17. Entrepreneurs with ADHD (or Easily Distracted Brains): A Simple System to Actually Get Things Done | Productivity

You can have the most organized calendar in the world—and still feel like you got nothing done.

In this episode, we’re breaking down why traditional productivity advice doesn’t work for many entrepreneurs—especially those with fast-moving, easily distracted, or ADHD-style brains.

Ginny shares a simple but powerful 2-part system designed to help you stop spinning your wheels and start making real progress:

•  The Intentional Week (so you’re not reinventing your schedule every day) 
•  The Daily Anchor (a 10-minute practice that keeps you focused on what actually matters) 

If you’ve ever ended your week wondering where the time went, this episode will give you a practical, realistic way to take back control of your time and attention.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

•  Why your calendar isn’t actually the problem 
•  The real reason you feel busy but not productive 
•  How “mouse and cookie” thinking derails your day 
•  The difference between discipline and structure (and why it matters) 
•  How to structure your week to reduce overwhelm 
•  A simple daily routine to stay focused (even on chaotic days) 
•  Why doing just 3 things a day can transform your business 

The 2-Part System

1. The Intentional Week

Assign specific types of work to specific days so you:

•  Reduce decision fatigue 
•  Stay focused longer 
•  Always know what to return to after interruptions 

2. The Daily Anchor (10 Minutes Each Morning)

Before checking your phone:

1. Gratitude – 5 specific, recent things 
2. Goals – 10 life categories written as already achieved (Brain, Body, Beliefs, Cash, Clutter, Calendar, Relaxation, Recreation, Relationships, Work)
3. Top 3 Tasks – Your must-do priorities for the day 

Mentioned in This Episode

• Free to Focus by Michael Hyatt 
• If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Numeroff 
•  Business Mountain Framework 

Thanks for listening to The Outcome Academy Podcast.

If you enjoyed this episode and want to keep learning how to work ON your business with systems, strategy, and practical tools, here are a few ways to stay connected:

Website: https://www.outcomeacademy.com/ 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ginny.outcomeacademy 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ginny.outcomeacademy/ 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@outcomeacademy 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/outcome-academy

If this episode was helpful, be sure to follow the show so you don't miss future conversations. If you know a local service business owner who could use this, share it with them.

Your outcome isn't a wish. It's a decision.

Transcript

You can have the most beautiful calendar in the whole wide world—color-coded, time-blocked, perfectly organized—and still, at the end of the day, feel like you've got nothing done. The calendar was never the problem. What happens before you even open it is.

Welcome to the Outcome Academy podcast. I am Ginny Seeley. I'm a business strategist and longtime process improvement expert, and I also co-own an appliance service business and a co-working space with my husband, Joe. So I understand what it looks like to juggle growth, leadership, family, and victory all at once.

If you're a service-based entrepreneur or executive who wants to stop putting out fires and work on your business and build momentum with systems, smart marketing, and practical tech, you are in exactly the right place.

Hello, my friend. Welcome back to the Outcome Academy podcast. Here is where I am right now. It's been about six months now since I left my hospital job, so I'm here at about six months of full-time entrepreneurship. And I want to be real with you—I am still building the systems. I'm still trying to figure out how to structure my days in a way that actually works for how my brain operates.

Some weeks feel like I'm firing on all cylinders. Other weeks, I look up on Friday afternoon and I'm like, what even happened this week? And I know I'm not alone in that. I talk to business owners all the time who tell me the same thing. They are super busy, they're working really hard all the time, putting in the hours, but at the end of the day, the week, the month, they can't always point to what moved.

So today I want to talk about something that has kind of changed the way I work. It's not really a hack, and it's not a productivity app or anything. It's a system, of course—Outcome Academy style—and it's one that has two parts: one for your week and one for your day.

I'm a big fan of Michael Hyatt's Free to Focus, and so I love that, but it's not quite as detailed as that. It's more of an overarching way that I handle my week and my day. But if you want to get into the nitty-gritty of how to really hack your day and your week and your calendar and all of your productivity, I highly recommend Michael Hyatt's book, Free to Focus.

Okay—different book. If you have kids, or if you've ever been around kids, there's a very good chance you have read the book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. It's by an amazing author, Laura Numeroff, and it's kind of a classic. And I think I have read it approximately 900 times.

