This week I'm talking with Russ Jones, a productivity coach for adults with ADHD and founder of ADHD Big Brother, an ADHD accountability community (he also hosts a podcast with the same name) - When Russ was last on the show, we talked about reducing distractions on our phones. So naturally, we start by checking in on how that’s going (and honestly I could be doing better on my end).
From there we get into the idea that systems are born, not designed. And to be clear up front, that doesn’t mean we should stop planning. It means we don’t have to figure out every step and every possible obstacle before we start. Sometimes we need to do the thing, notice where we get stuck, and build our system from there. And we talk about how searching for the perfect system can use up the energy we needed for the task itself, and what to do when something that used to work starts to get boring.
And at one point, Russ turns the interview around on me and we talk about my summer break, burnout, and what it takes to keep making something you care about when you’re also getting tired of making it.
And cause Russ and I like to talk there was enough here for two episodes, so this is just the first half of our conversation.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/323
YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk
All right. As I was telling you before the show, this is my first episode that I'm recording after my summer hiatus. People will not be aware of that because I had a lot in the bank, so this probably will not go up until October or November. So we'll see. But I'm really excited to have this conversation again because of our last show, and I thought one of the fun things to do would be to actually look back at that episode, which is something I plan to do every time I have a returning guest, and I rarely do.
It was very much worth it this time because of some of the callbacks I was looking for. We were talking about phones last time, and I was talking about how I had no social media on my phone, no games. It was very much just a non-distraction tool. And you were talking about how you were going to set that up as a community challenge and stuff, so I just wanted to check back in with that—with the note that my phone has a ton of Pokémon GO on it right now, and I've been spending way too much time on Threads.
Russ Jones: Yeah. Oh, man. So my phone... Okay, success... I don't know if I was successful right away. I would've won the challenge, I know that, because I can't not win my 30-day challenges. But I got rid of all of them. So Facebook, Instagram—I never had a TikTok—LinkedIn, boom. I got rid of them all.
And yeah, you're going against the grain when you do that, especially if you're a solopreneur. People are like, "Oh, but you gotta have a presence. You should at least have your thing." And I'm like, "No, I don't." In my heart, I was like, that's like telling someone, "You just have to have a cigarette in your mouth. All the people that are talking are smoking, so to hang out with them, don't even light it, just have the cigarette in your mouth." I'm like, "Are you kidding me? No." And then there's the oppositional side of me that's like, "I'll prove you wrong. I'm doing it anyway."
William Curb: That's definitely something with ADHD all the time, where if someone tells you, "You can't do it," or "You have to do it"—with either one of those things, I'm going the other way.
Russ Jones: Just to show you I can do it. Yeah, big time. And then I'm currently looking at getting rid of my Substack. I think I can do it, because it does the same thing. I am a person that can't control myself, and especially with the news nowadays, with what's going on, my Substack becomes just a lot of awfulness. That is the awfulness, and so as I was telling you offline, I just got a subscription to Reuters. It feels weird to say Reuters; I want to say "Routers."
William Curb: Yeah.
Russ Jones: I got the Rooty-Tooters magazine! But they're unbiased. So I can go, "Give me the facts," and I will express outrage where I need to express outrage, and I'll decide for myself. I'm not addicted to looking at news. I seek news out, which is different than algorithm-type stuff.
William Curb: Yeah. The algorithm-type things are a little bit insidious and they just play off of our worst instincts. We think, "Oh, it's what I choose to look at," but there's so many factors that go into it. Like, "Oh, while you were scrolling, did you stop here and look for a second?"
Russ Jones: Yeah. "Ooh, we know what you like."
William Curb: Yeah. It's like you didn't even have to click. There's so much more data being collected than people often realize, and that is why some of the algorithms are so good—which is also sometimes why I'm surprised when things are really bad. I'm like, "What did I do to—"
Russ Jones: William, one of the reasons why I had to get off Instagram: I am extremely non-violent, to the point where I don't even like watching football because it's so aggressive. And I must have stopped on a UFC knockout punch on an Instagram Reel one time. And my algorithm—you're like, "Oh my God."
