One simple tip to 10x focus

My Ugliest Ad Won (And Ended My ADHD Idea Spin)I stood outside in front of my phone with a whiteboard full of badly drawn emojis, happy on Monday and totally crashed out by Friday. That rough one-minute video ended up beating every polished ad I made.This is the follow-up to my episode on the ADHD idea spin. I’d been going around and around on which framing to lead with: my Decide / Do / Sustain framework, or the lived experiences like the Scattered Week and the Dopamine Desert. So I stopped trying to settle it in my head and ran a Facebook ads campaign to let the market answer. The Scattered Week won by a mile, bringing in 73 of the 130 workshop sign-ups.I walk through what I think it means. People connect first with the experience they’re having, and the explanation lands after that. I also talk about why I’m now convinced the bias should be toward Doing, even when the problem feels like a Deciding problem.In this episode:How I tested 12 ads to settle a question I couldn’t answer in my headWhy the Scattered Week beat Decide / Do / Sustain with people meeting me for the first timeWhy rough, human content is getting more powerfulHow Deciding and Doing get tangled up, and which one to lean onIf your week starts strong on Monday and falls apart by Friday, come join us in AEX: https://adhd-accelerator.com/?utm_source=captivate&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=podcast&utm_content=ugliest-ad-wonResources mentioned: ADHD Entrepreneur Accelerator (AEX): https://adhd-accelerator.com Free Weekly ADHD Dashboard: https://go.steveaugustcoaching.com/adhd-dashboard Contact Steve: https://steveaugustcoaching.com/contact

Sometimes a small change has a big impact. A new AEX member made one small change before a Toastmasters meeting, and he could feel the difference right away.During a webinar last week, Steve asked everyone to close their other windows and turn off alerts. The member took it to his next meeting: he minimized every browser window except the ones he needed, covered his desktop with a notes doc so he couldn’t see his files and app icons, and focused on the meeting instead of multitasking. In one of his shortest episodes ever, Steve explains why a move that seems this obvious matters so much for an ADHD brain. When several things are in view, your brain keeps checking each of them, and that pulls focus away from what you’re actually doing. It comes back to a core idea in AEX: environment beats willpower and discipline. Steve then shares the end-of-day shutdown he uses to start every morning with his focus already set.Key points:Why having more than one thing open pulls an ADHD brain off trackWhat Steve means when he says ADHD is a surplus of attentionWhy changing your environment works better than trying harder to ignore distractionsThe end-of-day shutdown that makes his weekly dashboard, not email, the first thing he sees each morningResources mentioned: ADHD Entrepreneur Accelerator (AEX): https://adhd-accelerator.com Free Weekly ADHD Dashboard: https://go.steveaugustcoaching.com/adhd-dashboard Contact Steve: [email protected]

AI hands you back an hour. Then you spend it asking AI what to do next.A new study from Hubstaff found that most people using AI at work save at least an hour a week, and a third save four hours or more. But only about a quarter of them do anything useful with that time. Employees at least have a boss waiting to claim the hour. ADHD entrepreneurs don’t, so saved time drifts toward whatever’s new, loud or urgent. This week Steve looks at where those hours go and how to get them back.Key points:Why AI-saved time is easier to lose when you’re the bossThe “decision spin”: treating long AI conversations as progressHow AI makes starting over cheap, and why that hurts SustainingThe weekly anchor that keeps AI working for your most important thingWeeklyOS Bootcamp enrollment closes Thursday, October 29 at midnight PT. Join AEX by then to get three live sessions with Steve to install your Weekly OS: https://adhd-accelerator.comResources mentioned: ADHD Entrepreneur Accelerator (AEX): https://adhd-accelerator.com Free Weekly ADHD Dashboard: https://go.steveaugustcoaching.com/adhd-dashboard Contact Steve: [email protected]: Hubstaff, State of the Workweek 2026 (full report): https://hubstaff.com/state-of-the-workweek Hubstaff press release (Oct 27, 2026): https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ai-is-saving-employees-time-but-employers-arent-getting-the-capacity-they-expect-new-hubstaff-research-finds-302920946.html

If your schedule falls apart by Wednesday, it was probably built for a version of you that only shows up some of the time.One of Steve's AEX members asked him how to find the middle ground between a schedule that's too tight and rigid and one that's too loose to get anything done. Steve's answer starts with why ADHD schedules break: we plan for our 100% self, time blindness makes us overestimate what fits in a day, and all-or-nothing thinking turns one bad morning into a lost week. From there he walks through the five pieces of his own weekly system, with real examples from how he runs his week, including his Monday "work on the business" day, his Friday admin block, and the end-of-day ritual that sets up his next morning.Key points:Why the week is a better container than the day for an ADHD brainThe two-hour workday mindset, and why everything after those two hours is a bonusHow theme days and rituals cut down on context switching and keep a system from going staleWhat it looks like to meet your brain where it's at on a low-energy dayJoin AEX by midnight on Thursday, October 29th and you'll get a free live 3-Week AEX Bootcamp, with sessions on November 3rd, 10th and 17th, where we build your weekly system together. Same $99/month membership. https://adhd-accelerator.comResources mentioned: ADHD Entrepreneur Accelerator (AEX): https://adhd-accelerator.com Free Weekly ADHD Dashboard: https://go.steveaugustcoaching.com/adhd-dashboard Contact Steve: [email protected]