And so it kind of goes like this: the mouse would like a cookie. The cookie leads to some milk. The milk leads to a straw, then a napkin, then a mirror to check for a milk mustache, then scissors because now he notices his hair needs a trim, then a broom to sweep up the hair, and then somehow he's sweeping every room in the house and washing the floors, and then he needs a nap, and then a story, and then he wants to draw a picture—and you know where this is going.

If that sounds familiar to you, that is my brain on a day without a plan. And I'm willing to bet that it's kind of similar to your brain because most entrepreneurs I know have at least somewhat of an ADHD-style brain.

This is how my day usually ends up. I sit down to write a newsletter. Writing the newsletter reminds me that I have to update something on my website. Then when I go to update that link, it means I have to log into the back end. While I'm in there, I notice something else that needs fixing. Then that is like three more things, and an hour later I'm in my emails, and I'm in a rabbit hole, and I never intended to enter that rabbit hole, and the newsletter is still sitting there untouched, blinking at me.

Sound familiar?

So here's what I want to say about that. And I want to say it kind of carefully because I think it matters, and I don't want to insult you. It's not about calling you out, and it's not that either of us is lazy. But a lot of entrepreneurs operate this way. It's because most of the business owners I work with are some of the most motivated, hardworking people I've ever met in my life.

But this spiral happens because entrepreneurship attracts a certain kind of brain—a brain that's creative and curious and makes connections quickly and sees opportunities everywhere. A brain that runs a lot of tabs at once.

Some people I know have been formally diagnosed with ADHD. Some people, like myself, suspect that we probably should be. And some of us just know that our brain works a little differently than the linear, one-task-at-a-time advice that most productivity content is written for.

Whatever category you fall into, this episode is for you. Because the standard advice does not really work for us. The “just focus” advice—well, which one of the 47 things do you want me to focus on? Make a to-do list? Oh, you should see my to-do list. It is like two pages long. And it helps to get that out of your head, but it doesn't always help you figure out exactly what you want to focus on.

So the structure, or the system, that I'm going to talk about today is what really helps me, and I imagine that it will help you. It's not going to be the perfect recipe for every single person because we're all different, right? But I hope that something in this episode really helps you and that you can take it away and just try at least one piece of it and let you be a little more organized about your day and your week.

So discipline is willpower. You have to generate it fresh every single day, and it runs out. Structure is a system. You build it once, you refine it over time, and it carries you even on the days when your willpower is nowhere to be found. For brains like ours, structure is not optional. It is the whole game.

And sometimes it even drives my husband crazy. Because when I say structure, I mean every night when I walk into my bedroom for the first time at the end of the day, I take my wedding rings off and I put them in the exact same spot. Why? Because if I don't, I don't know where they are. I need to put them in the exact same spot so that I have them the next day.

The dog leash gets hung up on the dog leash holder. My keys go in my purse. This is because for probably 40 years, I had to figure that out the hard way. I lost things, I forgot things, I didn't know where important things were when I needed them, and I had to spend a lot of wasted time trying to find things that, if I had only put them where they belonged, my life would have been so much easier.

So structure—not optional. It is literally what holds me together and what lets me get anything at all done.

The other thing I want to talk about is that the problem isn't that you're just getting derailed. Those kinds of things are going to happen all the time. You're an entrepreneur. Unexpected things land in your lap. Clients need things. Life intervenes. The phone rings. Somebody has a question. A team member walks in. Somebody gets a flat tire. Somebody runs out of gas. The software system goes down.

The problem is not having something clear and concrete to return to when the derailment is over. Without that anchor, one distraction becomes five, and five becomes a full day—just like the mouse and the cookie.

So what I'm going to share today is the system that helps give me a little bit of an anchor in my day and in my week.

Before I get into the system, I want to give you a little context on how I think about business progress because it connects directly to why this kind of daily structure matters so much to me.

If you're new here to the Outcome Academy podcast, I use something called the Business Mountain Framework to describe the stages of building a business. This is something that has evolved out of the systems that we've been working on since day one. And when we put all of those systems into the framework of climbing a mountain, it just all fell into place.

So think of building your business like climbing a mountain. There is base camp, where you are laying your foundation—your brand, your offer, your core identity as a business. Camp one is where you're starting, getting clients, getting traction, figuring out what works, but you are the one that is solely responsible for generating any income in your business.

