ADHD Procrastination as a Strategy: Harnessing Anxiety for Productivity

In the hustle and bustle of running a business with ADHD, the word 'procrastination' often feels like a dark shadow looming over every unchecked item on our to-do lists.

But what if I told you that procrastination isn't the villain it's often made out to be?

Hey, I'm Katie McManus, your host of The Weeniecast, and in this episode, I'm flipping the script on procrastination and revealing how it can actually be harnessed as a powerful tool to manage anxiety and boost productivity.

As an ADHD entrepreneur myself, I've been doing a lifelong dance with the total death eater that is the procrastination beast.

But I learned a lot about the world of dopamine-driven decisions and anti-linear productivity.

I'll walk you through the intricacies of managing a business with an often misunderstood psychology.

We delve into the fear of diving into unknown tasks, the relentless planning churning in our minds, and the hidden creativity within procrastination.

By revealing my own stories and dissecting the complex interplay between ADHD, procrastination, and fear of failure, I'll show you how to redefine productivity norms to cater to your beautifully unique neurological wiring.

From organizing tasks into manageable categories to breaking down complex projects into digestible pieces, this episode is designed to help you navigate your workday with intuitive grace.

Stick with me, weenie, and you'll discover the secret sauce to optimizing your work life by realigned task management to harmonize with your body's natural dopamine levels.

By the time we wrap up, you'll have the tools and a fresh mindset that defies traditional business strategies.

You'll know how to turn the tide on procrastination and use it to your advantage.

You'll have been guided you through the process of identifying and prioritizing tasks according to your energy levels.

And you'll feel empowered to tackle them not just with efficiency, but with enthusiasm.

Timestamped Summary:

00:00 ADHD procrastination sparks creativity, fear plays role.

06:12 Our brains absorb things easily, but not everything.

09:24 Manage cortisol with dopamine, avoiding unwanted tasks.

10:31 Acknowledge low dopamine, prioritize tasks accordingly.

14:00 Reluctantly leaving dishes leads to more chores.

17:32 Understanding technology, organization, segmentation, targeted distribution and decision-making.

21:24 Thoroughly planning day, assessing energy levels.

26:19 Use procrastination to manage anxiety, book call.

Mentioned in this episode:

Join the Hyperfocused Community

In this episode, I'm going to show you how you can actually use

procrastination to manage your anxiety and get more shit

done. Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset

coach, and welcome to the Weeniecast.

My whole life I've been a procrastinator. There was not

one essay that I wrote in high school or in

college that I did before the the night before is due. There was

no project that I was ever given in any of my jobs that I didn't

procrastinate to the last minute. I've also procrastinated throughout my

entire professional career when I worked for other people and working for myself.

That doesn't mean I wasn't providing really top tier

value

for ADHD entrepreneurs. We know

that if we're assigned something, that thing will only get

done with the minimum amount of time left to. Do

it, and we get a lot of flak for it. A lot of people

have a big problem with us leaving things to the last minute now

to them, to neurotypical. People, they can't

imagine procrastinating to the last minute. For them, the

anxiety just would not be healthy for them.

They need to chip away at a. Big project little

by little as they go to be able to do it well.

What they don't understand about people with ADHD

is that even though we're procrastinating, writing the paper for

four weeks and. We're going to do it the night before, it doesn't mean we're

not working on it. But the work that we do in procrastinating

is in our heads. And you know this, I'm describing this, and I bet you

you're remembering that paper that you wrote about the bubonic.

Plague in college for History 101

and. How you had pulled some

books, read some stuff, done a little bit of research, and then

for three weeks before. The paper was due. In your

mind, you're structuring and restructuring. And restructuring your

argument. In your mind, you're playing out how. You'Re

going to phrase everything and what your

thesis was going to be and. How you are going to line up.

Evidence to prove it. That's not necessarily procrastinating.

First and foremost, that's finding a way that works for you

to do the work. Now, just because the

work is not. Visible to other people doesn't mean it's not existing.