My feed became nothing but street fighting knockouts. And I was like, "Oh." You can't not look at it; you have a visceral reaction to it. And I'm like, "Who have I become?" Now I'm a guy that is consumed by violence. It's awful. So out it goes.
William Curb: Yeah. I do find, if people want to keep using social media for whatever reason... I was off for the summer, so I had time to kill with my phone. That's why some of the games came back. That's why I had some social media. I was like, "Oh yeah, I'm just sitting here for a little bit. I'll check this out."
I find being really strict with the rules that I put in the app—the phrases that are muted, what I'm allowed to see—really helps fight some of those algorithmic tendencies. Because I'm like, "Oh yeah, I'm going to put every one of these rage-bait terms into my mute list." Anything that says "unpopular opinion, but..." People are just trying to bait engagement there.
Russ Jones: That's fascinating. That's something that's really interesting that maybe we should talk about a little bit, because I didn't know that existed. It's not going to get me back onto Instagram, but if I were a person that wanted to use social media, what is that? It's a setting in the app?
William Curb: Yeah, it depends on each individual app and what they have. Threads is actually great with it because you can mute an entire phrase.
Russ Jones: Oh, wow.
William Curb: And all of the big names that I know I'm going to see, I'm just going to block all these political names, and then I don't have to read anything about any of these people.
Russ Jones: Super.
William Curb: I appreciate that. Some of the apps are like, "This post is hidden. Click here to see." And I'm like, "Of course I'm going to click that!"
Russ Jones: What are they doing? "We think you might still really, really be interested in it. We know you're addicted to this thing, but we would love to show you..." That's awful.
William Curb: Yeah. But a lot of them do have options to mute things or block people. Anytime I see someone where I'm like, "I don't really care; that person had a slightly bad take," I'm just blocking them. I don't care if they're actually a great person, because there are so many other people online, it doesn't matter.
Russ Jones: Yeah, good deal.
William Curb: Really curating that stream and taking the time to think about what you actually want to see on social media makes it a lot better.
Russ Jones: Yeah, that's an interesting take. To me, the way that I hear that is it is well advised to take control over your social media, as opposed to just allowing it to give you stuff.
William Curb: Yeah, which is often what happens with TikTok's For You page and all that kind of stuff. They're like, "Oh yeah, this is what everybody loves." And you're like, "Yeah, everybody loves outrage, and I don't need that in my life all the time."
Russ Jones: Aren't we struggling enough? We're struggling as ADHDers, right? And I'm a depresso, and I have anxiety. We're struggling enough with just today's stuff in our own bubble. I can't handle the whole world's problems. I'm trying to get my laundry done, man.
William Curb: Yeah. And even with what I follow, it's mostly TV show news and that kind of stuff. And people are like, "I'm really mad about the new Lanterns episode." And I'm like, "Ugh, but it was really good!"
Russ Jones: Like, "Oh God, we just live in an outrage world," I guess.
William Curb: Yeah. And even with that, it's very important to temper things. I have these rules, but even if I stick to them, it is still easy to go too far because it's very tempting.
Russ Jones: Yeah. If I didn't have a solopreneur-type thing, this would be a lot easier for me, because who gives a shit? Who cares? I could just be off social media and be happy with myself. It's the idea of marketing and all that business where you're like, "Well, so what are you going to do?" But I'm leaning into the challenge of it all.
William Curb: When it comes to me, I'm always like, "Okay, but what's the actual conversion rate of me having a big social presence?"
Russ Jones: I feel like this sounds like virtue signaling: "Let me just tell you about what I'm doing." But on the moral compass aspect of it, I do coaching. Most of the people that I work with, I'm coaching them on getting out of doom-scrolling, because time management is everybody's big lament.
You start dissecting the time and you realize, "Oh, three hours of Instagram. Gotcha. I think we found the missing time." And so from the marketing aspect, now I have to go and put myself out there and be a part of the things that are bad or unhealthy for us? Just because somebody out there knows how to moderate, or has it figured out where they can...
