Sasha's tips for thriving as a neurodivergent + why I'm building a health care product this August

Aug 08, 2024

Getting sh*t done (with ADHD)

Note: this should be applicable whatever your 🧠 structure is!

I think I first realized I had ADHD when I moved to New York in 2017. Citibikes, which were ‘funner’ than the subway, but a tad more dangerous appealed to me. Weaving in between lines of traffic on 5th avenue on a rainy October night felt great. Folding my laundry did not.

I had known that I was neurodivergent, and, for a while, I’d tried to ‘push’ my diagnosis down, like a hungover person resisting the urge to yack. Sure, I was a bit more hyperactive than most, and would lose keys and water bottles constantly, but why worry about it?

It wasn’t until 5 years later, getting essentially fired from a job, and being tired of the disorganized chaos that I even entertained the idea of trying medicine, which in hindsight felt like putting on glasses for the first time, and being able to see more clearly, so here are some of my tips.

I know that this Substack has been ostensibly focused on building. A lot of my builder friends are neurodivergent, which is why I thought I’d share. I appreciate the patience of my readers as I figure out via trial / error what I can sustainably write my Substack on.

Tips:

Note, I’m not a doctor, or a PhD. Feel free to disagree with my opinions.

Dive 🏊‍♂️ into it

Don’t shy away from your diagnosis, dive into it. As I explained to my friend with Asperger’s: if you had a sleek but modified Mercedes where the steering wheel was in the backseat, and instead of brakes, it was voice activated, you would study the instruction manual inside and out to a) stay safe, and b) figure out how to drive the thing.
There’s no point in not studying it — it’s the car you were given, so you might as well understand every nook and cranny. There can be a lot of pain associated with having a brain that works differently; it causes distance from work and relationships, and consequentially, neurodivergent people can crave being normal and don’t necessarily want to admit their differences.
Your diagnosis is an explanation for why certain tasks are more difficult for you, but it is not a justification to not deal with them. Someone I know, a successful entrepreneur, had an utterly dysfunctional apartment that was a borderline health hazard. Washing clothing was so tedious and difficult that they preferred to wear dirty clothing. This is not acceptable.
It is totally acceptable to hire help to wash your clothing (or whatever you struggle with acutely), and not to feel ashamed, or that you are lazy. But being wildly disorganized or late, is a choice at the end of the day. And from firsthand experience, it is a choice that hurts you in the long-term and pushes away your relationships and long-term goals. In no world, does spending 30 minutes looking for your keys help.
I think neurodivergents often struggle with details / organization, but internalize shame and judgement from neuronormal people who can organize quite easily and conclude that they should also be able to organize well. As a result, they both organize and manage details poorly and then refuse to ask for help given the stigma, which compounds the problem.
There is a balance between denying your diagnosis and that certain tasks are more difficult, and having a diagnosis sit on your shoulders like a wet self-pity blanket that you use to qualify why you can’t do something. Find a happy middle ground.

Practical:

Get Airtags. On everything. Incredibly helpful. I am almost at the point where I am considering embedding Airtags in a water-proof case into my favorite sweaters.
Commit to doing tasks each week, but not at a certain time. Here is my task management system (link here). I only use Google Calendar for explicit meetings / social events.

I find that the work my brain ‘wants’ to do varies between:
1. logical / analytical reasoning
2. read / research
3. creative / right-brained type of activity
4. details

There is no point in making things harder than they need to be, and say, writing at 9am, because it is what you said. Different people work differently. See the below calendar showing the way different creatives used their time. Unless you absolutely need to, give yourself the flexibility of choosing what work or task feels right at the time.

