pants and just kick back on your

couch. You earned this by working

hard. The more I coach other ADHD business owners

and the more I get in touch with myself and how

I work and how I sabotage myself, the more I realize the

biggest problem ADHD business owners have.

Because we're ambitious, because we're hard workers, because we have this

vision of this bigger life that we want to have, and because I carry

a whole buttload of shame and beliefs that I'm

lazy, that I don't work hard enough, that there's something deficient about

me. The more I see this in myself and in my clients, the more I

realize the biggest hurdle we need to overcome is

learning that we do not need to earn rest. When we

prioritize rest and recharging our brains and

recuperating our bodies. When we prioritize that first,

everything else becomes more successful. If you want to hear more about

this, then go and check out episode 81, where I talk all about my favorite

topic, which is sleep. But genuinely, if you want

to be successful at running your business, if you want to make buckets of

money, if you want to help thousands of people out there in the world,

first you need to help yourself. And if you'd like a community

around you, to support you and to remind you

that you're normal, I mean, as normal as we get, and that

your struggles are not unique, and to remind you that you

deserve to actually enjoy this whole

journey and you want some coaching from me, then I

invite you to check out the hyper focused membership. It's designed for

people like you and me, and I really wish I had it nine months

ago.

I'm gonna look that up. Hold on.

Do turtles

eat mosquitoes?

Squirrel, squirrel. Squirrel, squirrel.