I'm not a moderation person. I suck at it. The idea that somebody's going to be scrolling, and then they see, "Here's something about ADHD"—who gives a shit, right? They're just zooming past. I watched my girlfriend one time scrolling on Instagram, and she'll see a picture of a soccer player that she likes and she'll like it without reading it. It's a source of joy to see some things, but nobody's stopping to be like, "Oh, I need this coaching." It's a different world, and the conversion is... You gotta get in front of a billion people to help... It doesn't seem right. I'm rambling, but it doesn't make sense to me.
William Curb: Yeah. I saw an interesting video from one of the Green brothers—Hank or John—asking, "Are we cigarettes with our online posting? Are we the cigarettes of this generation?" Because they said, "Yeah, I know social media is bad for people, and I am engaged in that system. However, I am not posting the bad outrage social media stuff." So they're wondering, "Maybe I'm in a position where I'm counteracting some of the more negative effects." They admit it's still not great, but at least it's not the outrage, AI-slop crap that we see everywhere.
Russ Jones: Yeah. I don't know if that makes sense to me. The visual that I got from that would be like advertising something you do in something bad. Where you go, "Try my bubblegum," and it's in a porno magazine. And you're like, "What am I doing in there? Well, those people need chewing gum, too." It doesn't make sense to me.
William Curb: You're like, "Is this weird fetish bubblegum?"
Russ Jones: What kind of bubblegum is that? And maybe it is a mindset thing where if I don't know how to connect to it, I can't do it. We might've talked about this before, but I was an actor in my twenties. I was really successful with commercials, and then I suddenly couldn't do it anymore because I had no purpose. It didn't connect. I was like, "I don't know that I believe in Coca-Cola, so how can I say that's a tasty Coca-Cola?" I don't know if that's an ADHD thing where you just shut down and you can't do it, even though you technically can.
William Curb: Yeah. It's like, "What am I putting my face on, and how does it reflect my own values?"
Russ Jones: Totally. You're one of the most popular ADHD podcasts out there. I'm sure you get offers where you're like, "That doesn't connect to my moral compass. I can't—"
William Curb: Oh, yeah. There was a number of recent things where I was like, "Okay, let's look into this company," and I realized they have a really aggressive subscription model that's hard to cancel. No way in hell am I advertising that kind of thing.
Russ Jones: Yeah. Even though some smooth talker could probably convince you why it makes sense that you should promote them, that initial intuitive feeling says, "No, this is a no for me." Sometimes that's really hard. I don't want to blanket it for all of us, but it's hard for me when I have a boundary.
I'm 51 now. In my thirties and stuff, you go through life thinking, "Everybody else does things this way. Why can't I?" And so you try to be neurotypical. You try to force-feed yourself into that dynamic, and you feel awful about yourself, but you suck it up because this is what everybody else does. God, it's so much more freeing to just live and die by your own situation.
William Curb: There is that aspect of masking where you're just like, "I need to..." It's not even that I want to be like everyone else; it's that I don't know another way to be, and I just see what everyone else is doing.
Russ Jones: Yeah, for sure. You think, "I guess that's how we do it, then."
William Curb: Although I do find with a lot of folks with ADHD, they're just like, "Why?" A lot of the neurodivergent folk I know have to quiet that down because they're thinking, "That's a stupid way of doing things. Why are we doing it like that?"
Russ Jones: Yeah! I'm getting that from my kids right now, big time. It's about having to be cool with the fact that—this kind of goes to my general philosophy—we all kind of have to fail through things. We live in a guru-type society where somebody made it and they tell you their secret. Nobody creates terrible systems; they all worked for somebody. But sometimes that takes away the experience of failing, of sucking at something and learning your own unique way.
You need to have that failure that someone is trying to prevent you from having. You need to suck at something so that you can connect it to your own insights. Those epiphanies always lead us forward much better than someone saying, "Hey, I'll tell you how to do a thing. Do it this way. Don't ask questions."
