I’ve always been the person who leaves their coffee in the microwave and finds it three hours later. Completely normal Tuesday for me. But a couple of years ago, I started forgetting to eat. (If you know me, you know that’s not like me.) Lunch would still be sitting in the microwave at 4pm. Then one night after cooking dinner, I left the oven on overnight. That’s when I knew something had to change.
At the time, I was working in a project management role that wasn’t the right fit for my brain. Back-to-back Zoom calls, constant urgent tasks, very little room for the proactive, big-picture thinking that energizes me. I was exhausted at the end of every day and couldn’t figure out why. Turns out, I was running my brain in a way it wasn’t built to run. From the outside, I held all the details perfectly, but on the inside, my nervous system was SCREAMING.
I left that job and started paying closer attention to how I actually prefer to work. I’ve done a ton of research on ADHD and autism since then, and I suspect I have both to some degree. I once impulse-bought an ADHD coach certification course from a Facebook ad at 11pm and never finished it, which felt like confirmation enough. I’m not formally diagnosed and I don’t have a degree in psychology, but I know my own brain. What I’ve realized is that I leaned into systems and structure most of my life as a way to cope. Maybe even to mask. You get a lot of praise for being the organized, detail-oriented one. Now I use that exact gift to help other people, on my time and in my own way.
Have you ever felt like you’re just wired differently? Maybe you have seventeen tabs open and can’t find what you need. Maybe you work best in bursts and then need to step away. Maybe you’re great with people, but not so much with remembering to follow up. Maybe the to-do list works fine until it doesn’t, and some days, nothing works. None of that is wrong. It’s just information about how to set things up.
Honestly, it never occurred to me NOT to design a business that fits my life. It’s my business. I get to decide what kinds of work and communication suit me, and when something feels off, I adjust. A bad fit, work-wise or communication-wise, feels like an itchy sweater to me. I can’t ignore it for long.
Not everyone feels that itchy sweater feeling, or knows to pay attention to it when they do. A lot of people accidentally walked into the chaos they’re in now because the business grew faster than the systems did. That’s where I come in. We start with you, how you think, what drains you, what lights you up, and then figure out what needs to be in place to support that. One system at a time, starting with whatever would free you up the most. The goal isn’t a perfect tech stack. It’s to stop fighting your own wiring.
If you’ve been feeling the itchy sweater feeling and you’re not sure where the mismatch is in your systems, I’d love to be the person you think it through with. A free 20-minute call is a pretty easy place to start.
Have a great week. You’re doing better than you think!