When everything feels broken at once, it’s hard to know where to even begin.I’ve had 61 ADHD founders take my execution assessment, and 23 of them scored high challenge on all three parts of execution: Deciding, Doing and Sustaining. Eight of them maxed out on every part. In this episode I dig into what that means, why it feels like you have to fix everything at the same time, and why Doing is usually the best place to start. When follow-through keeps letting you down, every decision gets heavier, and that can look a lot like a prioritizing problem.Key points:Russell Barkley’s line that ADHD is a performance disorder: we know what to do, we have trouble doing what we knowDoing was the biggest challenge in the assessment more often than any other area (22 outright, 36 counting ties)Why a Magnetic North is the one piece of Deciding worth setting firstA one-hour move for this week: pick the thing you already know you should do, and do it with supportFree live Game Plan workshop: Thursday, October 22, 10am PT / 1pm ET (90 minutes).Register: https://go.steveaugustcoaching.com/gameplan-liveResources mentioned:ADHD Entrepreneur Accelerator (AEX): https://adhd-accelerator.comFree Weekly ADHD Dashboard: https://go.steveaugustcoaching.com/adhd-dashboardContact Steve: [email protected]

ADHD brains can spin on an idea for years, trying to think their way to the right answer. Steve has been doing exactly that with his own messaging, and this week he's finally handing the decision to someone else: the market.For two years Steve has had two ways of describing what makes business hard for ADHD entrepreneurs. One is the three skills of Decide, Do, and Sustain. The other is the lived experience: the scattered week that starts strong on Monday and ends with you surveying the wreckage on Friday, the dopamine desert between intense interest and urgent consequence, and the inevitable drift once something stops feeling new. Both have resonated with people, and as he works on bringing more people into the AEX community, he's gone around and around on which one to lead with.That spin is familiar to most ADHD entrepreneurs. Because we're good at thinking and problem-solving, we try to solve it in our heads, and new ideas keep showing up while we do. Steve explains why that's an impossible task when the question is what will resonate with the people you serve, since they're the ones who decide. He shares the Facebook Ads campaign he's launching this week, built to test his different framings against each other, and the relief that comes from giving your brain a clearer job description.Key points:Why ADHD entrepreneurs try to think their way out of the idea spin, and why it keeps the spin goingWhy your customers, not your own sense of what's elegant, decide what resonatesHow Steve is using a Facebook Ads campaign to test two years of competing framingsTwo ways to get real input fast: 10 to 20 conversations, or a small ad spendJoin Steve live: The monthly ADHD Entrepreneur Game Plan Workshop is coming up this month: https://go.steveaugustcoaching.com/gameplan-live?utm_source=rssResources mentioned: ADHD Entrepreneur Accelerator (AEX): https://adhd-accelerator.com Free Weekly ADHD Dashboard: https://go.steveaugustcoaching.com/adhd-dashboard Contact Steve: [email protected]

It took Steve three quizzes to get one that worked. The first two failed pretty badly, and if he'd judged quizzes by them, he would have written the whole channel off as dead.That's the kind of verdict your feed hands out every day. LinkedIn reach has collapsed, ad costs are rising, outreach is dead, and AI just killed whatever's next, while the shiny objects promise that the right quiz, webinar, or AI tool will make sales happen on their own. After years of using almost all of them, Steve's lesson is that they all work and they all don't. His first 2 quizzes flopped, and then the 3rd was a hit, with basically the same mechanics all three times. The difference was finding the thing that actually connected with the audience he was serving.Steve breaks down the two requirements for any channel to work, a compelling offer that solves a real need and being bad at it long enough to get good, and then walks through how ADHD trips up each part of execution: deciding (every new promise feels urgent), doing (rejection sensitivity and the dopamine desert), and sustaining (the drift toward whatever's shinier). He closes with a practical plan for picking one channel and sticking with it.Key points:Why every marketing channel works for some people and fails for othersWhat Steve learned from two failed quizzes before the Founder Type Quiz took offHow ADHD gets in the way of deciding, doing, and sustaining your marketingPicking a channel that fits how you like to talk to customers, and committing to it for three monthsFree training: Find out whether deciding, doing, or sustaining is most in your way, with an optional two-minute audit and game plan for $5: https://adhd-accelerator.com/gameplanResources mentioned: ADHD Entrepreneur Accelerator (AEX): https://adhd-accelerator.com Free Weekly ADHD Dashboard: https://go.steveaugustcoaching.com/adhd-dashboard Contact Steve: [email protected]

