I Was the Most Organised Person in the Office. Then I Went Self-Employed.
At work, you were the reliable one. The one who hit every deadline, corralled the team into action, and somehow kept three projects moving at once without dropping a single ball.
Then you went self-employed, and it all started to slide.
This is my story of running a business with ADHD, from undiagnosed to diagnosed.
The workplace was doing more for me than I realised
When I was employed, people called me the most organised person in the room. Deadlines met. Systems tidy. Always on top of it.
What I didn't clock was how much of that was down to being in the room itself.
I had to be at my desk at a fixed(ish) time. There were people working around me all day, every day. I call that extreme body-doubling, and it kept me accountable. That structure wasn't something I'd built. It was simply there, and it held the working day together for me.
But I didn't thrive on it. I paid for it. By the time I got home I was like a child with ADHD who'd been cooped up in a classroom all day. Wound up, dysregulated, and angry. The office got the organised one. My family got what was left. I thought that was normal.
Then I went self-employed and the accountability vanished overnight. No fixed hours. No busy office. Just me, my client work, a to-do list, and a very still and quiet house.
The diagnosis that made everything make sense
I didn't get my ADHD diagnosis until I was two years into running my own business, and for that 2 years I really did feel like I was going a little bit crazy. Why was it that I can do it all for clients, but my own stuff always got pushed to the bottom of the pile, even the stuff I knew was important! With clients it's easy, I know my stuff, I share it, things start to happen for them - simple! So, why not for me?
When the realisation came that something else could be at play, I sought a diagnosis and a lot of things fell into place. The string of different careers. The restlessness, and sleepless nights. The mislaid personal items. Why mastering the clock is so hard. And why, for years, I'd walked through my own front door and come apart. I'd been holding it together all day and was running on empty by the time I got there.
What running a business with ADHD actually looks like
Here's the honest version of what it looked like for me. Not the tidy LinkedIn one.
I hyperfocus so hard I forget to eat, drink, move from my desk or go outside, and for a migraine sufferer this is pure sabotage.
I'm late, everywhere. On a good day it's a minute or two. On a bad day it's fifteen and then comes the guilt and shame.
I rewrite the client quote so many times (in the pursuit of perfection) that by the time I send it, they've gone cold and booked someone else.
New shiny tool? I've signed up for the free trial before I've considered if I'll actually have the time to properly try it out.
Initial client call – allow double the time because if you stay and chat for long enough, you'll see how much I love brainstorming solutions.
500+ ideas for my business at any given time from blogs to exit plans! (At least now they are recorded in a list.)
Constantly go over and above for clients and network colleagues because I just want to help!
And then, when the rest of the house finally goes to bed, I've sat back down at my desk and worked or researched until two in the morning, then wondered why the next day was a write-off.
None of this means I'm bad at my job or shouldn't run a business. It means the structure that used to hold me together at work has gone, and somehow I have to build my own.
The part that took me longest to understand: it's also a strength
The same brain that forgets lunch is the reason I'm genuinely good at what I do.
I can walk into a muddled business and see the friction straight away. The wasted steps. The thing being done three times that could be done once. I can't bear doing anything twice, so I build systems that mean I don't have to, that also allow me to delegate!
For years I wondered why this was so obvious to me and not to everyone else. Now I know. That's the one and only gift ADHD gave me.
The irony wasn't lost on me either. I was building calm, sensible processes, systems and automations for other people's businesses while my own ran on adrenaline and late nights. The fix turned out to be the exact one I hand my clients. Stop relying on a flaky memory and faulty willpower, and take the time to build the structure in.
You can build the scaffolding too.
If the workplace or the school routine was giving you structure without you noticing, here's the good news. You can build that structure back deliberately.
Not with a clever app you'll abandon in a fortnight. Process first, software second, always. A tool is only ever as good as the process sitting underneath it.
That's the whole reason I created the More Profitable Me® Framework. It builds the scaffolding a busy, distractible brain needs, so my business supports me to do the client work I love and give me the time to create the assets and resources I can share with others. Work rhythms instead of willpower. Systems instead of memory. Capacity instead of chaos.
And what works for a service business where the owner has ADHD, makes sense for all service businesses.
Where to start
Running a business with ADHD is my story, not intgended as a diagnosis for anyone else.
I've watched clients land in the very same chaos without it. Running a practice while raising a family. Caring for ageing parents. Living with a long-term health condition, or mental health struggles, or plain old overwhelm. Different cause, same tangle.
The problem sitting underneath it is common to loads of us. The structure a workplace gives you doesn't follow you when you go it alone, and nobody teaches you how to rebuild it.
So, if you've been the organised one and you can't understand why self-employment now feels far harder than the day job ever did, please hear this. The problem isn't you. It's the missing structure, and that can be fixed.
A good first step is knowing exactly where your business is leaking time and energy. The free Business Health Check takes about ten minutes and shows you where the friction is, so you know what to fix first.
Take the free Business Health Check: https://www.hub.opswiz.co.uk/business-health-check