Camp two is where you're growing and starting to build a team so the business does not completely depend on you for everything. Camp three is scaling, where you're building a leadership team and creating the infrastructure for real growth. And camp four is where you're thinking about exit strategy and legacy—what this business becomes beyond you.

If you want to go deeper on any of that, episodes nine and 10 are where you should start. But either way, I think that visualizing it that way will really click for you and it'll really help you.

Now, the reason I bring all of that up—whichever camp you're in right now—there is specific work that belongs to that camp. Boxes to check, skills to build, systems to put in place. And the only way that work gets done is one day at a time, one intentional step at a time.

The mountain does not get climbed in one single heroic push. In fact, I've said this before on this podcast, but it's worth saying again: the people that rush up to the top of a huge mountain like Mount Everest, they die because they have not prepared for that type of trek.

So you need to do this systematically, a little bit at a time, consistently, with a clear sense of what you're doing today and why it matters for where you're headed. That is what this system is built around. It's not perfection, and it's certainly not heroism or rushing or anything like that. It's incremental, intentional progress up the mountain.

Now, the system has two parts. The first one is your intentional week—a structure that gives every kind of work a home so you're not reinventing your schedule from scratch every morning. The second is your daily anchor—a short morning practice that tells your brain exactly what matters today before anybody else gets to weigh in.

So let's start with the week first, because this is kind of the container that everything else sits inside of.

The idea is simple. Instead of waking up every morning and deciding what kind of work you're going to do that day, you assign categories of work to specific days. You make that decision once, and then you just follow the rhythm.

Here's what mine looks like right now.

Mondays are for content creation. That's when I write, develop, and produce things that carry my message for Outcome Academy out into the world. It requires my deepest creative focus, and I want to give it a full day rather than trying to squeeze it into the margins, because that work—I really need to be uninterrupted.

And I know this is going to sound weird to you, but Mondays are my freaking favorite day of the week. I love new things. I love when I used to be in school and it was the first day of school, and I got new school supplies—just a new opportunity, a new job, a new client, a new business that I get to work with.

Mondays are the first day of the work week, and it's like a fresh, brand-new start for the week. And I get so energized and excited because I love what I do. And I hope you feel that way too. But Monday—I'm ready. Like, I'm ready to create and solve problems.

And so that's why I chose that day for content creation, because that's basically my whole job here at Outcome Academy—is to create things that solve problems for other people. So that is my Monday.

Tuesdays, I work on my podcast. I write what I'm going to talk about. I research. I look at the rest of my podcasts that I've already put out, and I think about what questions people are asking, what people are struggling with, what kinds of things I've talked about a lot, and how I want to vary that. And I sit there and plan out what I'm going to do.

So you're literally listening to my Tuesday right now.

Wednesdays are for in-person connection. And that was kind of chosen for me because that's when BNI happens on Wednesday morning. And Joe and I are both part of BNI, which is Business Networking International. He has joined as the appliance technician seat, and I've joined as the business coach seat in that networking organization.

But we don't get to pick when that happens, and so that happens at eight o'clock every Wednesday morning. So because of that, I have just designated Wednesday as my time for in-person connection with other people.

So that could look like catching up with somebody one-to-one after a BNI meeting. It could look like a power team meeting where I meet with other people that are in my business-to-business section of the BNI group. It could be that I've planned to have lunch with somebody or anything like that. If I'm connecting with somebody in person, it's probably a Wednesday.

Okay. Thursdays are for Cavalry Appliance, our appliance service business that my husband Joe and I run together. It's a completely different operational mode from Outcome Academy, and it deserves its own focus day rather than getting squeezed in around everything else.

So for Cavalry, I do the marketing, I do the HR stuff. If there are evaluations to do or blog posts, I'll be doing social media things for Cavalry—things like that. If I have to write a refund for a customer, that's on me.

Fridays are my catch-up day—following up on things, admin things, specifically things for Highland Business Center.

Woven throughout the whole week are my accountability touchpoints—my mastermind calls, my check-ins, the moments where I'm working alongside other people instead of in isolation. Because accountability is not a nice-to-have thing for brains like mine, and likely yours, it's an additional layer of structural support.

So the structure—it's there, but sometimes things have to move around, like I said. If a client needs something on Monday or a Cavalry situation comes up on a Wednesday, the goal is not to follow this perfectly. The goal is to have the structure so that I have a home for all of the different kinds of work that I have to get done throughout the week.

