Entrepreneur 101: increase your brain power

Explore strategies to manage ADHD and decision fatigue for entrepreneurs. Learn time management, meal prep, and automation tips to boost productivity and mental clarity.

The drama of our brain — and especially with ADHD brains — is that taking any single decision will eat up some mental energy that you will only recover when getting proper rest. And this whether you are taking a critical life-or-death decision or decide which item to get from McDonald’s. On the other hand, being an entrepreneur requires so much decision-making that it would give ADHD¹ to neurotypicals.

So how do you increase the amount of decisions you can take? In a way you can’t, because of what I said. But on the other hand, you can by focusing yourself on the decisions that matter.

The question now becomes: how do you automate the decisions that do not matter? Some call me psycho, but here are the strategies that I’ve applied throughout my life to avoid useless choices.

Time management

Managing your time and priorities is a daunting task. A million things more urgent one than the other try to grab your attention. And if you’re like me, most likely you will just hyperfocus on the fun thing of the moment and forget completely about the rest. Which for the longest time has been my time management technique: just focus on one thing at a time, for one month or more straight.

And if you are bootstrapping it’s probably fine even though it can hurt you in the sense that you get completely blindsided by what you are doing and never take the time to do basic things such as checking for competitors, exploring advices that you’ve received or even simply looking for solutions that are not 100% in-house development.

Instead, you need to get a scheduler such as Reclaim, which is now my god and master, commanding my actions through my agenda.

The first thing it does is take a todo list and schedule it. If I’m able to break down the things I have to do into small, actionable tasks (that can later be extended or shortened) then it will automatically schedule all of them around my meetings and other obligations, while also making sure that everything moves in parallel and in accordance with their respective priorities and deadlines.

The other thing is that it allows to plan 1:1 meetings with your team. As you become a manager it’s essential to talk to your developers regularly and if you’re like me with no notion of time then 6 months can happen without realizing you didn’t follow up on anyone from your team. It will find the time for this in your agenda and make it happen.

Lastly it will allow you to have various rituals like checking your mails or monitoring tools. Super useful to keep an eye on things regularly while also working like crazy on other stuff.

Overall, Reclaim has massively decreased the amount of decisions that I need to take on a weekly basis, allowed me to multitask while it was previously impossible for me and also allows me to have an idea of when I’m going to be able to deliver a specific task.

Food

Don’t get me wrong I am a huge foodie and in fact spend most of my holidays hunting down restaurants and bars to discover local tastes. But let’s not get confused: there is eating as a hobby and there is eating because otherwise you’ll faint on your keyboard. I’m talking about the second one here.

Depending on your personal preferences, revenue levels and overall situation, different tactics can apply. For myself I’ve had the following ones:

Frozen dishes. The basic version is to go to your local frozen foods supermarket (Picard in France), stack up a month’s worth of food in your cart and store this in your freezer. While highly criticized by friends and roomates for this practices, I believe that it is a relatively balanced and extremely efficient way of managing your meals. Not to mention cheap, since I’ve basically been going through my student years and early entrepreneur stages with this technique.

Food subscriptions. In the same vein but definitely tastier and healthier you will see subscription services like Wetaca in Spain. Did not always exist, not sure how easy is it to find over the globe, but overall a cheap and efficient way to get relatively balanced meals. It’s what I’m currently doing most of the time and it’s great, they even change the menu for me and I don’t need to decide anything.

Recipe round-robin. Entrepreneur life has highs and lows and there was a short period during which I had to dip below the poverty line. Not a great time but probably the healthiest eating habits I’ve ever had. What I did was create about 5 to 10 recipes that took 5 minutes to cook then go to the market every week-end to buy the products directly from the producer and then cook just those recipes on repeat.

Fast-food obsession. My theory about fast food is that it’s only good if you can eat it every day of the week at every meal. When I lived in India I used to work in an IT building where all there restaurants were of a mediocre quality and it was becoming quite hard to alternate between the same dishes all the time. Eventually I ended up eating McDonald’s for every literal meal from breakfast to dinner. Never lost so much weight so fast for some reason. Anyways, it’s not a healthy option but if you don’t abuse you can get through a hard year or two without issue using this strategy.