William Curb: Yeah, that's like the core philosophy of coaching: you can't just tell people what to do because everybody needs to find their own way of doing it. Whenever people ask me, "How did you do all this stuff with your podcast?" I'm like, "I just did it and it worked."
Russ Jones: It happened, yeah.
William Curb: There was very little planning. Right before I went on break, I hit 300 episodes, and people were like, "That's incredible! How did you do that for so long?" And I'm like, "Well, I didn't stop."
Russ Jones: Yeah. When I started, I was all over the place. I would have a big idea, do three podcast episodes, and then I wouldn't do anything for a month and a half. And I got to one point where I was like, "Okay, no matter what, come hell or high water, an episode every Monday." And that was how I ended up growing. No matter what happens in life, this is something that happens. That, to me, was huge. Like you said, you just have to keep doing it to make it turn into something.
William Curb: Yeah. And it's like, "Okay, I missed a Monday. Next Monday I'm going to hit it." Not letting failure derail you, but asking, "Did I learn something from it?" Sometimes no, I didn't. Sometimes it was just, "Yeah, that happened."
Russ Jones: "I learned nothing."
William Curb: Yeah. Sometimes I just learned that I'm not good at something.
Russ Jones: Right! You're like, "I sucked at it this week." I'm a fan of just sucking your way forward. Sometimes you have to not be good at something as you get better.
William Curb: Yeah. What's the first step of getting better at something? Being bad at it.
Russ Jones: Yeah. This leads into what we were talking about earlier that I really wanted to discuss: these systems. In my mind, we're all looking for a way to get on the other side of tension. A difficult task has tension to it, so we think, "Oh, I just need a system."
I did this not too long ago. I caught myself. I didn't have the right groceries or something, and I got all pissed off at myself. I thought, "God, if I just had a system for groceries." And then I literally heard myself say it, and I went, "Dude, you just need to go grocery shopping. Go grocery shopping."
The system is this thing we create when we say, "Okay, here's a problem, and it was tense. So I need to create a mechanism that eliminates the tension forever. That's my system." We sit back, build the spreadsheet or the Notion template, and create what we think is the perfect, foolproof system.
Then when we try to do it, something inevitably goes wrong, and we go, "Oh, the system doesn't work!"—so off we go to create a new system. The actual doing of the thing is what eludes us. Just fail at it! Get with a team. I'm an accountability nerd, so I say let's just move forward. In moving forward consistently over time, a system manifests. You start to notice, "Oh, I always go grocery shopping on Sunday." That's your system. You didn't build it first; it became part of you through your efforts. Does that make sense?
William Curb: Yeah! Because so often we're really bad at thinking through everything that goes into a system, so we skip steps. You say, "Every Monday right after work, I am going to go grocery shopping." And then it's, "Oh, but I have this other commitment I forgot about, so we'll go right after that." Then it's, "Oh, now there's a ton of traffic and I don't want to go."
Russ Jones: Yeah. System broken.
William Curb: It's interesting. When it fails, there are often two reactions. One is, "I have ADHD, I can't do anything," which is never helpful, but I understand it. I've felt that so many times where I'm just like, "That's just how this is. Meh."
Russ Jones: Yeah. "Wah, meow." And we give up.
William Curb: Yeah. Or someone says, "Oh, I just need to make it even more complex."
Russ Jones: "Let me do a five-point system!" You know, a lot of ADHD stuff is treated like homework. For me, it's easier to see everything as a to-do item. I come from the productivity world anyway, but everything's a to-do. Hanging out with your kids is a to-do, because you "to-did" it, right? You hung out with them. For people who are emotionally dysregulated, you might think, "I need to regulate my emotions first." Well, that's a to-do item. You have to regulate yourself; you have to decide what to do with your time.
William Curb: It's one of those things where it's great to recognize that. I know that if it's not on my calendar, it's not going to happen. If I don't see it as something that has to be done, I'm going to put it off forever.
Russ Jones: Oh man, yeah. The "out of sight, out of mind" thing is huge for me. Do you see my daily counter here? 20 days in a row of doing the thing I said I was going to do. If I don't have something externalized right in front of me, I am highly likely to forget. Even in my own community, I'll forget to do the thing I said I'd do if I don't have the right scaffolding in place.