Just because it's something that's happening in. Your head doesn't mean it's not real.

One of the things that we forget about as

ADHD entrepreneurs is when we procrastinate, we actually give ourselves more time

to be creative. Because how you would have written that paper the

day it was assigned is very different from how you would have written it

a week in, which is very different from how you would have written it three

days later when you learned something in your chemistry class that could possibly

impact what you were going to write about. And it's very different

from that one book that you found in a library two days before the paper

was due. It's genuinely part of our creative process.

And let's talk about what procrastination is.

Right? One of the definitions out there is procrastination

is avoiding the bad feelings associated

with doing something. And oftentimes the

bad feelings associated with doing something have to do

with this fear of doing it badly, of failing, of

fucking it up, of not being perfect. If

you're a fellow recovering perfectionist. Hi, my name is

Katie. It's good to have you at our meeting anyway. And why

am I talking about this? Like, what does this have to do with starting a

business? When I started my business,

that's when my procrastination went through the roof. That's when I

would assign myself the work and give myself the deadline and then blow past

the deadline and then start procrastinating a lot more. Because

whatever it was that I assigned myself, not even acknowledging all

the other aspects of why there's bad feelings attached to it now,

it's already associated with failure because I'm behind on it already.

When we start business, we are venturing into the

unknown. We're doing something that we have

never done before. And because we've never done this

before, there are so many little tasks that we've

never done before. We've never set up an email marketing

system. You've never written a newsletter all

about you and your services before. You've never asked people

to spend money on your services before. Maybe you've never posted to

social media to try to get people to buy something. Something

that most ADHD entrepreneurs experience is we tend

to be really good at things really fast. We tend to learn things really

quickly. Not to brag or anything, but

when I used to work at a knitting shop, which, I mean, this is going

to sound like such a cool story. When I used to work at a knitting

shop, I was working on this one project and it called for cabling

needles. So, like, if you know, cabled sweaters, it has like, the braid. I

didn't know what those were? And so I went into the shop and I asked

the woman who was the manager at the time what cabling needles

were, and she was like, oh, they're over here. Here you go. And I was

like, cool, how do I use them? And she's like, you want me to

teach you how to cable knit? Right now, in the middle of the shop being

open and all stuff.

She'S. Like, she looked at me like I was crazy. And so she showed

me, and I was good. And I sat there and

I did the whole part of my knitting project that required

cabling. And she watched me with her eyes wide

open and her jaw on the floor because usually when she taught people how to

cable, it took several sessions for them to actually

learn it. There are lots of mistakes. There are lots of oopsies.

Oh, God, I dropped the stitches. What do I do? And if you're a knitter,

you know what I mean? If you're not a knitter, then that sounds bad, doesn't

it? You don't want to drop stitches. And regardless if you know anything about knitting

or not, you know that experience. Of being shown something,

all of a. Sudden you get it and you can do it, and people look

at you like you're a mastermind. But it's just

how our brains work. We absorb things certain

things very easily. Now that doesn't

go for everything. And there are enough things associated with our

businesses that we've experienced being too hard for us to figure out

that when we're about to do something that we've never done before,

we will procrastinate it. We will put it off

because we've never learned how to do it before. And if we've already

proven to be bad at, say, email marketing and

setting up those kinds of systems, why do you think you're going to be good

at setting up a task manager like ClickUp

or Monday or notion? Because not only do you have

to understand how it's going to work best, but you also have to know what

the language is to get the thing to do the thing that you need it

to do. There's a lot of potential bad feelings there.

And a, like folks with ADHD, we don't want to feel those bad feelings

because we're used to being good at things. And b, we

really do need that time to figure out exactly how we want it in our

minds before we go and exert the effort

into making it real. That, or we need a deadline. But it's hard when

you have a business because you create the deadlines, and you're the boss.

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

find out. But first

is

if you're the boss. And you create the deadlines and you get to change the

deadlines and so. On and so forth, and we all know how that goes. But

would it surprise you to hear. That maybe you could use your

procrastination. Actually as a stress management and productivity

tool? My friend Laura recently asked me how

I avoid procrastinating so much because I. Get a lot done.

