The Simple Productivity System That Turned My ADHD into a Superpower
The Hyperfocused Entrepreneur
August 15, 2023
Read time: 12.5 minutes
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Confession time:
I’m a productivity slut.
I’ve wasted hours, days, and weeks of my life falling down YouTube rabbit holes, reading countless articles, books, and anything that maybe, just maybe might give me that new insight, that new tool, or new framework that’ll somehow unlock 1,000x productivity.
On the one hand, this obsession has served me pretty well. It was, afterall, instrumental in helping me turn my ADHD into a superpower.
But, on the other hand, we have the darkside of productivity…
The side where we fall into the trap of trying so hard to create the perfect system that we become fixated on tinkering with the newest app or scheduling technique, and in the process, we forget to do the actual work.
This is sneaky because working ON the productivity system often makes us feel productive, despite the fact that we’re not actually getting any meaningful work done.
It’s motion without progress.
What a waste.
Remember, productivity isn’t about being busy. It’s about being effective.
And there are two ways we can achieve this: by increasing the quantity and quality of our work.
Simply put:
The goal is to get more high leverage tasks done in less time.
Over the years, I’ve experimented with hundreds of systems, tools, and frameworks…
Some were great. Others, not so much.
Slowly, but surely, I collected the parts that worked and created a simple productivity system that’s served me incredibly well over the years.
So here it is…
My 5 Step Productivity System
1. The Second Brain
I was diagnosed with severe-ADHD when I was 6 years old and it was a problem that plagued me all throughout my twenties.
One of the main issues I had with ADHD was the struggle to organize all the thousands of thoughts swirling through my head at any moment.
At its worst, I would simply lay in bed at night, staring at the ceiling in the dark, unable to fall asleep because I was so distracted by my flickering thoughts that I just couldn’t shut down for the night.
And whenever I’d sit down during the day to get work done, it felt genuinely impossible to stay on a single task for more than 5 minutes at a time.
It took me a really long time to figure out the solution:
Stop trying to hold everything in your head.
This is where I discovered the power of creating a Second Brain.
Let’s not overcomplicate this… a Second Brain is simply a complete mind dump of all the thoughts swirling through your head.
I personally use technology (like Asana and Notion), but a notebook could work just as well.
The important thing happening here is that from a neurological level we’re closing Cognitive Loops.
See, whenever you have a thought or something you’re trying to remember, it’s like opening another application or tab on your computer.
Any one tab won’t tax the system all that much, but add’em all up over the course of a day, week, or month and suddenly your system is getting bogged down with open, unresolved cognitive loops.
And as long as you’re holding unnecessary cognitive loops open, you’ll never be able to dedicate your full attention and decision making prowess towards any individual task at hand.
This usually plays out in two frustrating ways:
In the short term: that idea takes up mental energy.
In the long term, there’s a chance you’ll lose or forget that idea.
I believe one of the most important qualities you have to develop if you want to be successful in life is Clarity of Thought.
The Second Brain is a way of dropping all the excess baggage you’re lugging around in the back of your mind so that when you sit down to work on a task, you can bring every ounce of focus to bear.
Personally, I update my Second Brain every night before bed.
The timing of this is important because it allows me to get everything off my mind before I go to bed, which in turn makes it more likely I’ll get an awesome night’s sleep (nothing better for boosting productivity than that!).
If focus is your most valuable resource (and I believe it is), then keeping a Second Brain is like having a safe you lock up all your valuable thoughts so you don’t have to haul’em all around town with ya.
It’s one of the best investments of time you can make, but it’s only part one of my productivity system.
The next phase is:
2. Priority Management
Hyper-successful people don’t waste time doing stupid shit because they understand this simple concept:
There is no greater waste than to do with excellence that which shouldn’t be done at all.
People like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have just as many hours in the day as the rest of us.
Despite this, they seem to get so much, much, much more done than the average person.
How?
Well, it’s not by working harder.
It’s by understanding that only a very few number of things in life actually matter.
You’re probably familiar with the Pareto Principle (The 80/20 Rule) which says that, in all systems, a small number of inputs account for the majority of outputs.
Put another way: 20% of what you do accounts for 80% of the results.
The key, therefore, is to focus all your time and energy on executing the 20 percent with excellence.
But here’s the problem…
Actually, there’s two problems.
First, how do you actually know which are the big levers to pull?
Second, how do we structure our time so that we’re not constantly sucked into doing the non-important work?
Here’s a system I picked up from Tom Bilyeu for solving that first problem.
It’s called I.C.E.
To begin, we create three columns in a spreadsheet and label them Impact, Confidence, and Ease.
That is:
- How Important is this task?
- How Confident are you in your ability to execute that task?
- How Easy will it be to execute that task?
On the left side, list out all the tasks we’ve accumulated inside our Second Brain.
Then rank each task on a scale of 1 – 20 for Importance, 1 – 10 for Confidence, and 1 – 5 for Ease.
The bigger the number, the more Important, Confident, or Easy the task will be.
