Most of my friends and family—anyone I love, really—are neurodivergent.

I've gotten so much benefit from using AI to design my life that I wanted to pay some of it forward. So this brief blog will give you some frameworks for knowing how to use AI, and I have designed a couple of GPTs for you to try out yourself.

Hopefully this will inspire some to leverage this newly available technology to redesign their lives.

Enjoy!

I've struggled with ADHD my whole life. Maybe you have too. Or maybe you have some other kind of executive dysfunction disorder.

If you do, a lot of this will feel familiar to you.

ADHD can feel debilitating at times, and I've tried many solutions, systems, and products just to feel normal. And besides pharmacological solutions, the only thing that's ever worked for me has been AI.

If this is relevant to you, AI isn't just a lifesaver. It's your new superpower.

Trying to function as a good little cog in an industrial society with ADHD is hell.

People with ADHD aren't stupid, but we can come off that way. We can see the line we're supposed to walk and then completely fail to put one foot in front of the other. Being productive in modern society often feels like a series of to-do lists, box ticking, appointments, errands, and chores. You're meant to receive your directions, follow them, and then report back for more.

Some people function better this way. But for people with ADHD, we're often better at divergent creative thinking and struggle with simple routine convergent tasks. This latter category makes up 90% of tasks a business would pay you to do, by the way.

Having ADHD means that you're aware at all times that there is so much work you're supposed to be doing, but never being organized enough to be doing it correctly and at the right time. This leads to overwhelm, feelings of inadequacy, shame, and ultimately procrastination.

Another symptom of ADHD is feeling disconnected from your feelings. Struggling to feel present and identify the quality of the moment. This lack of self-awareness only further exacerbates that feeling of overwhelm I mentioned earlier.

To have ADHD often means feeling lost and behind, and for a long time medication was the main intervention.

Enter AI.

I've always been great at creating systems, but terrible at following them.

It's one thing to build the roadmap, to construct the vision and another to follow it. This has always been the source of friction for me. I can build the plane, but I'm a terrible pilot.

The wonderful thing about AI is that if the system you're building is engineered correctly, it pilots itself.

The goal here, when trying to implement AI into your life, is to reduce unnecessary cognitive load. You can think of it a lot like adding RAM to a computer. You're terrible at keeping track of things, and you're building an external source of truth that you can trust to do that for you.

So here's an overview of what tasks/processes I outsource to AI:

There are more, but we're going to focus on these because they are a great place to start.

AI is incredibly good at breaking down complex tasks and problems into actionable steps.

Depending on how many projects you're working on and how disparate they are, AI is also good at batching those tasks together and scheduling them so that you don't have to worry about too much task/context switching.

Having ADHD is like having 100 monkeys, each with distinctive personalities yelling ideas over each other. Meanwhile, you need to sit down and do your taxes.

With AI, it's never been easier to just open up voice mode and vent for 30 minutes about all the garbage rattling around in your brain. Then AI can repeat cliff notes back to you.

It's a lot like having an interactive journal, that adapts to your needs as it gets to know you.

Time blindness is real.

You may think you were working on something for an hour, but maybe it was three. Maybe it only took you 15 minutes and you spent the rest of the time on your phone.

You know who won't get confused and can craft accurate reports around how you've been spending your time? ChatGPT.

You're responsible for reporting in to your time tracking GPT, but you can do so in unformatted plain text and it will handle pattern recognition for you.

If you end up just kind of floating throughout your day completely unable to manage your energy—sometimes you feel great, sometimes you feel unmotivated—AI can help.

AI can help you map out when you feel your best, or when you're depleted and look for patterns. Maybe you always feel terrible around 2pm, or after you answer emails. Maybe you always feel energized and creative after finishing your favorite podcast.

AI can help you pattern match your feelings so that you can improve the overall quality of your day.

You keep putting off responding to a simple email. Why?

Because you're grossly overestimating how much time it'll take to craft a response and you feel uncomfortable thinking about sitting down to think about the message.

The shortcut here is to just have AI craft a version 1 draft for you.

You can do this with many tasks. It's not lazy—the final product, whatever you actually send out, will be thoroughly edited by you. However, just lowering that threshold to action by copy and pasting an email into ChatGPT or asking for a rough outline for something is highly motivating.

The last thing I want to do is give you more stuff you feel like you should figure out. I don't want to put more work on your plate.

I want to give you tools that you can use right now, so I'm going to give you two prompts for two systems along with instructions. These are real tools I use in real life.

*You will need a free chatGPT account to use these

Here is a Time and Energy Coach and a 1, 2, 3 prioritization assistant:

All you have to do to use this one is give it an approximate time range of what you were doing and when. The more you update it, the smarter it gets, so I'd check in often—even checking in with vague answers like: "I think I worked from 12ish to 2ish on a project and then took a 15-30 minute lunch and I feel sluggish now." It'll be able to put together a pretty detailed report for you at the end of the day with recommended insights.

https://chatgpt.com/g/g-68bf54d2239481918e7b286fb7560f46-time-and-energy-coach

This GPT is based on the 123 method of minimalist author Greg McKeown. It's a simple framework for task batching/prioritization where you end up with one critical task, two urgent/non-essential tasks, and three maintenance tasks.

I've also designed this GPT to be incredibly simple. You tell it everything that you need to do and why you need to do it, and the GPT will structure the tasks and set your day up for success.

https://chatgpt.com/g/g-68c72fd7a22881918cc87094f75a2c1d-1-2-3-task-planning-assistant

If these don't quite work for you, it's up to you to do some experimentation to find a system that does work for you.

AI is adaptive, and you can always submit your feedback directly within the chat, and it'll learn and grow alongside you.

That's half the fun.