173: 3 ADHD Hacks to Force Your Focus

Three Hacks to Force Your Focus

We’d all love to be able to summon hyper-focus on demand for a truly productive day, but it isn’t something we can just switch on. Here are three hacks worth experimenting with. A quick caveat first: I’m not a mental health professional, just someone speaking from personal experience and a lot of self-research.

Hack one: work with your doctor on brain-specific modifications

Medications, supplements, behavior therapies, sleep routines, and exercise routines can all shift how your brain functions, and everyone responds differently. I’m not formally diagnosed with ADHD myself, and I always encourage working with a doctor to get information tailored specifically to you rather than guessing in isolation. That said, strategies developed for ADHD brains tend to help typical and neurodivergent brains alike, so there’s nothing wrong with experimenting even without a formal diagnosis, as long as you’re paying attention to what actually works for you specifically. If you have been diagnosed and something you tried didn’t help, it’s worth going back for more conversation and trying something different, there are far more resources now, podcasts, books, and communities, than existed in the past.

One recent discovery for me has been adding Magic Mind to my morning coffee routine. A month in, the biggest shift I’ve noticed is in the parts of my business I’ve always struggled with, the technical back-end tasks, scheduler issues, missed alerts, the stuff that used to make me give up two minutes into a YouTube tutorial because it got complicated or didn’t match my screen. The hard, less enjoyable tasks have started feeling more approachable, and the focus from it lasts hours without the crash I’d get from relying on caffeine alone.

Hack two: get an accountability buddy through body doubling

Body doubling is simply having someone else nearby, even virtually, doing their own work while you do yours. Just knowing someone might notice if you lose focus is often enough to keep you on track. In my membership group’s Work With Me Wednesdays, we hop on a shared Zoom call, check in briefly at the start about everyone’s monthly challenge, and then just work, sometimes with cameras and mics off, simply because knowing others are there working alongside you creates real accountability, even through a screen.

Hack three: create a real deadline, not an arbitrary one

I have a genuine pet peeve about the idea that simply writing something on a calendar creates accountability. It doesn’t, not on its own. If you used to work a job with a boss and real deadlines, or you remember managing surprisingly well when your kids were very young, that wasn’t really you being more pulled together. It was because young children create their own unavoidable deadlines: feedings, naps, school drop-offs, project due dates, all with real consequences attached. Once kids get older and some of that built-in structure disappears, it becomes easy to sit down with your coffee for “just two seconds,” blink, and lose four hours, because nothing forced your hand.

To recreate that same forcing function, build in a genuinely real deadline, one you can’t quietly cancel. Host a recurring group on a set date each month, invite an out-of-town friend who’s already booked their flight, commit to something where backing out would actually let someone down. Canceling on a close friend who’ll understand doesn’t create the same pressure as canceling on people you don’t know as well or someone who’s already made real plans around your commitment.

Your practical, actionable step

Pick one of these three hacks to try this week: talk to your doctor about one specific strategy, find one person to body double with even briefly, or commit to one real, hard-to-cancel deadline. See which one actually moves the needle for your own brain.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.