May is Mental Health Awareness month, and I wanted to take a sec to talk about ADHD business owner baddies in a world of time blocking, Slack, Claude, and heaven forbid a recurring weekly call. If you’ve ever wondered what the heck is going on in Samm’s head, well, it’s ADHD. (The fact that this blog is going live after the month is almost over is a little telling.)
ADHD makes business ownership sometimes the absolute worsttttttt, but it’s also kind of a superpower (more on that at the end).
I’d like to preface this by calling out that I’m not special or unique in these experiences, and some of these may be attributed to other neurospicy hints or personal disposition. I’m not the only neurodivergent entrepreneur operating on her own terms, so if you struggle with the same things and find this helpful, well then that’s what it’s all about. Let’s get into it!
Recurring Tasks
Recurring tasks are my nemesis. Hate hate double hate loathe entirely. My brain is literally built for novelty. If it’s seen it before, the dopamine has already left the building.
Where it shows up: Weekly team calls. Invoicing. Monthly reports. 🤮 Anything with the audacity to happen again.
How we work around it: If it recurs, it gets automated or delegated. Full stop. I stopped fighting this one and just built around it.
Demand Avoidance
Demand avoidance is real, and my fight or flight has absolutely no chill. My nervous system reads external demands as a threat to autonomy—even stuff I actually want to do. It’s not attitude, it’s wiring.
Where it shows up: The moment something shifts from “I want to do this” to “I have to do this” and suddenly it feels impossible.
How we work around it: I reframe everything I can as a choice. Opted-in me is a completely different person than obligated me and we’ve learned to set things up accordingly.
Question Avoidance
I will not respond to your question, but I will send you a 9-minute voice memo unprompted. Incoming questions demand I context switch on your timeline. Me initiating means I’m already loaded, already excited, already in it. The direction of information flow is everything.
Where it shows up: Slack messages on read for 3 days. Brain dump voice memos. Every single client call that ran long because I had thoughts.
How we work around it: We run async first. Brief me instead of questioning me, and watch how fast things actually move.
Structure: a Love/Hate Relationship
I desperately want structure and also kind of want to blow it up. Structure keeps the chaos from winning, but predictability slowly kills my drive. I need the container. I also resent the container. Both are true simultaneously.
Where it shows up: Everywhere. Constantly. Ask my team.
How we work around it: Loose frameworks instead of rigid schedules. Themes over time blocks. Enough shape to function, enough flex to not lose my mind.
MAIL.
Mail. Just. Mail. It’s a stack of uninvited demands that showed up, made themselves at home, and now just stare at you.
Where it shows up: The pile. You know exactly which pile I mean.
How we work around it: One dedicated slot a week, good snack, good playlist, low stakes. Ritual makes the unbearable bearable.
Variable Work Output
Some days I do two weeks of work. Some days, a shower is a genuine achievement. ADHD isn’t a lack of attention, but the dysregulation of it. My output is variable and honestly always will be. That used to embarrass me. Now it’s just data.
Where it shows up: Project timelines. My calendar. The gap between what I planned and what actually happened.
How we work around it: We buffer everything. We underpromise. We stopped building schedules that assume I’m going to be the same person every single day because I’m simply not.
Managing Others
Managing people does not come naturally to me. I’m suddenly responsible for someone else’s consistency and follow-through, which are the exact things my own brain negotiates with daily.
Where it shows up: The feedback conversation I’ve been meaning to have for two weeks. The thing I assumed was obvious was not obvious.
How we work around it: Clear documentation, an incredible ops person, and a lot of mutual grace. I’m a better leader when I stop pretending I’m a different kind of leader.
Confrontation
Confrontation makes me want to disappear into the floor. My nervous system doesn’t really distinguish between social discomfort and actual danger. A hard email can feel like a threat. It’s exhausting and also incredibly inconvenient when you own a business.
Where it shows up: Letting things linger too long. Apologizing before anyone’s even upset. Writing and deleting the same message four times.