And we do like a monthly check in. We both run businesses. We do a

monthly check in with. Each other, and we kind of go over what we did

the previous month. And she asked me, like, how do you keep yourself

from procrastinating? And I laughed in her face because. I procrastinate all the time.

But I didn't realize that I've actually created a system for procrastination,

that a. Helps me get shit done, and b. Helps

me actually manage my stress in. A fairly healthy way. So if you've

been listening to the. Podcast for a while, you know, I. Talk a lot about

feeding yourself dopamine. Finding different ways to get that

dopamine running. Because one of the things that we have discovered about

ADHD is like, it's not a disorder really, it's

just a deficiency of dopamine. And dopamine is the

hormone that tells our brain that we have the get up and go to go

and do. The thing and then gets us to get up and go and do

the thing. When we don't have enough dopamine in our

systems, a, we get kicked into executive dysfunction where we

know what we have to do and we want to do it, and we want

to get up and do it, and we just can't get ourselves to get up

and do it. But the other interesting thing about dopamine is that

when we don't have enough of it in our bodies, you know which hormone

likes to spike up? Cortisol.

Cortisol, the stress hormone. Now,

cortisol can wreak havoc on your body. It

can wreak havoc on your mental health. So

learning how to spike your dopamine every single day is

going to help you really manage your cortisol levels, which means that

you're going to get shit done and you're going to lower your anxiety at the

same time, which if you're like me, that is a really, really good thing

to do. And to do this, we're going to use a

very sophisticated system

where we avoid doing the work that we really, really

don't want to do with the work that we only really, really don't want

to do. And we're going to avoid doing the work that we really, really don't

want to do with the work that we just really don't want to do.

And then we're going to avoid doing the work that we really don't want to

do, the stuff that we just don't really particularly care to do and so on

and so forth until we get to the actual things that we

enjoy doing. How this works is essentially for

you to do the things that you triple do not want to do, you're going

to need a lot of dopamine. And so it doesn't mean that you can do

those things on any given day. You genuinely do have to wait

for the day when you have enough dopamine in your system to tackle them.

And where a lot of ADHD entrepreneurs fall into a trap of self punishment

is you tell yourself, okay, I'm going to do that terrible thing tomorrow.

And tomorrow rolls around and you don't have enough dopamine, but you don't

actually acknowledge that you don't have enough dopamine to do it. So

you sit there agonizing over, I need to do this, I need to do this,

I need to do this. Stuck in executive dysfunction all the while,

more cortisol is entering your system, so you're feeling more and more and more

stressed out and you become less and less and less

likely to be able to even start that thing. And throughout the

day, you will probably mess around your email inbox, you

might write something down, you might post something, but you're not going to

actually get any real work done when you're holding yourself to the standard of I

need to do this one big thing and I don't need to tell you that

that's not helpful to running a business. So on days when

we don't have enough dopamine for the thing that we really, really, really do

not want to do, we check in with ourselves and we say, okay, cool,

how much dopamine do I have? Can I do the next tier down

of terrible? What about the next tier down from that? The next tier

down from that? Until we find the task that

is a tolerable level of miserable for us to do

that we have enough dopamine to do and then we go and do it. It's

still something that had to get done. It's still something that was on your list.

You still get credit for finishing it, and it still moves you forward in your

business. Now, this does make for a really

haphazard kind of random smattering of, like,

moving forward in different projects. Who says that you have to get

projects done linearly? Neurotypicals. Great. That's good for

them. Great for them. So happy that that works for

them does not work for us. And we don't have to

force it to work for us. We get to find different ways to

work that allow us to be

calm and feel accomplished and

know that we are moving closer towards our goal every single day.

So to be able to do this, literally, you just have to be a

little bit organized. Not crazy organized. I'm not going to set that expectation

for you. So first you have to let go of linear.