So I don't get as easily derailed, and I know what I need to come back to when I do get interrupted. It kind of helps combat that mouse-and-cookie syndrome that I have. The structure is kind of my anchor, but it's not a cage that I'm stuck in and I can't get out of.

But the intentional week only solves half of the problem. The intentional week tells me what kind of work belongs to each day, but it doesn't really tell me specifically what to do when I sit down. And so that is where that spiral can live—where you can get very distracted. That's where the tabs multiply.

So this is where the second part comes in that I want to share with you. That's my daily anchor. And it's a morning practice that takes about 10 minutes, and it has three parts.

Before anybody else gets access to your brain, I want you to really carve out this time first thing in the morning to do these three things.

The first part is gratitude. And I have a journal that I think we just got at Walmart, so I'm not saying you have to go out and get an extensive journal, but I do like to have a journal with lined pages for this.

And then I literally just put the date at the top of the page, and then I'm writing these three things down on the page.

The first part is gratitude. I write five things that I'm grateful for since the last time I wrote in my journal. And the rule is it has to be something specific and recent—not something fluffy like the sun or my family or my health.

Like, that's great, and it's okay if you need a filler because you literally can't think of your fifth thing or something. But I want you to think about something real and recent. A very kind message you received yesterday from a client, that every single light was green on the way to your meeting today, your kid said something that made you laugh out loud at dinner—something really small and specific.

And I want to tell you why it matters. Your brain has a built-in negativity bias. It's wired to scan for problems and threats. If you leave your brain to its own devices, your brain is going to start your morning by cataloging everything that's wrong, everything that's not resolved, every worry that you have in your mind.

And when you take this time to start your day with gratitude, it interrupts that pattern. And it's not fake stuff. It's not fake positivity. It's just redirecting your attention before your day even begins. And that filter carries into everything that comes after that.

So stick with me here. You started a new page in your journal, you wrote the date at the top, you wrote one, two, three, four, five, and you wrote down five quick things that you thought of that you're grateful for.

The second part is your goals. I have 10 categories that cover a full picture of my life, not just my business. And these are categories that I teach in our mastermind program. The third week of every month, we focus on something out of this list that I'm going to share with you because we've all heard that we cannot pour from an empty cup. We've heard that you have to put your oxygen mask on before you put it on somebody else.

They sound really hokey, but they are true. If you're not taking care of yourself, you cannot take care of anybody else—including your clients, including your team, including your spouse or your children. These are important.

So the 10 categories are brain, body, beliefs, cash, clutter, calendar, relaxation, recreation, and relationships. And then that leaves one category, and that's work.

So every morning, I write one goal in each of those categories as if it has already happened. Not “I want to grow my mastermind.” More like, “My 8000er Mastermind is full and thriving, and the members are doing incredible work.”

For brain, it might be something that I'm learning right now, and you want to write it in the past tense as if you've already mastered it. If it's cash, you can say, “I'm financially free and I can give generously.” Pick your number one goal for each of those areas and write it as if it already happened.

When you write it as if it's already true, you actually feel, for a tiny moment, what it would feel like if it was true. And your brain starts to treat that future state as something to move toward. You're pointing your attention at where you want to go every single morning, before the noise of the day sets in. Over time, it stops being a dream and it starts being direction.

So I've been writing for a while, for the recreation category, “I ran a 5K without stopping.” Guess what? I'm not there yet. I'm far from it. But every time I write that on there and I haven't done it yet, I'm telling myself that I'm still going towards that goal. It's still important to me.

And listen, I do this most days—not every single day—because sometimes life happens. Some days it's five minutes while my coffee brews, and on a rare occasion, I just skip it. So I'm not telling you that I'm going to be your journal police, but I will tell you that when I don't do this, my day feels different.

All right, so we have our five gratitudes, we have our 10 goals as if they've already happened, and then the last part is my three things that I must do that day.

And this is the piece that has probably made the biggest practical difference in how I move through my days. It's not the whole to-do list because I put that at the start of every week. So sometime like Saturday or Sunday, I will rewrite my whole entire to-do list, and then I have a menu to pick from throughout the week.

Now, sometimes things pop up and they're really important or they're deadline-related, and I have to get those done. And they might be recurring items. Like right now, for me, I have to do my podcast episode. It's due. And if I don't record it, it's not going to be ready for you to listen to. So that's always going to go on Tuesday, right?