William Curb: Yeah. I've had a fun system that I've been playing with recently.
Russ Jones: What are you doing?
William Curb: An LLM setup where I have a document where I just brain dump every day, and then it sorts it.
Russ Jones: Really?
William Curb: It adds my to-dos, organizes what goes where, and sorts everything for me. That's really all I need: being able to quickly capture things. The really nice feature is that it acts like a tickler file—like in Getting Things Done. It handles the "someday/maybe" stuff. I can toss something in there that is a month out just to get it written down; it doesn't clutter my current to-do list, but a month later, it pops back up.
Russ Jones: Your LLM does that for you?
William Curb: Yeah.
Russ Jones: Oh, that's cool. Somebody in our community connected their LLM to Google Drive to create a diary. They talk about the things that worked and the things that didn't, and over time, you build an accessible record that says, "This strategy worked for you back then."
I even have clients who take our Zoom meetings and build an ADHD coach bot out of them. I'm like, "Great! Build the Russ Jones coach bot." If you can do this stuff on your own, God bless you. I think ADHD is a team sport, and there's a "now what?" component where you still need accountability. But to have that historical information about what worked for you is huge, because I'll forget tomorrow what worked for me today.
William Curb: Oh, absolutely.
Russ Jones: Every time.
William Curb: What I like about my current setup is that I don't have to overthink where I'm putting ideas. There's just a widget on my phone that opens my note-taking app, Obsidian, and captures it.
Russ Jones: Do you talk it out or do you type it out?
William Curb: Usually I type it on my phone because I'm in bed and don't want to wake up my wife.
Russ Jones: Right, otherwise she's like, "Are you talking to yourself? 'Today was really hard...'"
William Curb: Yeah. I've also been getting a lot of use out of Whisper Flow for voice-to-text. With the LLM, I don't have to be precise. I can just dictate general thoughts. I have a gigantic prompt document with rules for how I want things structured—certain things it should never rewrite, and other things it should just summarize.
Russ Jones: That's so cool. I have a love-hate relationship with the whole AI world. Some of what you can do with it is so helpful to us. You can say, "I have to buy a car, but it's too many steps," and it breaks down all the steps to buying a new car. That kind of stuff is amazing.
William Curb: I did that with buying new tires recently. I said, "I need new tires. This is what I need them for; tell me more about this because I don't know enough."
Russ Jones: "Talk to me about tread!" And then suddenly you have the best snow tires ever in the middle of summer because the AI got you.
William Curb: I love when people ask, "How do you know if it's accurate?" I read it, and then I check its sources. I'm the kind of person who reads a Wikipedia article and then clicks through to the citations.
Russ Jones: You're rare! A lot of people are just like, "This is the truth. FYI, I just read the truth, and now I'm going to share it with everybody."
William Curb: Yeah, that's the love-hate aspect. It's great, but it's also horrific how some people use it.
Russ Jones: For sure. We're playing with the tools of our destruction, but let's get some productivity out of it while we're on the journey.
William Curb: Assistive technology like that works for me, so that's why I use it.
Russ Jones: It's a collective shiny object right now for the entire ADHD community. Everyone's sharing what they use it for, and we're all experiencing shiny object syndrome together.
William Curb: Some of it is great, some isn't. There are definitely privacy concerns, so there's certain stuff that shouldn't go in there.
Russ Jones: For sure. But I'll tell you what: it's really helping me with my homebrew D&D campaign.
William Curb: Pulling us back to the idea of systems being born rather than crafted perfectly beforehand: that's why I like this system. It grows as I use it. Every once in a while I realize, "Oh, here's a new rule we need," and I implement it.
Russ Jones: Awesome.
William Curb: It really drives home that I could not have crafted this flawlessly beforehand without doing the work first.
Russ Jones: A hundred percent. You iterate as you go.
William Curb: And you can apply this outside of tech, too. For instance, I'm getting up 90 minutes earlier this year to get my kid to middle school, and that's a new system we're working out.
