Katie McManus, a business strategist, uses monthly Innovation Days to keep her business fresh and her ADHD brain engaged. She sleeps in, generates ideas without structure, then breaks the best ones into 3-5 actionable chunks. She schedules them on the second and fourth Tuesday of each month.
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If you're an ADHD business owner and you're terrified of the idea that you're going to get bored of your business and want to quit at some point, then listen up, because I'm sharing with you my key to staying interested in my business. And doing this one thing helps me grow my business, stay interested in what I'm doing, and continue to help my audience in ways that I couldn't even imagine when I first started my business. And hi, I help ADHD business owners make more money in less time with fewer distractions by showing you how to pick a profitable niche, design an offer that people actually want to buy buy, and teach you how to market and sell your services without wanting to vomit. I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach. So what is this one thing that changes absolutely everything in your business? It's Innovation Days. So before I share with you how I do an Innovation Day, I want to pause you here because I know you have adhd and I know when we hear instructions or how someone else does something, we think, oh, my God, that's the right way to do it. I have to do it exactly that way. No, I'm going to share with you what works for me. You get to take parts of it and make it work for you. Okay? Take what I say as inspiration for your Innovation Day, or whatever the fuck you want to call it. Okay? But these are not hard and fast rules. Deal. The most important thing that I found to have a successful Innovation Day is to get enough sleep. So on days where I'm having an Innovation Day, it may sound counterintuitive, but I don't set an alarm. I let myself wake up naturally. And you know what? Sometimes that means that I sleep until 9am on these days, and that is absolutely fine. Another key that I found to having a successful Innovation Day is that I do not rush to get to work. Because here's the thing about an Innovation Day. Like, it's innovating. There's not a plan to the work that you're going to be doing in an Innovation Day, okay? The Innovation Day is really for inspiration to come to you. And that does not happen on a schedule. So oftentimes, I will get up late, I will drink my coffee, I'll have breakfast, I'll listen to a book on tape. I will walk around my house, I'll think through all the things that I haven't had a chance to think through, and I will wait for ideas to come to me. While on other days I'll actually go into my manifesting practice, and I will get everything out that I want to bring in. And that's usually what sparks me into the ideas of, like, what I want to create. And when I finally sit down and start, like, vomiting up all of the ideas that I have for my business, for new programs I want to run, for things that I want to build into my existing programs, for how I want to manage my social media over the coming months around lead magnets I want to create. What I do is I first, like, vomit up all the ideas and I kind of map them out, and then I look to see where do I have the most dopamine, what looks like the most fun for me to get started on right now, and also what will set me up for success in the coming months. Once I've identified the one thing that I really want to focus on for the rest of the day before I actually dive into doing the work, I plan out the work. Because here's the thing about having ADHD is when we create a big project for ourselves, oftentimes we don't delayer it. Okay? So a layered project is typically something that, like, it starts off as one small thing, like food prepping for the week, and then turns into a massive layered task. So to food prep, you have to go and buy groceries. So you go and buy groceries, and then you come back, and then you realize, oh, shit, I didn't do any of the dishes from the last two days. Now you have to load the dishwasher and, like, hand wash some of the dishes. But you open the dishwasher, and the dishwasher is full of clean dishes. So now you also have to unload the dishwasher and put all the clean stuff away. And as you're putting stuff away, you realize, oh, my God, the kitchen's kind of dirty. Like, I have to kind of tidy and organize and get things settled before I can go and do the dirty dishes. Before I can go and start meal prepping and figuring out what needs to go in the refrigerator and what I need to cook right away. That's exhausting. So before I get into the work of the project that I've designed for myself, in my innovation day, I break up the project into usually, like, three to five big chunks. And then I go in and I assign myself different tasks that I have to do. And I'll also assign things to. To my team so they know exactly how to support me in it. And today's a big innovation day. Okay, so today's the Innovation Day that I'm using to kind of ideate how I want 2024 to go. And a couple of things that have come up for me so far is. And this is backwards. I know. Plan the work and not the results. Okay. So this is something that I train my clients on. You can't plan on results. You can't plan on how many clients you're going to get or how much money you're going to make. And yet I fall into this trap as well. Okay. I want to plan exactly how many new clients I'm going to enroll each month, but that's not helpful. So I'm planning the work. The other thing that I came up with were a few things I wanted to add to my group program. Something I want to plan for my membership, the Hyper Focus membership that's launching at the end of January. I'm super excited for that. How I want to do my social media. I also came up with an apron idea for gardening. It's kind of like an apron overalls kind of combo thing. I don't know where this came from. It just was in my brain and it had to come out. One of the other things that I came up with was, like, different ways I want to repurpose my lives and how I want to live my life. In 2024, I wrote Pretty every day, clean my home, which I'm not a clean person. I mean, I'm clean, but I'm not tidy. So I need to stay organized and then exercise every single day. So it's kind of all over the place. Okay. And that's okay. When you have an Innovation Day, there's not like a set amount of things that you want to get. You want to come up with ideas, you want to. You want to let inspiration for your business come back to you. And I do this a couple times a month, and sometimes they're super impactful. And I create incredible plans that carry me through the next few months in my business, Create amazing programs for my. My clients and all that stuff. And sometimes an Innovation Day turns into a day where I am really just journaling on what I appreciate about my life. Different things I want to do better and really just like getting realigned to why I'm doing what I'm doing. So I know a lot of us business owners are like, doing the internal work right now to get ready for the new year. And so I offer this as my gift to you if it's helpful, and an invitation for you to schedule your own innovation days and just to share how I build this into my schedule. I build it into the second and fourth Tuesday of every single month. Okay? So those days are absolutely blocked off. No one is allowed to book with me on those Tuesdays. And I'm curious if you do something similar, please tell me about in the comments. I'd love to get some more ideas as to how I can change my innovation days. And if you want more content like this and permission to make the instructions out there in the world your own, then like this video and go ahead and follow me.