Tasks that score between 30-35 are labeled High Priority inside my Second Brain.
Tasks scoring between 20 – 30 are Moderate Priority and tasks under 20 are Low Priority.
Quick Note: Don’t get too caught up in the specific numbers. This is just a starting point for organizing you thoughts and to create preliminary priorities. You’ll have to apply healthy doses of personal discretion and judgment in determining what you should actually work on in any given moment.
Alright, so now that we have a better understanding of our priorities, we’re going to lay out our tasks to create a maximally effective day.
And to do this, we move to the third part of my productivity system:
3. Amplified Impact Time
Scott Adams, the creator of the cartoon Dilbert, said:
Goals are for losers. Winners use systems.
Now, I love goals as much as the next person, but there’s a lot of truth here.
When I was younger, I was guilty of creating goals that were nothing more than sugar coated wishes.
I was a great goal-setter. Not such a great goal-getter.
The problem with goals is that they trick our brains into thinking we’re actually doing something productive.
When we set goals our brains reward us with a squirt of dopamine and a little kick of motivation, but that all quickly wears off, and if you don’t have a system to fall back on, then you’re ultimately gonna fail in the pursuit of your goal.
If you want to succeed where so many others have failed, you must go one step beyond simply setting goals and create what psychologists refer to as an Implementation Intention.
This is just a fancy name for a two step process where you write down:
- What are you going to do?
- When are you going to do it?
Seriously basic, but ultimately very effective because they specify the daily actions you need to perform to achieve your desired result.
My personal process for creating Implementation Intentions is a two step process I call Amplified Impact Time.
Part One: Priority Setting
First, we set our daily priorities (which should be straightforward since we’ve already implemented a Priority Management system using I.C.E. to organize our Second Brain).
Each day we’re going to take those tasks we’ve deemed High Priority and create our Two to Do, Three to Free, and Five to Thrive.
Let’s start at the top:
Five to Thrive
These are the five most important tasks for the month or quarter.
Your timelines may vary depending on the type of goal, but try to limit your TOP priority goals to 5. Any more than that and you’ll likely struggle to make meaningful progress.
Remember, we tend to overestimate what we can achieve in a year, and underestimate what we can achieve in five.
Set yourself up for success and never have more than 5 BIG goals you’re working towards.
Three to Free
These are our most important tasks for the day.
Another way to look at these is to ask yourself the question:
If I could only accomplish 3 things today, and by doing those 3 things, today would feel like a stunning success… what would those 3 things be?
These should be tasks rated above a 30 on the I.C.E scale.
Two to Do
Finally, we make room for a couple Low Priority tasks (activities scoring less than 20 on the I.C.E scale.
It’s important to make space for these small, seemingly unimportant tasks (like doing the laundry or mowing the lawn), because if you DON’T do them, they start to add up and take a mental toll.
Picking away at them on a daily basis is better than ignoring them and letting them build up.
Now, the real power in this system is that we’re not concerned by how MUCH we get done, but rather, by WHAT we get done.
Okay, now that we’ve established our Five to Thrive, Three to Free, and Two to Do, let’s move to the second part of Amplified Impact Time.
Part Two: Time Blocking
Now, I’m not exaggerating when I say Time Blocking fundamentally changed my life.
See, growing up with ADHD, I hated structure and schedules and planning and ugh…
I wanted to be free and spontaneous and live in the moment.
But here’s the problem.
The things I want to do IN THE MOMENT are rarely things that are good for me in the long term.
It took me a long time to learn this lesson:
Either you own your schedule…
Or your schedule owns you.
There is no third option here.
— Anthony Vicino (@AnthonyVicino) July 13, 2022
Time Blocking is how you take control of your schedule.
I like to sit down before I shut down work for the night and plot out the next day’s activities as though I were constructing the perfect, most effective day for Future-Me.
Avoid the rookie mistake of overestimating how much you can get done, though. Schedule more time for tasks (and between tasks) than you think is necessary, cause it’s not a matter of IF you’ll eventually get sidetracked by life, but WHEN.
Because it’s only a matter of time until life gets in the way, we need to have a system for coping (which takes us to the fourth part in my productivity system)…
4. Intention Maintenance
Humans are a walking contradiction.
On the one hand, our brains have evolved for maximum efficiency. It’s highly adept at simplifying and encoding complex stimuli for easy future retrieval.
We call this muscle memory, and it’s why things get easier over time, aka: How We Learn.
And this makes sense when you consider how much energy your brain gobbles up. Your brain makes up less than 2% of your total body weight, but accounts for over 20% of the body’s energy consumption.
Now, if your brain was always running at full capacity, you’d be an energy drained puddle unable to get out of bed in the morning.
Your brain doesn’t want this. In fact, it only wants one thing:
To keep you alive long enough to pass along your genes.
That’s literally it’s only goal.
To that end, it’s gonna do its darndest to expend as little energy as possible keeping you not dead.
This is why binge watching Netflix, scrolling Instagram, and playing video games is so easy.