The other two things I might pick off of my list. So these are going to be three things that are specific, concrete, and completable. It's not going to be something like “work on marketing.” It's going to be a SMART goal, like “finish the newsletter draft.”

Okay, and we know that the deadline is today, so the “T” is going to be that we get it done today.

So here's where I sometimes use ChatGPT. And I'm going to be real with you about how this actually works, because it is not fancy. Here's where I sometimes use ChatGPT.

Sometimes my head is so full—ideas, tasks, things I said I'd follow up on, things I know are coming—I can't see straight. And on those days, sometimes I open up ChatGPT and I just talk. I tell it everything that's swirling in my head, and I basically idea-vomit into the chat.

Then I ask it to help me organize my thoughts and figure out what actually matters most right now, and it hands me back a clear picture I can work from. It's not really a system, but sometimes I do use it as a thinking partner for the days my brain has too many tabs open and I just need help closing a few.

So if that's something that's helpful for you, go ahead and use it for that. Just go ahead and say all the things on your mind, ask it to give you a list, then you can copy and paste that into your list.

So once I know what's on my plate, I pick my three must-dos for the day. Here's the important part: I pick them in the context of where I am on the mountain. What camp am I working in right now?

And that's so important. And it's something that we always have to keep reminding ourselves—my people in my masterminds, myself, everybody I work with—we have to keep coming back to the context of where we are on the mountain.

So if you are in the starting camp, you do not need to be doing tasks that are in the scaling camp, because those things are going to distract you.

So this system about the camps on the mountain—it's not just some system that I made up just to be creative. It is something that keeps you in your pathway, going up the mountain one step at a time with purpose so that you're not getting derailed.

A camp one owner picking their three must-dos might be thinking about getting their first clients, nailing their offer, making their first real sales.

A camp two owner might be thinking about systems and team pieces that need to be in place so the business can grow beyond them. They might have on their list writing a policy once a week or something like that.

A camp three owner is thinking leadership, scalability, infrastructure.

The three must-dos are your daily contribution to your climb. And when that mouse-and-cookie spiral happens—because it will, it's going to happen—the three must-dos are what you come back to.

It's not about feeling guilty about everything you didn't get done, and it's not like a full restart. You just literally look over at your list, and you are reminded of the things that you told yourself in the morning were your most important things to get done.

You just look at your list, find where you are, and keep going. That's it. That's the whole move.

And if you get other things done during the day, wonderful. But you really just need to get done those things that you put on your list.

Progress up the mountain is not always dramatic. Most days, it does not look like a summit push. Most days, it looks like three things checked off a list.

But those three intentional steps are in the right direction. Those three boxes that belong to your camp are now done.

And another thing that we do in the mastermind is once a quarter, we go back and celebrate all of the things that we've accomplished in the previous quarter. So all of those things that you've checked off of your list every single day, they start to add up to real progress.

Those three things done consistently—they compound. The business owner who does three things right every single day for a year has done over a thousand intentional steps forward.

The one who is waiting for a perfect, uninterrupted, fully productive day to make their big move—well, they're still sitting there like a couch potato, waiting.

You don't need a perfect day. You just need a system that works on the imperfect days. Because guess what? That is most days.

So here's what I want you to do this week. Start with your intentional week. Sketch it out. Think about what naturally feels right for you for each day of your week. What would change if similar work was grouped together instead of scattering it across every day?

It doesn't have to be perfect, but you just need a starting draft, and then you can continue to refine it as you go.

Tomorrow morning, before you pick up your phone and dive into something like your email list, try the daily anchor practice: five things you're grateful for—specific and recent—ten goals written as if they're already done, and your three must-do things that connect to where you are on the mountain right now.

Ten minutes. That's all it takes.

And see how differently your day starts when you are the one who gets to decide what you're going to do with it.

If you want support doing this work inside a community of business owners who are climbing at the same altitude you are, that is exactly what the 8000er Mastermind is built for. And you can learn more at outcomeacademy.com/summit.

I'll see you next week, and I can't wait to hear about how your week went after you implemented what we talked about today.

As you think about this week, notice where this shows up in your own business. If you want to go deeper into this work, including the mastermind and other ways we support service-based business owners, you can explore everything at outcomeacademy.com.

Thanks for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.