There’s real money on my list today, and by mid-morning I’d done none of it. Saturday, AuDHD, five genuinely good options in front of me — and complete paralysis. I’m not on medication yet, family’s away, and the bags from visiting my mum are still half-unpacked on the floor. This is what a bad executive-function day actually looks like, “high-achieving” or not.
I want to be honest about it, because the tidy productivity version skips the part that matters: sometimes nothing on the list is a bad idea, and that’s exactly why nothing moves.
Why a good list jams you
Ordinary prioritising assumes there’s a dud to cut and a winner to crown. “Do the most important thing.” But my list this morning was five things that are all, legitimately, worth doing:
- Two schools are interested in the maths game I built with my son.
- A friend has a high-ticket referral into AI-transformation consulting — the kind of work that, at three clients a month, could let me leave my job.
- My mortgage rate needs reviewing before it climbs further.
- The house needs clearing — I still haven’t unpacked.
- And about four side projects, including a tool for running neurodivergent businesses that I genuinely want to build.
None of them is wrong. There’s no obvious thing to delete. So my brain, asked to rank five good options by “importance”, just… stalls. Every one of them has a case. The list has no slope for me to roll down, and I sat in that for two hours.
The question that broke it
Not “what’s most important.” Not “most valuable”, or “most urgent”, or “what do I feel like.” Those are all internal, abstract judgments — the exact thing my brain can’t do on a day like this.
The question that finally sorted it was external and concrete: who’s waiting?
Two people — the schools — are actually waiting on one thing: the maths game. Nobody is waiting on the rest. The consulting referral will keep. The mortgage has until November. The house isn’t going anywhere. The side projects are mine alone, so no one’s blocked by them.
That’s the whole answer. One thing has real people waiting behind it; everything else is a decision I’m making with myself, which means it can move. Suddenly there’s a slope.
Why “who’s waiting?” works when nothing else does
Two reasons. First, it swaps an impossible internal ranking for a simple external fact — you either have someone waiting or you don’t, and that’s easy to see even on a foggy day. Second, “someone’s waiting” is usually the thing with momentum already behind it: other people’s interest and energy, not just yours. On a low-fuel day, you want to spend your scarce activation energy where it’s already half-lit.
And it still gives everything else a decision, which is the part that stops the guilt loop: the mortgage got scheduled — reminder set, a date in the diary; the house got one hour, capped; the side projects got not today — on purpose, not by avoidance.
The honest coda
It took me two hours to arrive at a one-line answer. That’s the bit I won’t dress up. Some days the fog is just there, and the win isn’t a perfect system — it’s finding the one question that gets you moving before the day is gone.
If your list is jammed because everything on it is genuinely worth doing, stop trying to rank by importance. Ask who’s waiting, do that one, and give everything else a real decision — a date, a cap, or an honest “not today.”
Show transcript
There's real money on the table today, and I haven't been able to force myself to do anything for the last two or three hours. Quick context: I'm an entrepreneur, in a few businesses, and I still work a corporate 9-to-5 while trying to exit it. Most of all, I have a dual diagnosis — ADHD and autism. Sometimes it helps me; on days like today, it's a pain. I'm not on medication yet — that'll come. I wanted to show you my actual mindset right now, partly to make myself accountable (which helps), and partly to show that even a "high-achieving" AuDHD person has messy, hard days. Some backstory: I'm on my own for a bit, just back from visiting my mum, and I still haven't unpacked since Thursday night — it's Saturday. There's a bit of a mess around me because I couldn't be bothered to do things properly. I set myself this channel as a challenge to stay accountable, which is going well, but yesterday was hard and today is too. There are strong signals about money coming in from a few directions, and I still work full-time because you have to pay the bills — and I'm not willing to drop my family's living standard. I have loads of my own ideas: I want to build software for managing neurodivergent businesses, for me and for you, but that needs proof — I need feedback from you to know it's worth doing. Then there are signals from elsewhere. With my son I built a maths game, and we've got genuine interest from schools, which I wasn't expecting — some people even want to partner. It started as a fun project addressing my own worry that schools don't give maths enough attention (not just a UK thing). That one keeps ending up at the bottom of my list because I never planned for it. Then there's a mate who got laid off — a project manager of project managers, a bit BS but he was good at it — who went into consultancy doing AI transformation, where he thrives: high pay, high-ticket clients, nice work-life balance, sometimes too many clients. The catch is uncertainty; those clients come and go. I'm a problem-solver still learning to be a marketer, how to approach clients — which is why I paired with Dom (I'll tag him; he helped me get focused, including on this channel). I'd love to jump on this, because three clients a month and I could basically leave my job. But you have to be in the right state and able to commit the time, and mentally I'm not there today. So I'm using the tools my CBT therapist gave me, and I'm using Claude and my own agent — after spending time getting it to know me, it's better at telling me what's actually right when I make content, and I deliberately made it not a people-pleaser so it challenges me. You need someone to keep you accountable, and I don't have anyone right now — family's away, friends are in other countries. I won't go further into that or I'll start crying; being an immigrant is a lonely place. Love where you are — the grass is always greener. So my plan for today: after making myself accountable to Claude and to you, I'll spend an hour max tidying — kitchen, unpack, a bit of hoovering, water the plants — then sit down to prep the next episode. I just remembered a couple of other things: my mortgage rate needs reviewing — it's going through the roof — but I have until about November, so I'll schedule that with a reminder for another day. Today I'll focus solely on the maths thing, because someone came to me with genuine interest and it's going places, and there are people who might help. Fingers crossed. If you want to talk about tools for ADHD, let's talk. This channel isn't for milking people — it's for sharing the journey.