ADHD entrepreneurial anxiety? Use procrastination!

Hey, new listener, thanks so much for checking us out. And there's a good chance you have adhd, so I quickly wanted to ask you to please follow this podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whichever app you're listening to this on. Don't leave it until later because you will forget. Thank you. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. In this episode, I'm going to show you how you can actually use procrastination to manage your anxiety and get more sh t. 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 Night before is due. There is 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 folks with adhd. 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 flack 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, like 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 gonna 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, you know, 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 people with ADHD 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 learn 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 the library two days before the paper was due. It's genuinely part of our creative process. And let's talk about what procrastination is. 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 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. 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 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, like, why there's bad feelings attached to it now, it's already associated with failure because I'm behind on it already. You know, when we start businesses, 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 people experience is, 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 you. 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? She looked at me like I was crazy. And so she showed me and I was good. And, like, 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. You know, 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, you know, 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 just once, 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, like, how it's going to work best, but you also have to know, like, 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, like, 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. 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 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 to 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, like, you're gonna get done and you're gonna 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 gonna use a very sophisticated system where we avoid doing the work that we really, really, really don't wanna do with the work that we only really, really don't wanna do. And we're gonna avoid doing the work that we really, really don't wanna 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 with the stuff that we just don't really particularly care to do, and so on and so forth until we get to the actual, 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 people with ADHD 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. Stalk an 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 like, 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. 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 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, like literally, you just have to be a little bit organized, not crazy organized. Okay, I'm not gonna like set that expectation for you. So first. Oh, what am I going to say next? Well, you'll have to keep listening to find out. But first, Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. The hyperfocus community is the inner sanctum of the weeniecast. It's a club that's designed just for you, where you'll learn how to leverage your ADHD to grow your business. In the hyperfocus community, we are realistic about the challenges that face ADHD business owners and we don't believe in one size fits all solutions. We believe in creating strategies that fit you. On day one of signing up, you'll experience that deep sigh of relief that comes from walking into a room full of people like you, who you do not need to mask your quirks in front of in order to fit in because they get you in the membership. Every single month, you'll get two group calls. One is an ADHD group coaching call and the other is a networking call with fellow ADHD business owners. We will also have coworking sessions designed for the ADHD mind. Monday get organized Sprint calls to keep you out of overwhelm. Access to weekly Brave BizLab calls where I will give you practical advice to grow your business. We'll also have the occasional expert training which are absolutely ADHD vetted and of course, community support by folks like you. And those who pay for the year upfront get a surprise bonus. Visit weenicast.com hyperfocused and stop procrastinating the things that will grow your business. That's weeniecast.com hyperfocus or click the link in the episode description. 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 gonna 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, like, dive in, start cooking. And then you realize, oh, I didn't do the dishes over the last couple 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 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, like, 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 like, you're thinking, okay, everything can go into its place. Now 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 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 in schools, which I think is 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 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, like, you know, 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, like, throw 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 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. I want you to think about how this shows up in our business. You tell yourself, okay, I'm gonna start sending a newsletter to everyone who's 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 you know, like, 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 like, 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, you know, 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 a deep level. And the stakes are super f cking 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. Because someone sometime told you that Tuesday was the best day to send a newsletter. F 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 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, you know, I have kind of a cadence and I'm not perfect about doing this. Like, you're gonna, you're gonna hear this and be like, oh, cool. I'm gonna 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, 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. You know, 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 like giving myself a little testimonial, you know, which is kind of a fun way of showing people, you know, 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 1, Pain 2, Pain 3, Pain 4, Pain 5, Pain 6, Pain, Desire 1, Desire 2. 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 done? We get dopamine. So oftentimes, when I get something done that requires less dopamine than one of the bigger, scarier, like, 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. Like, it's just weird. Don't do it like you were a fish once, now you're. You have four legs, you jump around, you have, like, a voice. And I don't support metaphorical frogs 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. And 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 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? Since 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, like, 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? You know, 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 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. You know, there's like a joke and it's not like a funny haha 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 like when you go into an ADHD person's house, like they're messy. You know, there's stuff everywhere. You know, you look at their desk and there's like papers and piles and post its and you know, just a bunch of random. 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 gonna need to remember that it exists, we're gonna 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 non linear 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 forward/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. Join the weeniecast hyperfocus community and unlock a whole world of support. Get direct access to me in exclusive calls. Turbocharge your network with unless unlimited referrals and boost your productivity with Sprint calls and accountability sessions. But that's not all. We're talking expert talks, masterclasses, and more. Register now to get in front of the line for this at the introductory price of just $77 per month, it's time to elevate your entrepreneurial game. Let's do this together. Go to weeniecast.com hyperfocus all one word. That's weeniecast.com hyperFocus.