Steve was diagnosed with ADHD at 54, tried medication, and found it didn't work for him. So he went back through every chapter of his entrepreneurial life and started seeing how ADHD had shaped each one. Four years later, he's distilled what he's learned into nine operating principles for ADHD entrepreneurs.This week he walks through all nine. The first is the foundation for everything else: supporting your ADHD is supporting your business, because a business takes on the energy of its founder. From there Steve covers execution as three separate skills (deciding, doing, and sustaining), why progress beats productivity, why slow and messy progress still counts, and why the week works better than the quarter or the day as a container for ADHD brains. He then gets into environment over discipline and willpower, emotional and nervous system regulation, why bringing yourself back after you drift is the greatest skill, and why it takes a whole ecosystem of system, tools, and community to make it all hold.Key points:Why supporting your ADHD is the most direct way to support your businessExecution as three skills: decide, do, and sustainWhy the week is the best container of progress for ADHD brainsWhy bringing yourself back after you lose focus matters more than the initial focusResources mentioned: ADHD Entrepreneur Accelerator (AEX): https://adhd-accelerator.com Free Weekly ADHD Dashboard: https://go.steveaugustcoaching.com/adhd-dashboard Contact Steve: [email protected]

You've got too many good ideas and no way to tell which one the market actually wants, and that's exactly the theme that came up most when Steve surveyed 60 ADHD entrepreneurs last month.Steve ran a live Game Plan Session and had attendees fill out an assessment beforehand on what's actually blocking them in their business. The biggest theme, by far: too many directions, too many good ideas, and no way to choose between them. That came from people just starting out, people pivoting after something changed, and people sitting on a pile of ideas they were excited about with no way to tell which one would work.On the surface this looks like a deciding problem, and it partly is. ADHD brains make everything feel equally urgent and equally exciting, at least for a while, and the moment we think of something we expect ourselves to finish it about as fast as we thought it. But the real fix isn't more thinking. Steve walks through why you can't decide your way out of this by spinning ideas in your own head, because the market, not your own excitement, determines whether something is a good business or just a good idea. The way to find that out is conversations, and once you commit to having them, too many options turns into a doing problem: a real list of tasks that gets you the information you actually need. Steve also gets into what he calls the dopamine desert, and why doing needs just as much support as deciding does.Key points:Why too many good ideas looks like a deciding problem but is often really a doing problemWhy the market, not your own excitement, decides whether an idea is a good businessWhat "conversations are the currency" actually means and what it looks like as a task listThe dopamine desert, and why doing needs real support to happen at allOver the next six weeks, Steve is working with 10 ADHD entrepreneurs to define and execute a real plan, with daily coworking and accountability behind it. If that's you, email [email protected] and he'll set up a time to talk.Resources mentioned: ADHD Entrepreneur Accelerator (AEX): https://adhd-accelerator.com Free Weekly ADHD Dashboard: https://go.steveaugustcoaching.com/adhd-dashboard Contact Steve: [email protected]

You spent years succeeding on energy, interest, and effort alone. Then you hit a wall, and what you lost wasn't just your output. It was your trust in yourself.Steve digs into something he thinks doesn't get acknowledged enough in late-diagnosed ADHD entrepreneurs. Before diagnosis, most people succeed anyway, working harder than everyone around them without knowing why. Then midlife arrives, sometimes a hormonal shift, sometimes just years of accumulation, and the coping mechanisms that used to work stop working. Burnout shows up, or the wins keep coming at a real cost. Diagnosis explains the wiring, but it doesn't repair what actually breaks when you hit that wall: the belief that you can decide, that you can do the thing you know you're capable of, and that you can sustain it.Steve makes the case that self-trust, not productivity, is the real thing on the line, and shares what happens in AEX co-working sessions when members watch themselves finally do the thing they'd been avoiding for months, in twenty minutes flat. He closes with two stories: a member who nearly gave up on her business and ended up turning her garage into an art studio, and a songwriter who finally recorded his own album.Key points:What actually breaks when a late-diagnosed ADHD entrepreneur hits the wall, and why it isn't just burnoutThe three things self-trust covers: deciding, doing, and sustainingWhat AEX co-working sessions reveal about how fast "impossible" tasks actually are once you sit down and do themHow rebuilding self-trust in the business ripples out into the rest of lifeResources mentioned: ADHD Entrepreneur Accelerator (AEX): https://adhd-accelerator.com Free Weekly ADHD Dashboard: https://go.steveaugustcoaching.com/adhd-dashboard Contact Steve: [email protected]