Linear does not work for us. Setting arbitrary

deadlines also does not work for

us. Expecting yourself to chip away at something for 30 minutes a

day, also not going to work for us. Let it go. Let

it go. We're not doing that. And something you have to

be aware of when you're starting to organize your

tasks in a way where you're kind of giving yourself the whole buffet of

options of miserable things that you need to get done is we have

to break down what I call layered tasks. A layered

task is when you say, okay, cool, I need to meal prep for the

week. I want to make all my lunches Monday through Friday, and I

want to put together some stuff that I can really quickly put together for dinner

every single evening. You go shopping, you come back

ready to dive in, start cooking, and then you realize, oh,

shit, I didn't do the dishes over the last couple of days. So the sink

is full of dirty dishes. Great, so now I have to do that. And

then you open the dishwasher to start loading the stuff that can go into the

dishwasher into the dishwasher, and it's full of clean dishes that you

didn't unload from a couple of days before. And you're like, oh, yeah, that's right.

That's why I left the dishes in the sink, because I needed to unload the

dishwasher, but I just didn't have the energy for it. So now

you have to not just start cooking the food,

but you have to unload the dishwasher of clean dishes. Probably you're going to get

distracted by cleaning the kitchen around the same time because as you're putting things away,

it's just kind of how your brain works, that you're thinking, okay,

everything can go into its place. Now then you're going to have to

load the dishwasher again. And then you're going to have to wash the dishes

like the pots and pans and sharp knives that couldn't go into the dishwasher. Because

fun fact, if you put good. Chef'S knives in the dishwasher, it actually. Fucks up

the blade. Don't do that. Also, anything with non stick, you

ruin. By putting in the dishwasher. This is a game changer for

keeping quality kitchen stuff around for a long time. When you know this stuff,

they don't. Teach this shit in schools, which I. Think is fucked up. I think

there has to be a whole. Here's how you take care of your stuff so

it lasts longer. Lesson in schools. If you're involved in

the education system in the United States, can you please get on this?

And also, if you want to email me, I have a lot more suggestions.

We need to have a meeting. Back to the point. Now,

instead of it just being one. Task cooking food, it's now

become three tasks. Putting clean stuff away, loading the

dishwasher with dirty dishes, and cleaning the dishes that can't

be put in the dishwasher. And then, of course, those things you have to dry

and put away. So that's kind of a fourth task. And we all know what

happens at that point. We get to this point and then. We look at the

groceries that have. Been sitting on the floor because we were like, okay, well, I

don't want. To put them all away just to. Bring them all out again while

I do this stuff. And then you're like, well, now I don't have any energy

to actually do the cooking. I'm tired. That was a lot

of work. I just cleaned the kitchen. I don't really want to make it messy

again. Let me do this. Let me just put everything in the refrigerator.

I'm going to order a burrito and have it delivered. That'll be my dinner tonight.

And tomorrow I'll plan on grabbing a salad

for lunch. And then tomorrow night I'll meal prep. And we all know what happens

from there, right? You never meal prep. All that food

you got, you might. Cook some of it throughout the week. For dinners and

stuff, but come the next weekend, some of it started

smelling in your fridge and you have to. Really guiltily

just drag the garbage bin over to the fridge along with a chair, and

you have to go through. And just throw shit out because you didn't get

to it in time. Okay? So when we think about a layered. Task,

we have to figure out what. Are all the steps that are required of

me before I can actually do. The thing that I need to do. So,

meal prepping. When you have to meal prep, you really do

have to take into consideration. Did I empty the dishwasher? Did I

load the dishwasher? Did I do all of the dishes that can't be put in

the dishwasher? Did I dry them, did I put them away? Because those

are all extra tasks that. Will slow you down from getting to. The thing

you actually need to do. Okay, I want you to think about. How this shows

up in our business. You tell yourself, okay, I'm going to. Start sending a newsletter

to everyone who. Has ever booked a call with me. Or

downloaded a freebie on my website. Great. You've never

actually learned how to send. An email out of your email marketing thing,

right? It was something that you set up, so maybe you had a va set

up so that you could have a. Freebie and collect email addresses. But

there's something called lists. You're not really sure who you're supposed to send this thing