Russ Jones: It's going to suck a little bit at first, right? It's going to be painful, but I feel you.
William Curb: I was thinking, "Oh man, only nine more years of this."
Russ Jones: By nine years, you'll be so used to waking up early that you'll have found the beauty in it. There was a time when I would get up at 5:00 in the morning. I like the world at 5:00 AM.
William Curb: It's very nice. It's the same feeling as staying up very late when no one else is around.
Russ Jones: I do like it, but it requires effort.
William Curb: My wife and I have been lamenting how terrible it is that we're actually getting so much more done because we're up that early!
Russ Jones: There's a freshness to a new day. The sky's the limit; there are nothing but possibilities.
William Curb: I tend to do more early in the day. Once the evening comes, I'm just farting around. So now I have an extra hour and a half where I'm actually doing things.
Russ Jones: I really subscribe to the idea of the executive function juice tank. By the end of the day, I still have the desire to do things, but my mental tank is empty. Being okay with that has been a struggle for me, but it helps to know when I have juice. I have juice in the morning, so what am I going to use it for?
Going back to systems: if we put all our effort into the homework of building the system, we have no juice left for the practical things we're trying to do that day. It's a balancing act.
William Curb: It's so easy to tinker with a system continuously because it gives you so much dopamine to feel like you're making it better.
Russ Jones: It's a system of hope—the dream of eliminating tension. The problem is that the laundry is still going to suck. There isn't a system in the world that makes an unpleasant task pleasant. Some days it's easy to do, and some days it's impossible. A system doesn't change your mood state or replenish your executive function juice.
William Curb: Right. We want a system that gets us from A to B regardless of how we feel, or at least one that lets us reroute when we don't have the capacity that day.
Russ Jones: There's power in saying, "This sucks, but I'm going to do it anyway." But with ADHD, we're not naturally "just do it" people. We sit back and assess: "Is this a dopamine problem? A sleep problem? Food? Exercise? Environment? Interest?"
We overanalyze every complexity. Do we improve the environment? Do we do push-ups? When there are so many potential answers, how do you choose?
The real question is: what does it take for you to do the thing even though? Even though you're miserable, even though your brain found a loophole, even though it's not urgent. Whatever makes the slog simple is the answer. For me, it's telling someone else. I have to make myself visible and vulnerable: "William, as soon as we're done here, I'm going to do my dishes."
Knowing that you know creates just enough accountability. You're a fellow ADHDer, so you won't judge me if I don't, but I want to win and tell you that I did it. That's my quickest way to do the hard thing right now, rather than searching for a magic formula.
William Curb: You can't plan for every variable. I can set up guardrails for when I'm tired from waking up at 6:00, but at 10:00 PM, I just have to realize I need to sleep.
Russ Jones: You wake up early, realize you feel exhausted, and make the adjustment: "I need to go to bed by 9:00." You figured that out from experiencing the problem firsthand.
William Curb: When evaluating our systems, we have to look at why a part failed, but also ask why we want to get back on that system in the first place.
Russ Jones: Do you even care about it?
William Curb: Exactly. Like when I decided to train for a marathon, and then realized, "This is not for me."
Russ Jones: Turns out marathons are dumb!
William Curb: If you want to restart a to-do system, ask yourself what made it worthwhile to begin with. Understanding what drives that desire helps pinpoint the breakdown point so you can work around it.
Russ Jones: You have to find that through doing. Often we try something, it doesn't work, and we quit immediately, rather than using that self-awareness to test it thoroughly. And I can't do that alone; that's why I believe in accountability.
William Curb: That's why I love journaling. It's much harder to lie to myself when I write it down, because I'll read it back and think, "That's not true."
Russ Jones: "You're lying to yourself, William!"
William Curb: It forces me to confront reality. Like, why can't I put my keys back in the basket? Is it my ADHD, or is there a concrete workaround?
Russ Jones: Do you have a basket for your keys? Are you good at using it?
William Curb: Mostly, yes. It's become a habit now. When I pull them out, I know they belong there.
