I wrote this book because I got tired of marketing advice that assumed I had a normal brain. Every marketing book, course and guru told me the same things. Maintain consistent daily habits. Network regularly. Follow a systematic content calendar. Great advice, for somebody who can do it.
What happens when you force a marketing routine on an ADHD brain?
You burn out, repeatedly, and you conclude the problem is you. For years I tried to fit myself into the neurotypical marketing mold. I’d build the calendar, commit to the daily habit, set up the weekly cadence. It would work for a few weeks and then stop working, and each time it stopped I understood it as a personal failure. Everybody else managed these proven systems. I couldn’t stick to them.
That interpretation is the expensive part. Not the failed calendar. That costs a fortnight. The conclusion that you’re undisciplined. That costs years and gets reinforced every time you try again. I’m an autistic ADHD introvert who ended up in marketing because I left my corporate job and suddenly had to work it out. Nothing about the standard advice was written with that in mind, and there’s no reason it should have been. It was simply never going to fit.
What marketing system works with an ADHD brain?
I stopped fighting my brain and started building around it.
That sentence has an operational meaning. Consistency isn’t available to me on demand. Intensity is, in unpredictable but real bursts. So the question stops being how do I become consistent and becomes what can I build that runs on intensity.
In practice: I don’t write a post a day. I write a month of them in two days when the hyperfocus arrives, then schedule them out. The audience sees consistency. The production was nothing like consistent. Those two things were never required to match and almost every piece of advice conflates them.
Is ADHD hyperfocus really a marketing advantage?
On the right task it’s a large one, and here’s the example I use. On one project, most marketers would have read a few trade publications and called that research. My hyperfocus arrived and I spent weeks understanding the entire supply chain, the regulatory environment, and the technical specifications that mattered to the customers.
That produced positioning opportunities nobody else had found. Nobody else had gone that deep, because for a normally regulated person there was no reason to. The depth was what my brain does when it engages, pointed at something useful for once. Nobody can summon hyperfocus on command. The skill is having something worth its while ready when it turns up, and I hate wasting one of those bursts on email because nothing better was queued.
The book on this: The ADHD Marketer is 22 chapters on marketing with this brain instead of against it, from a decade of doing it and burning out first.
Which marketing activities need consistency?
Some do, and pretending otherwise is how this advice becomes useless.
Following up with a lead has a window. Invoices have dates. Some cadences are structural and no amount of reframing changes that. For those, the answer is automation, batching, and systems that don’t depend on remembering. Discipline has already been tried and didn’t work. A reminder that fires is worth more than an intention that’s stronger, and calling that a crutch is lazy. Systems built around a known constraint are ordinary engineering.
My CliftonStrengths results put Empathy near the bottom, 28th of my 34 themes. You need empathy to write emotional material, and when I get into emotions, I stall. Intellectual and procedural writing comes easily to me, and so does coding. So I decided to treat marketing like a computer program and take the people out of it. I had to stop being intimidated by the people and just program it.
Should marketers with ADHD ignore conventional marketing advice?
No. Translate it.
The underlying principles in most marketing advice are sound. Be visible. Say useful things. Follow up. Understand who you’re talking to. None of that is wrong and none of it is what fails. What fails is the delivery mechanism. That nearly always assumes a steady daily output. Keep the principle, replace the mechanism. Be visible becomes produce in bursts and distribute steadily. Network regularly becomes have a small number of real relationships instead of a weekly quota.
Almost every piece of advice survives this translation. It just has to be done deliberately, because nobody is going to do it for you.
What do you do when marketing advice does not fit you?
When a method fails you for years, blame the method. That much evidence is data about fit, and I’d hate for anybody to read it as a verdict on their character the way I did.
Separate production from publication. They were never required to happen at the same rate.
Keep something ready for when hyperfocus arrives. It’s coming and you can’t schedule it, so have the deep work queued.
Automate anything with a deadline. Don’t rely on remembering, because you already know how that goes.
Translate instead of discard. The principles are usually fine. The daily-habit packaging is what doesn’t fit.
The thing I’d go back and tell myself is that no amount of trying harder was going to make the content calendar work, and the years spent proving that were the actual waste.
