Foundations of Productivity: How a Guy With Severe ADHD Learned to Run 10 Companies Without His Hair on Fire
People ask me some version of the same question constantly: "Kirk, how do you get so much done? How is your hair not on fire?"
Fair question. I'm balancing three kids, a marriage, a winery, Credit Union 2.0, speaking gigs, and roughly ten other companies I'm actively involved in. And I'm doing it with severe ADHD I didn't even know I had for most of my life, plus a father who generated a bajillion ideas and a mother who never let him forget the ones he didn't act on. So I've got a permanent inner monologue screaming that every idea must become action right now.
That's either a recipe for a meltdown or, if you channel it, a superpower. After 25 years of collecting tricks, tools, and systems, I've turned it into the latter. This is where we start.
First, figure out your actual "why."
Before any tool, get honest about what's draining you. Take ten quiet minutes and write down your biggest frustrations, pain points, and bottlenecks. Don't filter. My favorite version of this exercise: If I retired tomorrow and had a free week, what would I finally get done? I once made a list of about 20 things gnawing at me — including organizing 15 years of my kids' childhood videos, which I'd treated as proof I was failing as a dad. I'd been carrying that guilt for years. The actual task took seven minutes. Seven. Turns out high-def video from 2010 uploads in about eight seconds today. I haven't thought about it since.
A lot of your mental load is exactly like that — cobwebs you could clear in an afternoon if you'd just name them.
Then meet the single best tool I've ever found: the Productivity Planner.
I've used this thing for 15 years. It was created by Hal Elrod, the Miracle Morning guy and a friend of mine, and it's deceptively simple. Here's how it works:
Each week — I do it Sunday night, but Friday afternoon or Monday morning works too — you write down 15 things for the week. Five most important, then your second five, then your third five. Next to each, put the number of 30-minute cycles you think it'll take. Two-hour task? That's a 4. Six hours? A 12. You're training yourself to estimate, which is a skill most of us are hilariously bad at.
Then, as the week unfolds, you track how many cycles things actually took and fill in the bubbles. At the end of the week, you run a quick review: What were your wins? What didn't get done? What did you learn? What will you change?
If you only get your five most important things done each week — one a day — your life starts getting better, fast.
The counterintuitive part: put your personal stuff on the list FIRST.
We all instinctively load up the work tasks and then try to cram in "play golf with my son" at the bottom. Guarantee it won't fit. Flip it. Put the gym, the family dinner, the hike on there first, then fill the gaps with work. It balances far better, and you stop feeling guilty every time your husband asks if you're really going to skip your kid's baseball game to answer email.
Quick related hack I learned the hard way: I book three or four gym sessions a week assuming I'll cancel one. If you only book two and cancel one, you've missed your goal. Game your own system a little.
And stop agonizing over the "right" order.
This is the one that frees ADHD brains especially. People freeze trying to figure out the perfect sequence for their 50 ideas. In my experience, the order is mostly irrelevant. Pick the smallest possible thing, start it, and let momentum carry you. You don't plan your way to motion — you move your way into clarity.
One more thing the planner taught me over years of weekly reviews: spotting my own traps. When my wife asks me to "grab a quick coffee" at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday, that's not coffee. That's three hours of random errands that will hijack my entire day. I love her. I still schedule a proper date night instead.
That's the foundation. Define your why, run the planner, protect what matters, and just start. Next time, we get into the fast, dirty fixes you can deploy tomorrow.
Disruption with a side of humor —
Kirk Drake