to. And then you have to figure out, well, what's the content, what's going to

be interesting to them and inspire them. To book a sales call

with me. God. Okay. So now you have to figure out the

technology. You also have to figure out the organization of it. You have to

understand how you're going to segment out this list. So you're sending it to the

people who would be most interested in getting this newsletter. Then you have to

figure out what. To put in the

newsletter, and then. You have to figure out how to

send it at the right time on. The right day to the right people. And

the issue with this, this one action that you want to take, send an

email newsletter to a bunch of. People has become

multiple different tasks. So you have to learn how to use this system. You have

to understand it on deep level. And the stakes are super fucking high

because if you get it wrong, everyone's going

to see, and we love catastrophizing little

actions that we take in our business, don't we? It's like if

I send my newsletter on a Wednesday instead of a Tuesday, no one's going to

read it. It's going to be a waste of words and blah, blah, blah, blah,

blah, blah, blah, blah. Because someone sometime told you that Tuesday. Was the best day

to send a newsletter. Fuck off. We get

really attached to the best ways of doing things. I

want you to notice that in yourself the next time you go to do something

that's a little outside your comfort zone. What's that little

standard that you're holding yourself to? And does it actually make a difference. At the

end of the day? Probably not. Whenever we're

approaching a project in our. Work, something that we want to get done,

what I do, how I use. My procrastination

to lower my cortisol levels. To increase my

dopamine, to actually create. An anxiety

controlling system. Where I get shit done is I.

Will sit down and I will break. Down any task I want to do.

I will delayer them. I will figure out every

single step. That I need to

take before I get to the thing. I do this with things

that I. Have done for years. One of the things that you'll

notice in my social media is I have. Kind of a cadence,

and I'm not. Perfect about doing this. You're going to hear this and be like,

oh, cool, I'm going to go. Check out her LinkedIn right now. And probably by

the time this episode. Has come out, I will have gotten bored of it for

a little while and you won't see this. But

when I'm perfectly in my game, I do content on kind of a

five day rotation. So, day one, I kind of look at the pain of the

things that. My clients struggle with and how it. Feels for them, and I just

kind of normalize it. It's called empathetic marketing. It's one of the things I train

in my programs. The next day, I talk about a. Desire that they all

have, and I champion it. I tell them

that I believe in you. You can actually have this if you want

it. And then day three, I'll generally do a testimonial or

a case study. Day four, I'll do something about my. Story,

and I might even talk about giving myself a little

testimonial, which is. Kind of a fun way of showing

people how you work and how you. Help your clients, because

generally, you help. Your clients with things that you had. To help yourself with

first. And then finally, day five, I try to share some

details about my programs. Okay? So if I have a five day.

Spread of content that I'm going to. Be creating for

the month, and I. Want to post every single day, let's. Just do the math.

There are 30 days. In some months, we're going to ignore. The 31 days and

the 29 days. For the sake of this.

Okay? So that means to post every single day on a five day rotation,

I. Need six pain posts. I need six desire posts. I

need six testimonial posts. I need six my story posts and. I need

six posts that have to do with the details of my programs. And I will

literally create a word. Document that has

pain, one. Pain two pain three

pain four. Pain five. Pain six

desire one. Desire, two. I'm not going to go through the. Whole thing, but you

get the point, right? I break it out. So literally when

I'm going through my list, and of course I break down every single project

that I do, like this. So as I'm sitting down at my desk in the

morning, I'm kind of doing a body scan, a little like mental check to

see how much juice I have in the tank. To do what? I can

literally look at a whole map of options

of the things that I could focus on for the day. And I get to

pick the hardest one that's possible for me on that. Given day

and I get it done. And what happens when we get shit

done? We get dopamine. So oftentimes

when I get something done that requires less dopamine than one of. The bigger,

scarier, awful, miserable tasks, if.

