Done doesn't mean you're happy with it. Done means a stranger can buy it. Let the AI take the first hit, then ship it small, today.

Someone called it this week: "these posts are AI generated." Correct. All of them. I hand the AI my raw stories, it hands back sentences, I keep the lines that sound like me. Even the voice on this video is a clone I built. You didn't notice. That's the point. Full story: https://lachiefreedom.substack.com/p/yes-it-was-ai

Thanks mate. For me it feels less like “I can’t concentrate” and more like there are 14 radios playing in the room and one of them might be important. I can sometimes focus brutally hard. That’s the annoying bit. The problem is steering it. Bad day: I know exactly what I need to do, I care about it, and my brain still won’t hand me the keys. AI helps because I can hand it the steering wheel for the first 3 minutes.

For months, someone who loves me kept asking how the work was going. Same answer every time. "Still on the big project. Nearly there." In my head that was true. It genuinely felt almost done. Here is what I never said out loud: there was no big project. There was infrastructure. Systems for the thing instead of the thing. One more wall to build so I would never have to open the door and let anyone in. "Nearly there" was not a lie I was telling her. It was a lie I had told myself so many times I believed it. The worst part of hiding is not that strangers do not see your work. It is that the people in your house watch you vanish into it, and you keep telling them you are nearly there, and you both slowly stop believing it. I shipped something last month. First finished thing out the door in years. The project was never the hard part. Being seen was.

Thank you as always for the sats bro 🙏

I have ADHD. For 30 years, every productivity system I tried worked for a week, then died. AI is the first thing that actually gets me moving. Not as a coach. As a prosthetic for the executive function I don't have on demand. Here are 8 copy-paste prompts that do the heavy lifting. Steal them: 1. When you can't start. Don't ask AI to break the task down (choosing how to break it down is its own freeze). Ask it to DO the first three minutes for you: "I have to (task) but I can't start. Write me the literal first three minutes as instructions I just follow. One concrete physical action per minute. Make it so small there's no decision left. Minute 1 has zero choices in it. No pep talk. Start at minute 1." 2. When "first three minutes" is still too big. "This task is too big to start: (task). Don't give me a plan. Name the single smallest DELIVERABLE inside it, one thing I could finish in 30 minutes, start now, with what's already in front of me. It has to be visible or sendable when done, not 'research' or 'think about'. One deliverable, not three. Then write the first three minutes of doing THAT." 3. When you're stuck choosing. "I'm stuck between: (options). What matters to me, including petty stuff like 'least boring to set up': (your real criteria). Don't give me a balanced view. No pros and cons. Commit. First line, nothing before it: the ONE you'd pick. Then three sentences why, against my criteria. Then one line: what I give up by picking it. If it's a coin-flip, say so and pick whatever is cheapest to undo." 4. When you're stuck in hyperfocus and can't pull out. "Stop. This is a hyperfocus state check. Don't reassure me. Ask me these one at a time, make me answer each in one honest line: 1. What am I doing, and is it STILL the best use of this time? 2. Did the work actually get better in the last 30 min, or am I just polishing? 3. Body check: water, food, movement, bathroom, what have I skipped? 4. If a friend were watching, what would they tell me to do? Then give me ONE next action for the next 3 minutes." 5. When your energy and your to-do list don't match. "Here's my honest state right now: (energy, focus, mood, time, anything physical: pain, hunger, meds). Here's my task pool: (paste it). Work out the state-cost of each yourself. Tell me the ONE task that best FITS the state I'm actually in, not the most important one. One line why. If nothing fits, say so, and tell me the state-change to do first: food, water, a walk." 6. When the work is done but you're frozen on shipping it. "I need to (send / post / publish) this but I'm frozen on the exposure. What it needs to say, however rough: (dump the points). Draft it in my voice, ready to go, so my job is to tweak and send, not write. One clean draft, not three. Keep it honest and brief. Don't make it grovel or over-explain, that's the RSD talking, not good writing." 7. When you have to stop and you're scared you'll lose where you are. "We're closing this session. Write a handoff to future-me, who has a flat battery and no memory of today. - THE GOAL: the outcome I'm after, not the task. One line. - WHERE I GOT TO: one line. - NEXT ACTION: the first thing tomorrow, concrete enough to start in 3 minutes. - DECISIONS (top 3): 'decided X because Y' so I don't re-litigate. - PARKED: what I set aside on purpose. Keep it under one screen, plain markdown." 8. Run this one every single day. It's the only metric the ADHD traps can't fool: "Did anything SHIP today, or did I just build and engage? One honest line. If nothing shipped, name one tiny thing I can ship in the next 10 minutes. No pep talk." Building feels like progress. Shipping IS progress. This prompt keeps me honest about the difference. That's 8 of them. They're not scripture, tune them to your voice, but don't polish them forever. A prompt you run beats a prompt you perfect. I keep the full set, every prompt organised by the moment your brain jams, in a free library. No email needed. It's right here: https://cyberfreedom.org/prompt-library

