ADHD-Friendly Productivity: The Real Reason You Start Everything and Finish Nothing
A few weeks ago I was clicking around my own website and found an offer called Momentum Mentoring.
I'd forgotten it existed. It has a page. It has a description. It has a price. I never launched it. No emails, no announcement, nothing. I built it, put it up, and walked away. 🙈
Here's the part that made me laugh, in that painful way: it's almost exactly what I'm rebuilding right now.
The easy part and the hard part
When I look at that old page now, my first reaction is not kind. That's stupid. That's useless. Nobody would ever buy that.
But I remember building it. I was so proud. I put 30 or 40 hours into it, probably more. Weeks of work. I wrote the page, figured out the process, made the resources.
All the parts that came easy to me, I barreled straight through.
Then I hit the part that was hard. For me, that was selling. Putting it in front of people. Being visible. Betting on myself in front of a pretty small audience and risking that nobody would want it.
So I'd put something out there, and then I'd suck it right back up.
That happened more than once. And every time, I added another line to a story I already believed about myself: here's another thing you didn't follow through on. Here's another thing you didn't see through to the end.
I'd love to tell you that voice is gone. It's not. I still hear it every time I look at old work.
What changed is that I finally noticed where I quit.
It's never random
I didn't quit at the beginning. I didn't quit in the middle. I quit at the exact same spot, every single time: the moment the work moved from the stuff I'm good at to the stuff that scares me.
The colored part is everything that came easy. It ends right where being seen begins.
"I'm bad at follow-through" is a verdict. It's about who you are, and the only thing you can do with it is feel bad.
"I stop at the point of challenge" is a pattern. It tells you where it's going to break. And if you know where something's going to break, you can plan for that spot before you ever start.
Not more discipline. A map of where you're going to want to bail.
What was different this time
This fall I launched a group program called The Experiment. I built it, and I sold it. Three people bought the beta.
I've thought a lot about why this one made it past the spot where so many other ideas died. It wasn't that I grew a spine overnight.
People were waiting for it.
The three people who bought were people I was already in community with. In direct and indirect ways, they shaped what it became. I'd spent most of this year running a free monthly call, just nurturing people. I'd found ways to give something away that also gave something back to me, and I trusted that eventually some of those people would bet on me.
So when it came time to sell, I wasn't selling cold to nobody in particular. I was responding to people who'd already told me they wanted it.
In human design I'm a generator, which means I'm built to respond, not to initiate. For years I did the opposite. I created offers in a vacuum, because creating was easier than being seen. Then I wondered why selling felt impossible.
Momentum Mentoring had nobody waiting on the other side of it. That made it really easy to pull back.
You don't need an audience. You need a loop.
If you're reading this with a tiny email list, or no list at all, please don't hear "come back when you're bigger." That's not what I mean.
What got me past the hard part was an accountability loop: something on the other side of the scary part that makes stopping cost more than keeping going. It can look like a lot of things:
- A rewardYou're getting your hair colored the day the shop goes live. You're painting the bathroom when the course is done.
- An eventThe decluttering project is finished before you host, because people are coming whether you're ready or not.
- A surpriseIt's done before your spouse gets home from their work trip.
- A personAn accountability partner who's going to check in. A coach. A group.
For me, it's my members and accountability partners. I tell them what I'm working on so they can get excited with me, and also so somebody knows it's supposed to exist. They're waiting on it. External accountability works on me like nothing else does, and I've stopped being embarrassed about that.
It works on the women in The Experiment, too. One of them said it on a call this week, better than I could:
"For me, accountability works because I feel pressured to show up for y'all."
The Experiment beta member
When I texted the group a deadline, she laughed: "Oh, there's a deadline. Now I can do it."
Same, friend. Same.
Before you start the next thing
Here's what I do now, before I start anything. I look at the whole project, start to finish, including the scary end, and I ask myself:
- Can I do this?All of it, including the part I'm going to want to skip.
- Do I believe in this?
- Do I want to see it through?
- If it takes six months (or however long it's going to take), do I still want it?
- What do I have to learn that's new?New stuff takes longer and stalls easier. Count it.
If the answer to any of those is no, that's not failure. That's data, and it showed up before you spent 40 hours instead of after.
The old work isn't proof
One more thing, because I think it's the part that matters most.
That old Momentum Mentoring page looks bad to me now because I'm not the person who built it anymore. Every time I make something, I learn something, and the next one's a little better. Then I look back and think, well, obviously. Of course I knew how to do that.
I didn't. That version of me built the stairs I'm standing on.
And Momentum Mentoring? It's coming back, rebuilt by the version of me who knows exactly where she quits. You'll hear about it in a few weeks.
It's why part of The Experiment is coming back at the end of the season and looking at what happened. Not to grade it. To remember where you came from, because it's so easy to get to a certain point and forget you were ever anywhere else.
So if you've got a graveyard of 80%-done things, they're not proof you can't finish. They're the drafts that showed you where you quit.
Now you know where to plan for it.
The next round of The Experiment starts in January, and nobody gets in without a plan first. More on that soon.
Here's what one beta member wrote me a few weeks in:
"It's already been so much value with the setup skills and having you and the group's support each week. I love it all so far."
The Experiment beta member
Come as you are. We'll figure it out together.
Janelle