Your brain wants to shut down and go on auto-pilot.
But is that what YOU really want?
See, here’s the thing.. The brain is inherently lazy, but YOU are not.
Your brain simply wants to survive whereas YOU want to THRIVE.
You don’t want to waste your time on meaningless drivel and we know this because studies consistently show that people reach their highest levels of happiness and fulfillment when they are challenged or fully engaged in accomplishing difficult tasks.
This is the polar opposite of what your brain wants and so, in a very real way, you’re locked in a battle for your attention with your brain.
It’s helpful, therefore, to know the two primary tactics your brain uses to win the attention war:
First, it sucks you into a zombie-like state of complacency and distraction without you even noticing.
This occurs when you tell yourself, “I’ll just check TikTok real quick,” and next thing you know 45 minutes have passed and you’re watching videos of adorable balls of floof doing…whatever.
Second, your brain tricks you into consciously deciding, “I’m too tired to do this” or “I’m not ready to do this”.
Regardless of which tactic your brain deploys, I’ve discovered there’s a single question that if asked at the right moment can turn the tables and put me back on the path of productive righteousness.
That question is:
What’s my outcome?
Might not seem like much, but this question is a powerful pattern interrupt that pulls you out of auto-pilot-zombie mode and gives you a moment to consider what are you really trying to accomplish in that moment?
Whether you’re out to lunch with a loved one, working on a book report at the coffee shop, or on a sales call, it’s so easy to just tune out and lose sight of why you’re doing the thing in the first place.
Let’s get meta for a second and apply this question to this article you’re reading now…
What’s your outcome?
Why are you reading this?
Are you distracting yourself from doing the work you know you should be doing?
Are you actually taking notes and planning to implement what you learn?
Even more broadly, what’s the real goal behind building a productivity system in the first place?
It’s not just to get more stuff done, right?
No, the reason you want to be more productive is because you think it’ll somehow make your life better.
By establishing an intention maintenance routine and regularly asking the question “What’s my outcome?”, you’re creating a lens through which you filter all of your activities to ensure you’re actually moving towards your desired goal of, ya know, a better life.
To implement this question into your life program an alarm to go off on your phone randomly throughout the day (there are a bunch of Random Alarm Apps you can download).
Every time it goes off, stop whatever you’re doing for just a second and ask the question:
What’s my outcome?
Fair warning… you’ll be surprised by how often this catches you in the middle of doing something really pointless.
You’re welcome.
Now that you’re aware you’ve been lured into complacency by your brain, you can turn the tables and take back control.
Listen, maintaining your intention is hard, but with time and practice it’ll get easier…
Which leads us to the fifth and final part of my simple productivity system called which is all about honing this intention muscle so improve our clarity of thought through a process called:
5. Thinking Time
Meditation, walking, quiet time, whatever you want to call it.
People have been talking about the benefits of meditation for a long time so I’m not gonna go too deep here.
But it’s a known quantity within the scientific community for its ability to lower stress levels, increase focus, and just overall improve quality of life.
Whether that’s meditation, prayer, long walks or hot showers, whatever you want to call it, Thinking Time helps in decluttering the mind so that you can think and move forward through life with clarity of vision.
What’s this have to do with productivity?
Everything.
Gandhi said (or at least somebody said this and attributed it to Gandhi):
“Your beliefs become your thoughts. Your thoughts become your words. Your words become your actions. Your actions become your habits. Your habits become your values. Your values become your destiny.”
By improving the quality of your thoughts, you improve the quality of your actions, and if that’s not a fantastic way to improve your productivity, I don’t know what is.
Now, here’s the truth:
Thinking ain’t easy, which is why most people don’t.
But if you want uncommon results, you can’t perform common actions.
So, here’s a way to think about it that’s helped me suck it up and do the hard work
Meditation or Thinking Time is like weightlifting for your mind. The more you do it, the stronger your focus muscle becomes.
You don’t go to the gym expecting one day it’s gonna magically get easier.
No, you go knowing it never gets easier, you just get better.
With time, you’ll move larger and larger amounts of weight.
It’s the same with meditation and Thinking Time.
In the beginning you’re gonna struggle to sit in the silence for more than a couple seconds before your monkey-mind sprints off in some random direction.
That’s to be expected.
But if you keep showing up and putting in the work, your ability to focus is going to dramatically improve, which in turn is going to enable you to increase the quantity of work you’re going to be able to complete throughout the day.
And if that’s not a golden recipe for increased productivity, I don’t know what is.
Until next week,
Stay Hyperfocused,
AV
From YouTube This Week:
The Simple Productivity System That Turned My ADHD into a Superpower
Want to go even deeper?
1. Ever felt like Sisyphus, pushing that boulder of focus uphill? ADHD, distractions, procrastination- all fighting to knock you back. 💥
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2. If you’re in relentless pursuit of doing less, but better, than check out my podcast, Amplified Impact, for a quick-hitting daily dose of motivation and inspiration.