I've started hundreds of things. Business ideas, side projects, whole systems built to finally get my life in order. Most died in week one. So when everyone said AI would change my life, my honest thought was: great, one more thing I'll set up and never use. And for a bit, I was right. AI made my ADHD worse first. Not because it's bad. Because of what an ADHD brain does with a shiny new tool: I turned it into infrastructure to build. Days spent engineering the perfect AI setup. Actual work done with it: almost none. Here's what I had wrong. I was treating AI like a coach, something to fix my discipline. But using a coach still needs the thing I don't have on demand: executive function. AI isn't a coach. It's closer to glasses. You don't need discipline to put glasses on. You just see. So stop asking it to make you disciplined. Borrow the function instead. The one that jams: starting. Open free ChatGPT or Claude in a browser. No app. No setup. Paste this and fill the blank with the thing you've been avoiding: "I have ADHD and I can't get started on this: ___. No motivational speech, no giant plan. Just the single smallest first step, something I could do in the next two minutes, and make it stupidly easy." That's it. That's the whole first win. No system to abandon. And when you fall off for two weeks (you will, it's fine), you don't start over. You paste the same thing again. It's glasses, not a streak. Nothing decayed while you were gone. I put a pile of these, one for each moment your brain jams, in a free library: https://cyberfreedom.org/prompt-library

Fifteen years ago I built a thing called Band4Hope. Copper wristbands, each with its own ID, meant to pass hand to hand across the world and light up a pin on a map every time one moved. The first version actually sold. Ten thousand bands. Real people, real map, real thing out in the world. Then I rebuilt it. Spent thirty grand and the better part of a dev team's year. Got it finished. And then I sat on a finished website for months. Not building it. Not fixing it. It was done. I just could not press publish. My partner at the time asked me what I wanted to do with it and I said "it deserves one more crack." That was the most honest lie I've ever told. I knew it was finished. I just could not be seen. When I finally launched, I recorded the announcement video about thirty times and showed it to everyone I knew, asking each of them if it was good enough. Posted it. Crickets. A handful of people ever used the site. Then nothing. For years I filed that under "the idea failed." It didn't. The idea shipped a version that sold ten thousand units. What actually happened is I stood in front of a finished thing and couldn't move, because finished meant someone finally got to judge it. Took me until this year, in my forties, to name it. Not laziness. Not a bad idea. A nervous system tapping out the second I might be seen. I don't sit on finished things anymore. That's the whole change. Everything else is detail.

ADHD has a funny failure mode: you can spend a week building the perfect machine to avoid a 2 minute post. Ask me how I know. Today's cure is tiny and annoying: publish the essay, post the note, walk away before it quietly expands from "small tweak" to "new operating system."

Confession: the manual is live and my first paid stranger still hasn't appeared. A blurry screenshot of the truth. The move is boring: keep showing the thing to people who might need it, until a stranger pays or the offer tells me what is wrong.

I keep wanting to build one more clever system before I sell the thing I already made. This is my brain turning fear into a spreadsheet and calling it progress. Today's job: publish the essay, post the useful comments, point people at the manual. Being seen is the work.

You've got a finished thing you haven't shipped. You know exactly which one. It's not perfectionism, it's a pain response, and you can't reason a flinch away. So change who gets exposed: let the AI be your first critic. Done means a stranger can buy it. https://blossom.primal.net':