Steal my writing productivity system to make huge money as an ADHD content creator

May 18, 2023

Recently, I was assigned an absolutely mind-numbing work task.

I’m a writer/editor in my day job and typically tackle projects that are on very tight deadlines.

This serves my ADHD brain well — I’m most effective when I can work quickly and in small, frantic bursts.

This latest task, however, was an ADHD brain’s nightmare:

a bureaucratic undertaking
with dubious value
and no fixed deadline
assigned on a whim by a new manager who has little institutional knowledge

(If you’re wondering why I’m working so hard to build my own business as quickly as possible, stuff like this is Exhibit A).

Two reasons I think I gravitated toward journalism in the first half of my career were that:

I would be writing about something new every day, which was perfect for my novelty-seeking, ADHD brain
I would always be on deadline — also good for someone whose mind is always all over the place

I’m absolutely allergic to projects like the above.

I did find a way to tackle it, and I used the same trick I’ve used for the past few months to supercharge my productivity as an independent writer.

In fact, this tactic has been so effective that I managed to post a ludicrous $197/hour wage writing part-time in April.

Let me tell you a little more about it, and you can steal it if you like!

My system is a mix of digital and analog tracking and timing. (Image licensed under the Unsplash+ License)

The Tyranny of Choice

I actually started doing this because I felt I was also getting a bit stagnant in my side business.

It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy writing or didn’t want to do it, I just felt a bit overwhelmed by it.

As I wrote in this piece, I generate an insane number of writing ideas, which can be a double-edged sword.

When you have too many options, suddenly you find yourself unable to settle on any one of them.

It’s like when I used to watch Netflix, scroll through shows and add them to my list for an hour, then wind up watching nothing.

The Tyranny of Choice, I think they call it.

I was also resting on my laurels a bit.

Any time you get a big breakthrough in your business and suddenly make a lot of money in a short period of time, it can be very tempting to take your foot off the gas.

It can be easy to fall into the “I deserve a break” trap, especially as a solopreneur. If you slack off, it only affects you.

This is a huge mistake, of course. When you start seeing a huge burst of momentum, you need to ride that wave, not paddle back to the cottage for a nap.

But I think it’s just human nature to do the opposite.

The other problem is that there’s no fixed deadline when you write for yourself.

If you decide not to write that day, there won’t be any nasty emails in your inbox chiding you for not submitting an assignment.

If you choose to skip writing that day, there’s no client or boss waiting to yell at you.

You will be less successful, but that’s a lot less tangible than getting in sh*t at work.

Anyway, when I get like this, I know it’s time to implement a system that will organize and focus my mind.

My journalism trick

As I watched my success taper off in a haze of laziness, I thought about my brain, how I work, and what I needed to do to get my productivity back on track.

Then I thought about my journalism days and how demanding it was.

There simply wasn’t an option to be late on a piece of writing: the presses were about to run and the paper was going out, and your article damn well better be in it when it does.

I knew what I needed: a deadline.

In fact, I needed many, crushing deadlines.

As a solopreneur, how much you earn is intertwined with how quickly and effectively you can work.

The vast majority of my side hustle income is from writing articles, and I know that writing an article typically takes me about 45 minutes.

So I decided not to just try to adhere to that amount of time — I would put myself on the clock. Forty-five minutes was all I had to complete a writing task.

You’ve heard of 25-minute Pomodoro timers? I chunked it down even more into 15-minute microbursts. I only have 3 microbursts to finish a piece.

I use a timer called Forest, which I highly, highly recommend. It gamifies concentration and it has both positive and negative reinforcement: if you complete your 15 minutes (or whatever amount of time you set), you add a tree to your forest. If you get distracted with your phone and leave the app, your tree dies.

Here’s what it looks like:

Forest app yearly tracking — The Forest app tracks your concentration time. Have fun and pick different types of tree based on the season! (author’s image)

I also added one more wrinkle: I would attack 6 pieces at a time.

This satisfies my ADHD brain’s need for novelty and variety.

At the beginning of the week, I pick 6 ideas that I want to turn into articles. Then I do a quick outline for each, which allows all my thoughts on the idea to spill onto the page.

Each outline only takes me about 5 minutes to do. Here’s an example of one I did for a piece called “Eat these top 5 healthiest foods in the world and you’ll feel amazing”.

An outline for an article — A very quick outline serves as the basis for my articles (author’s image)

Then I start working through each one in 15-minute bursts.

In my “story development” book, I draw boxes, with each one representing a story I’m working on. Here’s how that looks:

“WS 15” stands for Writing Session — 15 minutes.

Be flexible when necessary

Sometimes a story will require me to go over, sometimes I will bring one in in just 30 minutes.

But this is my structure and I try to adhere to it as best as I can.

One final, important point: I will not fight flow state.

Although my intent is to jump around and only work on articles 15 minutes at a time, if my brain has accepted the task, I’ll just keep going in flow until I hit some resistance and then jump to something else for a while.

In fact, the piece you’re about to finish reading was done in three consecutive bursts.

The benefit to only committing to 15 minutes on any given piece is that you’ve already taken the most difficult step: getting started.

Most of the time, you’ll just keep rolling and look up later to discover you’ve been working for 2 hours.

This deadline/15-minute strategy can be applied to anything.

That stupid work task? It’s done now.

Nobody put me on deadline, so I put myself on deadline and committed to tackling it 15 minutes at a time.

Was it painful? Yes.

Is it done? Yes (thank God).

ADHD folks — I’d love to hear about the systems you’ve created to stay on track. Let me know in the comments!

This post is republished from my Medium publication Create Every Day.

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