When Lotte first got in touch with me, she described her situation as personal chaos.
Too many projects, couldn’t initiate any of them, let alone see them through. Her inbox was something she was actively avoiding. Even the tiniest tasks had become impossible.
Not always dramatic. Sometimes it’s just: someone spotted that, so you didn’t have to.
That’s what ADHD business support looks like in practice.
And that’s what three years of working together every week has looked like for Lotte. We’ve built a Gmail system she can actually navigate, tracked projects she doesn’t have to hold in her head, dealt with forms she couldn’t face, and recovered a train refund she’d completely written off.
That last one happened live, in the middle of recording this interview. She said “oh, you got me my money back,” and I genuinely hadn’t noticed it had landed.
Small. Unexpected. The whole point.
Why “just get organised” isn’t useful advice
Lotte has ADHD. That means everything in her inbox feels equally urgent, all the time.
It means initiating tasks is genuinely difficult, not a character flaw.
It means the standard advice — prioritise ruthlessly, build better habits, have you tried a planner — lands somewhere between useless and actively demoralising.
What she needed wasn’t a productivity course or a 372-module system for inbox zero. She needed someone to sit alongside her and say:
- this one first
- that one later
- that one probably won’t matter in two weeks, so let’s park it
That’s a specific kind of support. It requires someone who’s been inside the same kind of brain, not someone who read a productivity book and thinks they get it.
I’m autistic. I’ve spent years working out how to get things done in a way that fits my brain, and I use all of that when I’m working with clients. It’s not a methodology I borrowed. It’s just how I think.
What changed for Lotte
She can open her emails now without immediately shutting down.
She has categories. She has a system that holds things so she doesn’t have to. When the overwhelming feeling comes back (and it does), she knows there’s a session coming where something will shift.
The chaos doesn’t disappear. It just stops feeling hopeless.
She said something I keep coming back to:
“I used to immediately blame myself when things went wrong. Now I think: maybe the person wasn’t being clear. Maybe this system has too many hoops.”
That shift in how she talks to herself about her own brain isn’t something I put on a services page. But it’s real, and it matters, and it happened because she stopped trying to operate like someone whose brain works differently to hers.
What this kind of ADHD business support doesn’t look like
It doesn’t look like handing someone a template and walking away.
It doesn’t look like working out what functions for most people and expecting your client to stretch to fit it.
Before Lotte found an approach that worked, she kept trying to operate the way other people do. She’d keep up for a bit, then inevitably fail, then feel worse about herself than before she’d started. She’d beat herself up for not initiating projects immediately, even when immediately was neurologically impossible.
The support that actually helped was someone who noticed when a system wasn’t working and tinkered with it. Who could look at an overflowing inbox full of things that all felt equally urgent and say:
No. Here’s what matters this week. Here’s what we’re filing. And here’s what is not your problem until September.
No shame. No “you should be able to do this yourself.” Just: here’s what we’re doing, let’s go.
“Someone’s in it with me”
One thing Lotte said that stuck with me:
“I feel like I’ve got a partner in the business of my life.”
Not a service provider. Not someone she has to manage or brief or look after. A partner. Someone who knows where things are, keeps track of what matters, and won’t let important things quietly slide.
She also told me she doesn’t have to mask with me. That she can say “I can’t do this today” and we’ll just redirect. That when I say I’m not up for something, it gives her permission to do the same.
She doesn’t have to perform competence. She just has to show up.
That’s not a feature. I’m not going to write it up as a bullet point. But it’s what happens when you’re not working around your brain — you’re working with it.
If you’re reading this and thinking: that sounds like what I need
Lotte has a thought on that.
“If you’re thinking about working with Jenn, you probably already know you need it. That call is there for a reason.”
She’s right.
In my experience, the people who need this kind of ADHD business support are not sitting around aspirationally browsing for a treat. They’re the ones with seventeen things in their inbox they can’t look at, a project that’s been “nearly ready” for four months, and a sinking feeling that they’re the problem.
They’re not the problem. The systems are. Or the absence of them.
The refund lands. The label gets created. The email that felt impossible gets filed, and it turns out the world didn’t end.
None of it is glamorous. All of it compounds.
If you’re running your business on anxiety and crossed fingers, here’s how to work with me.