Work in ‘flow’ states. I find working in 2 five-hour blocks works best for me. Use the ability to hyperfocus (when you become really into whatever you’re doing) to your advantage.
Experiment and figure out what works best for you with both the what & when. The problem with super specific advice is something like this: a friend of yours picks up running, especially running at 7am, and especially super enthusiastically (can someone explain why morning people are borderline psychotically happy at this time?). I digress.
They tell you “Sasha, there’s no other way to do it.” You HAVE to do x. But what if it doesn’t work? For me, contrary to all the morning people, I find workouts are best for me as a mental break and a time to digest whatever has been going on mentally. But maybe for you, morning workouts are sheer bliss and setup the rest of your day for success - I hope you find out! Personally, I find that there are certain timings where activities (working out, cleaning, etc.) have a natural place & feel like they require less effort.
Minimize activation cycles / batching: I define an activation cycle as interrupting the flow of whatever I’m doing to do something else, whether that is taking out the trash, going to the doctor’s, or the gym. The fewer the better, even if it sounds a bit bizarre. Here is an example:
- Sunday afternoon, I get invited to see disco at Tiki Disco in Knockdown Center at 7PM. I love a good disco set. I also planned to do a run at night. I knew … I wouldn’t likely go see the disco, then come back, and go on a run at 10PM. So I …
- ran to Tiki Disco with a change of clothes in my bag, danced for 3 hours, ran back.
- A bit strange, sure, but it was only one thing: leaving my apartment for 4 hours, and coming back, and that it was for the day.
Accept that you will lose things, and struggle to be disorganized a certain % of the time, and that it is okay. That said, if your actions affect someone else (say you lose their favorite jacket) apologize and own it fully, even if your diagnosis does make it harder for things to happen.
Use Amazon’s subscribe + save for anything non-perishable you use in your home. I never run out of conditioner, razor-blades, detergent, dish-washer-soap etc. It all comes on time, and just when I need it.
If you have a ton of details of things to do, take 1-2 days off until they are exclusively done. In March, I was in over my head in taxes (I had freelanced several jobs / moved between states, so they were particularly complicated) + I also had 2 sets of wedding travel to book.
Details seem to work one of three ways for me. Either you’re:
- stuffing them in between the folds of your regular responsibilities, at midnight in an often tired / rushed and incomplete way
- doing it one week before
- doing it very proactively
Rather than do the first and feel rushed, I make peace with the fact that I have a bunch of administrative things to do and peacefully work it out and took a couple of days to figure the travel and taxes out. I like to ‘batch plan’ and do the next 3 months of in one go:
- wedding travel
- doctors / dentist appts
- haircuts
- taxes & legal things
Once I’m done, I can reliably get back to my regular work, knowing that I don’t have to worry about some lingering detail that I’ll trip on and need to urgently do.
I can expand upon this in a further post, but using a virtual assistant has been life-changing for me. I don’t know many people that do this, but it doesn’t make sense. You pay $$ for the nice apartment, the Equinox membership, the comfortable clothes, the coach, the stuff for your hobby, because it makes your life better, so why not a VA (it costs $100 a month). As a result, I don’t spend time:
- in customer support chat
- booking / moving any type of appointment
- doing any type of research. For instance, when helping grow Things I Didn’t Learn in School, my VA took screenshots of the top 50 Finance Substacks, their pricing info etc so I could directly skim the info
- organizing dinners: I run monthly tech dinners where my VA actually find the restaurant, books it, puts it in the group chat, adds people to the calendar invite, sends me participants’ social info etc
- a bunch more things
Self-discipline is dramatically overrated. I think your system, not your self-discipline, and your habits, massively influences your results, not some mightier self-discipline that tells you to go lift the extra weight. Let me explain:
- I keep two phones: phone 1 (old iPhone 7) is my ‘texting, and social-media’ phone. If I meet someone at a party, am texting someone from high-school, going on a date etc … this is the # I give them.
- Phone 2 has no social media. The only people who have the # are my parents, a handful of close friends / someone I’m seriously dating. If I’m on a walk, at gym, whatever, I’m on my serious phone, answering the meme on my texting phone can wait.
- I then put the fun phone (phone 1) in a K-Safe (time locked safe) a couple times a week, sometimes for 12+ hours at a time. A bit wild, sure, but I pay $30 for Mint service for the slow phone. The K-Safe is a sunk cost. Would you pay $360 for a solution for reduced screen-time? I sure would.
- Similarly: 2-3x a week, instead of going home, I go to a bar / hotel / cafe called the Hoxton. I’m not going to come, get a great cup of tea, and then watch a movie… I naturally get more work done here than when I’m home.
Use Privacy.com if you frequently sign up for services and can forget to cancel. Privacy lets you make a credit card with a fixed amount that can’t be over charged and doesn’t mess with your credit score. Given that any conceivable service is a subscription, you can peacefully forget about cancelling, have them e-mail you 3x to pay, and then give up charging you. This goes back to point #7: the system is more important. I have poor self-discipline in remembering to cancel stuff, but because I’ve designed a system of temporary payment cards, none of this forgetfulness ever financially hurts me.
Set your environment up to reduce context switching. I keep: 3 different USB C-chargers in my apartment depending on where I want to hang out. I have 3 tooth-brushes (suitcase, apartment, and at my parents). It’s a bit pricey to setup initially but makes transitioning way easier, and require less mental memory.
Meditation / Visualization: I’m not someone who will harp on meditating for an hour, every day but 10 minutes in the morning does wonders. You get a degree of distance away from your thoughts, and immediate emotions. This helps you reduce your impulsivity and respond to things with less emotion.
Don’t text people you don’t know well at night. If you have ADHD, you have a more aggressive, passionate, impulsive side that can distance yourself from people who don’t understand you well. I have only good intentions if I text you at 2am, asking if you want to buy an ice-cream maker tomorrow and make ice-cream from scratch, are down to speak on a podcast I’m throwing, or how your date went, but to a newish acquaintance these things can throw you off. If you know and are used to my presence and brain, these texts are welcome. However, if you don’t, these texts will throw you off balance, so be especially sensitive with your written communication with someone new. It is by far the easiest medium to miscommunicate in because of the lack of other contexts (tone of voice, facial expressions etc.).
In a relationship: if the other person is more organized, you need to still try to strongly hold your own / contribute strongly in other ways to avoid creating a very unattractive parent / child dynamic.
Avoid comparing yourself to neurotypical people along two dimensions:
- how they do something (i.e., keep organized, etc.)
- the types of jobs that work for them (your brains are very different)
- the sense that you could only be more organized if you just ‘applied yourself’
Lastly, use my products!!
- Chrome extension called iCantSpell (we find typos in emails when you potentially misspell a person or company name in an email).
- New product: findurmeds.com, soon-to-be released product that helps you find a pharmacy that has your medicine in stock (currently there is a shortage of ADHD medicine).