IttyBiz

Let’s talk about ADHD for a minute.

I have it. It’s pretty raging sometimes. I don’t medicate it, nor do I plan to. And I run a business.

People with ADHD find themselves very drawn to business. It’s an intuitive choice for people like me. We make rapid connections. We easily wear multiple hats. We can focus like demons. We pivot well. And we don’t like being told what to do.

Add that employment sucks when you have ADHD, and it starts to seem like having this disorder and starting a business seems like a really good fit.

Having said that, when you’ve had a bottle and a half of red wine, taking recreational Percocet and calling your ex seems like a really good fit. That doesn’t mean you should do it.

Because the flip sides of ADHD are… not so rad. Sometimes, it’s kind of a big fat train wreck. Sometimes, there’s no “kind of” about it. So, it’s not surprising that some of us in the ADHD community wonder if the some-days-superpowers are enough to counter the many-days-liabilities.

I’m not a therapist. Not even remotely. But as someone who has managed to not run my business into the ground for more than a decade, I have some experience on this topic.

Should you also be one of the ADHD among us, then I’d love to give you my advice on how to stack the deck in your favor. That way you have the best possible chances of maximizing your superpowers and minimizing your liabilities.

First up…

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Ok, this one’s by request, and super easy.

You know when you’re signing up for a mailing list?

And you know how they sometimes ask you for your first name?

And you know how sometimes, when you’re typing something that starts with a capital letter, you capitalize the second letter at the same time?

And you know how you wonder how you’re STILL doing this after all these years of typing?

I know this happens to you, because it happens to everyone who types using capitalized words. It’s an incredibly common typing challenge.

Well, this happened to my friend Holly once. She was signing up for mailing list, and when it came time to input her first name, she typed HOlly. It was years ago. It’s an honest mistake. It could happen to anyone.

Unfortunately, data fields never forget. According to this database, Holly wants to be called HOlly, and hell if they’re going to disregard her stated wishes.

So what happens next?

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I have a secret hobby.

I like to go to the App Store and have Apple tell me all the awesome apps people far cooler than me are using and loving. I favor the really obscure hipster apps, the ones that cost 4 bucks, have limited functionality, and really good graphic design.

(This is a spectacular way to avoid doing work, by the way. The App Store can keep you busy for HOURS.)

However!

Recently the App Store had nothing to offer. I’d reached the end of their suggestions, completely uninspired. So I took to Google, to find “cool apps” that other people are using. I even searched it – see?

If you look closely at the picture above, you’ll notice a common thread – best this, best that, best the other thing – but I didn’t want the “best” apps. I didn’t want the apps that everyone and their basset hound was already using. I wanted new! cool! hip! fun! and instead I found nothing, because all the blogs hate me.

So! In response to this traumatic event, I have decided to channel my pain and boredom and tell YOU 5 cool underappreciated apps that I use nearly every day to make business easier.

Let us commence.

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Hey, guess what! Today is Celebrate Bisexuality Day! It’s a day for us to celebrate bisexual people and their bisexualness!

Also? I find my spell-checker hilarious:

Anyway, September 23rd is Celebrate Bisexuality Day and right around the corner from that is Coming Out Day on October 11th. Around this time of year, for those of us in the LGBTQ+ community, it is customary to ask oneself, should I come out on my blog or in my business?

So let’s look at your coming out options. At the macro level, you’ve got three.

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Sometimes we get a grand vision in our head. We conceive of something we want to do in our business to make things easier. And when we do it? It is gonna be RAD.

Maybe it’s something like an automated upsell system that will get offers in the hands of new customers at pre-defined times after a purchase. That certainly qualifies as rad.

But! Sometimes these things have a number of moving pieces that we haven’t figured out yet.

We need to move to a new shopping cart system, or we need to learn the tech behind our existing system, or we need to make adjustments in our sales pages to integrate some… thing.

But once we’re done – and we understand our shopping cart and get it figured out and all the things are in their right places, then the money’s just going to print itself. Automation FTW.

Again? Rad.

But if there’s a bunch of stuff we have to do before we can make our grand vision work, and we haven’t sorted out how to make each of those things happen, what tends to “happen” is NOTHING.

Hmm… what to do?

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