Overall, it’s important to place your bets in accordance to what works for you.

Transport

So surely you’ll want to move around. For example to go to work, to meet clients, etc. Let’s see how you can avoid useless pain in the process.

The first strategy to optimize transport is to not need transport. Start your company from your home, work remotely and save up on an office, etc. Can be daunting for the mental health, but for a time it is a good fix.

Another important point — except if you’re american I guess? — is to live in a densely populated area. By having all necessities close-by you avoid yourself complicated trips and can instead walk there most of the time. Which is especially important for the next point as well…

Don’t have a car. Cars are commonly known as money hogs because of the price you need to pay and on top of all the mechanical issues you’re going to get with it. People reading this claim that this statement is due to the fact I don’t have a driver’s license — and it is linked — but it’s also that up until recently I could not afford one in terms of costs and in terms of mental load. Instead, public transportation, taxis or car rental can often be a more economic option and a much lower mental load. Of course, YMMV.

Shopping

During my early years as an entrepreneur, the Christmas period was quite a stressful one. On top of being generally a very dense period in terms of work — client’s budgets need to be spent before the end of the year — you also need to think which gifts you’re going to get for your family. And when you pay yourself with one peanut on a half, the issue becomes quite the balancing act.

You basically end up going around all the shops of the city center fishing for ideas and taking notes of what could potentially be the best combination of things you could generate.

This was an issue until I realized that all I had to do — and sorry if it sounds obvious to everyone now — was to shop online. Instead of physically spending your energy walking a hundred thousand steps over your Saturday afternoon, you can simply switch from tab to tab, order and wait for things to arrive home.

These days I’m almost never buying anything in physical stores. Which can be pushed even further with delivery apps. Since they allow you to search items by name it gives you an index of all the objects and brands you can find in various stores. Want to drink your favorite kind of beer within the next 30 minutes and you don’t know where to find it? Type the name in Glovo and you’ll get a completely random kebab shop open at 2am which can ship it to you.

Administrative emails

If you’re like me you probably hate replying to emails, especially those that have few connection to your actual business. Administrative stuff, tax declarations, getting refunds from an e-commerce, etc. But I’ve managed to lower the cost of doing so substencially by using ChatGPT in a strategic way.

First I’ll take the email/message and ask ChatGPT to summarize what it says, figure what they want from me and give me options of what actions I could take.

Then I’ll pick an option and ask ChatGPT to reply accordingly. I’ll say it in my words, not constructed, not polite. And then it will write an nice long polite answer that says exactly what I need. Copy/pasta, send and done. Such a relief to proceed this way!

Entertainment

It’s important as a founder to change your mind from work regularly, otherwise you’d just become completely crazy. In terms of entertainment however, everyone got their jam so I’m not going to get super exhaustive, but let’s throw a few ideas.

Obviously everyone is going to have some kind of VOD subscription, but I also like to structure my entertainment around no-decision options.

It’s going to sound dumb, but TV is a good option. Especially paid cinema channels. Turn on your TV in the evening on a channel that you know you enjoy and you’ll for sure see something fresh wihtout spending any neuron on chosing it. On top if that it can rythm your day if you work from home and give you a motivation to stop working.

Another thing I like to do is to show up in big bobo cinema in the heart of Paris and picking a movie randomly on a combination of what is showing in the next hour and what posters are catching my eye. No reading synopsis, nor thinking what the movie is going to be about… I’ve seen amazing movies like that, totally recommend.

Conclusion

You could read this article thinking: why is idiot flaunting his lazyness over the Internet, but that would be missing the point. Throughout my life I’ve had to deal with a termendous workload and fairly low executive planning skills. You cannot do it all. And yes a lot of the techniques mentioned here are individually obvious if you start considering the issue but what matters most is to create for yourself a consistent way of life with the right combination of everything that makes your life as unloaded as possible, leaving your brain free to think what will make a difference in your business.

1. ADHD is defined by the symptoms and not the root cause. So if your life gets overloading, you can develop ADHD just because you have too many things going on.