I Built the Productivity System I Wish Existed as an ADHD Engineer
After years of failed GTD attempts and abandoned Notion setups, I built templates that actually work with ADHD brains.
I’ve tried every productivity system.
GTD. Bullet journaling. Pomodoro. Time blocking. The “second brain” thing. Each one worked for about two weeks before joining the graveyard of abandoned systems.
The pattern was always the same: find new system, get excited, customize obsessively, use it perfectly for 10 days, miss one day, feel guilty, avoid it, never open it again.
Sound familiar?
The Problem Isn’t Discipline
Here’s what took me years to understand: these systems aren’t built for ADHD brains.
They assume you have consistent energy levels. You don’t.
They assume you can maintain complex routines. You can’t—not without enormous friction that eventually wins.
They assume linear task progression. But your brain wants to hyperfocus on thing C while thing A sits there judging you.
Traditional productivity is built for neurotypical consistency. ADHD runs on interest, urgency, novelty, and challenge—not importance and deadlines.
When you try to force a system designed for one type of brain onto another, you don’t get productivity. You get guilt. You get shame spirals. You get the creeping suspicion that you’re fundamentally broken.
You’re not broken. Your productivity system is.
The Two-Week Death Spiral
Every ADHD person knows this cycle intimately. You discover a new system—maybe it’s Notion, maybe it’s a fancy app, maybe it’s the latest productivity guru’s framework. The novelty hits your dopamine receptors like a shot of espresso.
You spend hours setting it up. Days, even. The customization is part of the appeal. You’re not procrastinating, you’re preparing. This time will be different.
And for a while, it is. The system is new. It’s interesting. Your brain rewards you for engaging with it.
Then life happens. You miss a day. The system doesn’t account for missed days—it assumes you’ll be back tomorrow, picking up where you left off. But you won’t. The guilt has already started building.
By day three of avoidance, opening the app feels like confronting a disappointed parent. By week two, you’ve mentally filed it under “things that don’t work for me” and started looking for the next solution.
The problem isn’t your discipline. The problem is that these systems punish inconsistency instead of expecting it.
What Actually Works
After enough failed experiments, I started noticing what did work:
Single-Surface Systems
If I can’t see everything in one place, it doesn’t exist. Nested folders and pages are where my tasks go to die.
The best day I ever had with a task manager was when I kept everything on a single Notion page. No navigation. No “where did I put that?” No clicking through three levels of hierarchy to find my actual work.
One screen. Everything visible. That’s it.
Energy-Aware Scheduling
My 10am brain can do deep coding. Solving complex architectural problems. Writing intricate logic.
My 3pm brain? It can answer emails. Maybe do some admin work. Definitely not debug a race condition.
Traditional systems say “do the important things first.” But importance doesn’t correlate with cognitive demand. Sometimes the important thing is a draining two-hour meeting. Sometimes it’s a quick email.
What works: matching task difficulty to current energy level. A simple dropdown—high energy, medium, low—that filters what I should be working on right now.
Context Capture Before Switching
The research says it takes 23 minutes to fully refocus after a context switch. That number haunted me. With ADHD, context switches happen constantly—sometimes because I’m distracted, sometimes because a new thought pulled me away, sometimes because someone needed something.
But I discovered something: the 23 minutes isn’t mandatory. The reason it takes so long is because you’re rebuilding context from scratch. Your brain has to remember what you were doing, where you were in the task, what your next step was, what files you had open.
If you write that down before switching, you can recover in 2-3 minutes instead. Just a quick note: “Working on the authentication flow. Just finished the login form. Next: add password validation. Open files: auth.ts, login.svelte.”
When you come back—whether it’s 10 minutes later or three days later—you have a breadcrumb trail back to exactly where you were.
AI as an External Processor
This one changed everything for me.
My brain generates ideas faster than it can organize them. Thoughts arrive like popcorn—random, unpredictable, piling up. Traditional advice says to capture them in an inbox. But the inbox becomes another pile to process, another guilt source.
Claude and ChatGPT became my external prefrontal cortex.
When I’m overwhelmed by a project, I dump everything at an AI and ask it to organize it into steps. When I can’t figure out what’s important, I describe the situation and ask for priority sorting. When I’m stuck, I ask “what am I probably forgetting?”
The AI doesn’t judge. It doesn’t get tired. It doesn’t sigh when I come back to the same problem for the fifth time. It just processes.
I’ve written extensively about how I build with Claude Code and preventing context loss. These systems emerged directly from working with my ADHD brain, not against it.
Forgiveness Built In
Systems that punish inconsistency don’t survive. I needed templates that expect gaps and make returning easy.
No streak counters. No “you missed 3 days” notifications. No graphs showing my declining engagement. Just a clean slate every time I open it, ready for whatever I can give it today.
The best productivity tool for ADHD is one that never makes you feel bad for being human.
The Templates I Built
I packaged what actually works into Notion templates, starting with the core system:
Daily Driver Dashboard (Available Now)
Everything on one screen. Today’s tasks, energy level selector, brain dump capture, and current focus indicator. No navigation required.
The energy level dropdown is the magic piece. Set it when you sit down, and the dashboard shows you only tasks that match your current capacity. High energy? Here are your deep work items. Low energy? Here are the quick wins and admin tasks.
This is the foundation. If you only use one template, this is the one.
Coming Soon (Free for Early Buyers)
When you buy now, you’ll automatically receive these additional templates as I complete them:
Project Hyperfocus Tracker - Captures your context when you go deep on something. When you come back after an interruption (or three days later), you can pick up in minutes instead of rebuilding from scratch.
10-Minute Weekly Review - Three questions, ten minutes, done. Designed for inconsistency—because most weekly reviews get abandoned after you skip one.
AI Prompt Library - 40+ prompts I actually use with Claude and ChatGPT for ADHD-specific challenges. Breaking down tasks, unsticking paralysis, reality-checking timelines, and more.
I’ll email you when each one is ready. No extra charge—early buyers get everything.
Who This Is For
You might find these useful if:
- You’ve abandoned more productivity systems than you can count
- Your Notion is either completely empty or an overwhelming maze
- You know you’re capable but can’t seem to consistently execute
- Traditional advice like “just break it into smaller tasks” makes you want to scream
- You’ve started suspecting the problem isn’t laziness
You probably don’t need these if:
- GTD or time-blocking already works great for you
- You prefer building systems from scratch
- You don’t use Notion
- You’re looking for a magic solution that requires zero effort
I’m not selling discipline. I’m selling friction reduction.
Get the Templates
I’m selling these as a bundle for $29.
Get the ADHD Engineer’s Productivity System
One purchase, lifetime access, all future updates included.
I’m genuinely proud of these. They’re the system I wish existed five years ago—and the one I actually use every day now.
The templates won’t fix your ADHD. Nothing will “fix” ADHD, because it’s not broken—it’s different. But they can reduce the friction between your brain and your work. They can stop punishing you for being inconsistent. They can meet you where you are instead of where productivity culture thinks you should be.
That’s worth something.
The ADHD Architect Series
This post is part of a series exploring how ADHD traits translate to technical skills:
- Pattern Recognition - How the pattern-matching brain becomes an AI architect
- Parallel Processing - 47 background threads and distributed systems
- Novelty Seeking - Boredom as an innovation engine
- Abstraction - When you can’t remember details, you think in systems
- Chaos Resilience - Managing brain chaos prepares you for system failures
Questions? Just reply in the comments or email me directly. I read and respond to everything.