Russ Jones: I'm taking that idea. I don't have a key basket, and I look for them every single time.
William Curb: My wallet and keys both go in there, along with anything else I plan to take to the car—though that works less reliably. Sometimes I'll set my sunglasses on top of my keys, move them out of the way to grab the keys, and leave the sunglasses behind!
Russ Jones: I'm great at putting items by the door if they need to leave the house, but I don't put my keys and wallet there. If I were to implement that system, I'd have to gamify it with a 30-day challenge: every time I put them in the basket, I get a checkmark; every time I leave them somewhere else, I lose one.
William Curb: For me, it came down to necessity. I lost my keys for a month in college, hovering outside dorm doors hoping someone would let me in. When they finally fell out of a pants pocket, it was a huge relief. Now, whenever I lose something, old pockets are the first place I check.
Russ Jones: One hundred percent. Pockets first, then the computer desk, the dresser, or the kitchen counter.
William Curb: To build the habit, I had to practice: walk in the door, immediately put them in the basket. If I found them somewhere else, I would pick them up, walk back outside, come through the door again, and place them in the basket to build that muscle memory.
Russ Jones: Nice. I read in Changing to Thrive by Prochaska—a great book on the stages of behavior change—that the idea of building a habit in 21 days is a myth, but six months of consistency is what actually starts to build autopilot.
Do you have a system for task completion? A task pops into your head, eventually you do it, and then it's checked off. How do you prioritize and schedule? Or do you take things day by day?
William Curb: With my LLM system, whenever something enters my head, I immediately drop it into my notes without overthinking it. When I trigger an update, the system sorts everything into its proper place. If something is ambiguous, it prompts me with clarifying questions.
Prioritization comes down to tracking what's ahead. For example, I'm presenting at the ADHD conference in December, which means slides are due in November, giving me two months to prepare.
Russ Jones: So it reminds you, "Make sure you're working on those slides because it's September."
William Curb: Right. Below my active to-dos, I have upcoming projects. If an item sits untouched in that file for two weeks, it flags it: "Hey, you haven't touched this in two weeks and you said you wanted to."
Russ Jones: Are you going to package that up and sell it, or teach people how to set it up?
William Curb: I'm using Claude Code, essentially using the coding interface in a non-traditional way so it can directly read and edit my Obsidian Markdown files.
Russ Jones: I made a podcast finder tool using AI that you might appreciate. I'm 250 episodes in, and I never named episodes for SEO—I'd name them things like "Turd Mountain: How to Get Done with the Turds." So I fed all the transcripts in so people could search, "I can't get my laundry done today," and get the relevant episodes recommended.
William Curb: That's similar to why I learned it. I wanted to organize my episodes because I haven't been great about that over the years. I had the system scrape my website transcripts. It turns out 300 episodes is too much context for an LLM at once, so I had to process them in batches of 50 to extract the common themes I've covered over the last seven years.
Russ Jones: Do you ever feel like you're repeating yourself? I get that a lot—I'll think, "I swear I've talked about transitions before."
William Curb: All the time. I'll think I have a brand-new idea, only to realize not only have I covered it, but an older episode shares the exact same title. People will mention an episode to me and I won't even remember recording it. A coach once tried to help me with a problem by recommending an episode of my own podcast!
Russ Jones: "There's this guy named William Curb who could really help you with that!"
William Curb: Yeah, I was like, "Thanks, Jane. Appreciate it."
Russ Jones: How are you with listening to your own voice?
William Curb: Totally fine now. It was weird at first, but after doing so much editing, I got used to it.
Russ Jones: I edit my own show, and listening to myself still feels like painful exposure therapy.
William Curb: I actually stopped listening to my own episodes because I have an editor I trust. Plus, I get too bored listening to conversations I already had.
Russ Jones: That sounds like freedom.
William Curb: It was hard to let go at first, but after a busy week where I didn't get around to reviewing the audio, I realized everything turned out fine. Now I'm publishing episodes recorded three months ago before my summer break, and I barely remember what we talked about until I check the notes.