How we work around it: Literal scripts. Written out in advance so I’m not trying to word things correctly while my brain is already in flight (or fight!) mode. It works better than I expected.
Rejection Sensitivity
RSD is real y’all, and it has absolutely sent me into scope creep I didn’t charge for. Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria means the fear of disappointing someone hits fast, hits hard, and hits before I’ve had a chance to think rationally about it.
Where it shows up: Saying yes when I mean no. Adding deliverables nobody asked for. Doing extra work at midnight to outrun a feeling.
How we work around it: I’ve learned to clock the RSD spiral before it becomes a pricing problem. Boundaries are both a business and a nervous system practice for me.
AI Existential Crisis
AI is incredible and has also sent me into a full existential crisis more than once. My whole thing has always been that my brain moves fast and makes connections quickly. AI does that too. Better sometimes. That’s genuinely useful and also kind of identity-rattling when you’re not ready for it.
Where it shows up: Opening it with a purpose and looking up four hours later, having produced nothing billable, and questioning my entire value proposition.
How we work around it: Defined purpose before I open it, every time. It’s a tool I direct, not a spiral I fall into. Still a work in progress, honestly, but we’re getting there.
Developing My Own Operating System
If you’ve made it this far, then you know why I had to build an entirely different operating system for myself and then figure out how to explain it to other people. Standard systems weren’t built for brains like mine. They work fine until they don’t, and then they really don’t.
Where it shows up: Onboarding. Processes that live in my head. That one workflow that only makes sense if you understand how I think.
How we work around it: We spent real, intentional time translating how I work into something my team could actually use. It took a while. It was worth every minute. And honestly, it made us better at what we do.
How ADHD Has Made Me a Better Business Owner
Here’s the other side of it, the part nobody talks about enough. These are all the things the ADHD brain does that make me genuinely excellent at what I do. These are the superpowers I have to remind myself about when it feels like I’m failing.
- I can read a room (and a client) instantly: Pattern recognition and people reading come naturally when your brain has spent its whole life scanning for information at high speed. I pick up on what’s not being said as fast as what is.
- I make connections nobody else is making: Give me information across five unrelated industries, and I’ll find the thread between them before most people have finished reading the brief. That’s not hustle. That’s just how my brain is wired.
- I hyperfocus like it’s a superpower: When something clicks — a project, a problem, a client challenge I actually care about — I go all the way in. The quality and depth of output when I’m locked in is genuinely hard to replicate.
- I thrive in chaos: Fires, pivots, last-minute everything? That’s where I’m most alive. While everyone else is recalibrating, I’m already three moves ahead because my brain never fully stopped running those scenarios anyway.
- I think in systems, even when I resist them: Ironically, the person who hates process has built some really good ones. Because I’ve had to figure out how to make things work for a non-standard brain, the systems I build tend to actually work for a lot of different kinds of people.
- I genuinely care. Like, a lot: RSD and emotional intensity aren’t just liabilities. They mean I feel the wins deeply, I take client outcomes personally in the best way, and I will lose sleep over making sure something is right. That level of investment shows up in the work.
- I am very hard to bore: New industries, weird problems, left field briefs — yes please. Most people want to stay in their lane. I want to know what’s happening in every lane and how they’re all connected. Clients with complexity and range are where I do my best work.
- I iterate fast: I don’t get precious about ideas. I’ll generate ten directions, kill eight of them immediately, and keep moving. The speed at which I can produce, assess, and redirect is a genuine competitive advantage.
- I built a business that accommodates real human variability: Because I had to build for myself first, I built something that actually works for people who aren’t robots. My team has flex, my clients have grace, and the culture reflects the fact that output matters more than performance.
I figured out how to work with my brain instead of against it. Everything I just listed as a struggle? I didn’t always handle those well. I’ve burned out, over-delivered, under-charged, avoided, spiraled, and rebuilt. What I have now is hard-won, and it works. That’s not in spite of my ADHD. A lot of it is because of it.
Do you struggle with mental health while running a business? Let’s commiserate together.