I get that done early enough in the day and I get that dopamine. Hit

from it, sometimes that dopamine rolls. Over and

I'm able to tackle the bigger thing. You know that advice that

says eat the frog first thing in the morning, which sounds disgusting.

Don't do it like frogs aren't that tasty. I've had one. It's just weird.

Don't do it like you were a fish once and now you have four.

Legs, you jump around, you have like a voice.

I'm good, and I don't support metaphorical. Frog eating

for people with ADHD. Anyway, back to the point. The reason that doesn't

work is because it requires a lot of dopamine. If we

don't have enough dopamine to do the thing, we're not going to do the thing.

We're going to be in executive dysfunction. And what happens when

we set the expectation that we should be able to do the thing and then

we get kicked into executive dysfunction and we can't. Do it, we start punishing

ourselves. When we start punishing ourselves and feeling. Like a failure, our

cortisol spikes and. Cortisol really

eats away at your energy. So you're going to be able to get less

done that day because you're going to be more tired, more defeated, more

distracted. It's going to be harder for you to get dopamine into your

system. We really do have to come up with kind of a

scattershot, chaotic approach. To get stuff done that

works with how much dopamine we have in our systems. So here's

what you're going to do. As a business owner, I know you have a shit

ton on your plate and you're probably trying to manage it. All in your head.

You're probably trying to prioritize and figure it out. And like, what should I do

first? Stop doing that. What you're going to do is you're. Going to sit

down with a few. Pieces of paper and you are going. To write

down every single thing that. You think

you need to do. And this is personal, and this has to do

with work and this has. To do with your kids to do. Lists and your

spouse. Like anything that you have to do. With your family, everything that's

floating around in your brain, you have to put on this list. What I like

to do from here is I like to then rewrite the list

into different categories. So, like, anything personal goes onto

the personal list. And if you want to create subcategories, like, is there something

that has to do with health? Is there something that has to do. With your

house and taking care of it? Do you have to book a reservation at your

best friend's favorite restaurant for their birthday? All that goes on the

personal list. And then everything that has to do with your business, you're going to

put on your business list. You're going to organize it into different

categories. So say you have an email marketing category. What are

all the things you need. To do there, a social media posting.

To LinkedIn category, what are all the. Things you need to do

there? And so on and so forth. From here, I

want you to vote. Like, obviously we're talking about your business. This is the weenie

cast for business owners. Go through all the things that you've. Just listed

out that you have to do for your business and figure out if they are

layered tasks. And if they are, if you do need to

break down every single little step. Break down every single

little step. There's like a joke. And it's not like

a funny ha ha joke. It's just kind of like a truth. That people kind

of find amusing to. Explain how jokes work when they're not. That

funny is that when you go. Into an ADHD person's house, they're

messy. There's stuff everywhere. You look at

their desk and there's like papers and piles and

postits and just a bunch of random shit. I know I've gone through

everything that's on my desk and I won't do. It right now because it's pretty

gross anyway. The reason we do that is because

once something is not visible to us, it stops existing. Anything

that we feel like we're going to need to remember that it exists,

we're going to keep out in the. Open so we can see it. When we

organize the work and lay it all out for

ourselves, we're essentially doing the same thing. We're

reminding ourselves that all these things. Exist in our to do

list. And we literally create a little buffet.

Of options for what we can work. On every single day depending

on our dopamine levels. And when we do this and when we give

ourselves permission to pick and choose the things

that we have enough dopamine for every single day and to make

progress in a nonlinear way towards our

goals, we get more dopamine in our systems. We lower our

cortisol. And that, my friends, is how you use

procrastination to manage your anxiety. If you're ready to stop being a weenie

and actually run a business that makes money, then go ahead and book a

generate income strategy call with me by going to

weeniecast.com strategycall.

On this call, we will talk about your goals, your dreams,

and your frustrations in getting there. And if it's a fit

for both. Of us, then we can talk about different ways to work together.

Boom. Mic drop. But I'm not actually going to drop my mic because I like

it and I don't want to hurt it. Squirrel, squirrel,

squirrel, squirrel.