Russ Jones: Let me turn the tables on you: what is your big goal with Hacking Your ADHD moving forward? Where does it go from here?
William Curb: That's what I was wrestling with over the summer. After 300 episodes and seven years, I had to ask myself if I wanted to do another seven years. I started the podcast to help myself manage ADHD, and while it has accomplished that, there's always more to explore.
I love the bi-weekly episodes I do with Skye; having that structure provides accountability to actually read scientific research papers.
Russ Jones: Research papers are definitely dry. I'd rather listen to you and Skye break them down than read them myself.
William Curb: A lot of them are dense, and I often have to read them twice to understand them.
While I enjoy the creative writing involved in solo monologue episodes, they take a tremendous amount of energy to produce at the quality I expect from myself. I want to go bigger, so I'm working on a book about the tendency to continually ratchet up our efforts—running on hyperfocus and borrowing energy from tomorrow by sacrificing rest, which inevitably leads straight to burnout.
Russ Jones: Stealing energy from two days in the future.
William Curb: Exactly. Rather than writing another book on burnout recovery, I want to explore the mindset of how we drive ourselves into it in the first place.
Russ Jones: That's a compelling angle.
William Curb: My LLM setup has even been flagging relevant themes from past episodes to review for the book. But the challenge is making sure I don't fall into the exact trap I'm writing about. I caught myself planning to bring the podcast back, work on the book, prepare conference slides, manage family life—and realizing I was loading my plate right back up.
Russ Jones: Summer's over, back to work! You're becoming your own case study.
William Curb: It's an ongoing experiment.
Russ Jones: I struggle with that too. Turning 50, I sometimes wonder if I'm turning into a curmudgeon because I hit points where I think, "I don't want to do this anymore." I feel like I've said everything I need to say, and I get oppositional to my own efforts. I just want to be in the sandbox helping people take action, assuming everyone already knows the basics.
William Curb: Whenever I hit that wall of "I don't want to do this," I try to ask myself why. Am I bored? Do I feel it lacks value? That was the reason for my summer break: sitting down and realizing I had zero desire to do something I was choosing to do.
Russ Jones: What was the answer?
William Curb: I was simply exhausted and needed a real break. It also showed me that I need creative projects that are just for fun and not for public consumption. During our family road trip, I made expedition journals for my kids filled with local history and cryptographic puzzles. Working on that energized me instead of draining me. It highlighted the importance of distinguishing between what drains my energy and what replenishes it.
Russ Jones: That hits home. After 250 or 300 episodes, you've said so much that you feel like you've covered it all. Like actors on a sitcom after five seasons feeling like there's nothing left to explore. New people are always discovering the show, but to you, it feels like repeating the same philosophies.
William Curb: It wears on you, and you realize you need to introduce novelty for your own ADHD brain while helping others with theirs.
Russ Jones: Maybe we bring on musical guests and start singing about ADHD to keep it fresh!
William Curb: When a system breaks down, it's often not that the whole structure is flawed—it just needs an injection of novelty because it became boring.
Russ Jones: I love that. We can find fresh ways to approach familiar topics. For me, maybe that means bringing guests back. I got burned out on the logistical homework of scheduling, interviewing, and editing conversations, so I stopped. But having authentic, casual conversations like this one is energizing.
William Curb: Conversations with the right guests make podcasting fun, whereas the wrong guest leads straight to burnout. Adding novelty keeps systems sustainable without having to throw everything away.
Russ Jones: These casual conversations rooted in our lived experiences are the most rewarding.
This episode's Top Tips:
Let doing the task inform the system, you don’t need a complete grocery-shopping system before you can buy groceries. Start with enough of a plan to take action, notice the friction, and build around what actually happens.
When a system stops working, ask why it failed and just as importantly, why you want it back. Those are separate questions. Understanding what got in the way helps you adjust the system; remembering what it did for you helps you decide whether it’s worth restarting.
Try adding novelty before replacing everything, sometimes a system still meets your needs, but it’s become boring. Try changing one part of the experience while keeping the pieces that still work before throwing everything out.