02 Your ADHD Brain Was Built for This | Outsourced Executive Function

Everyone's worried AI is going to replace their creativity. My ADHD brain says the opposite is true. This episode is about why hyperfocus, pattern recognition, and nonlinear thinking make you and me built for the AI era, and how to actually use AI as outsourced executive function instead of just fancy Google.

📖 Want the full write-up? This episode's blog post goes deeper than the podcast—plus every link mentioned. Tap here to read it.

In this episode:

• Why ADHD brains are wired to thrive in the AI shift, not fall behind in it
• Hyperfocus, pattern recognition, and nonlinear thinking as an unfair advantage instead of just a diagnosis
• Using AI as outsourced executive function—brain dumps, prioritizing, and getting unstuck from decision paralysis
• What NOT to use AI for: the thinking, judgment, and decisions that are still yours to make
• How "Chad" (yes, my AI bot) helped land a book title
• Protecting your brain and your nervous system from AI's dopamine hijack
• The golden rule: AI should make you more yourself, not less

Tools & Resources:

• ChatGPT—My all-purpose AI assistant, including the voice feature I call "Chad"
• Claude—My go-to for long, complicated work
• Littlebird—watches what you're doing on your computer and builds SOPs from it

✨ Grab the free 5 AI Prompts to Get Your To-Do List Under Control Today

Go back to Episode 1 for the full story of how I got here.

Find me @hey.katmurphy: 📱 Instagram | 📘 Facebook | 🎵 TikTok | 📺 YouTube

💌 Get 3 ideas + 2 loves + 1 tip in your inbox every week. That's The Shiny List, my free weekly newsletter—no fluff, five minutes or less. Sign up free →

Hit follow/subscribe so the next one lands automatically. 🧡

Keywords

adhd and ai, ai for adhd, adhd productivity, executive function, outsourced executive function, ai for millennials, hyperfocus, adhd brain, ai tools for adhd, ai and creativity, adhd and creativity, practical ai, how to use ai, ai boundaries, pretty shiny things podcast

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

AI is going to replace your creativity. That's the headline everywhere, and if you've got an ADHD brain, it probably stings extra because the tangents, the big ideas, the way you connect the dots nobody else sees, that's supposedly the first thing on the chopping block. Here's the twist. For a brain like mine, AI's totally doing the opposite.

Stick around. By the end of the episode, you'll believe it too.

This is the Pretty Shiny Things podcast, a podcast for ADHD millennials who went through school, got ahead in a career, and built a whole life using nothing but dial-up AOL and a Trapper Keeper. And now it feels like everyone else picked up a new language overnight while you missed the memo. I'm Kat, and each week we'll talk about my favorite pretty shiny things, the actual useful ways to use AI to take some of the 400 lists, calendars, bills, and side hustle admin out of your brain and off your plate.

Not so you can do more, but so you have more time to be present with your family, be creative, or finally build the thing you've only had time to dream about. If you're ready to stop feeling behind and start using AI in a way that actually works for your brain, you're in the right place.

If you caught last week's episode, you know I left you with some big questions about where AI actually fits into your life. Today I'm answering them, starting with the biggest fear people have going into this whole thing. But first, here's what's actually happening out there right now. Most people are overwhelmed by AI. It showed up fast. It does about a million different things. Nobody handed out an instruction manual, and everyone is quietly panicking that they're already behind.

And by the way, I felt this panic. That's part of the reason this podcast exists. So go listen to episode one if you want that full story. But here's the part almost nobody's talking about. This stuff might actually be built for brains like ours. Think about what ADHD brains are already good at.

One, hyperfocus. When something actually grabs us, we can go deep in a way a lot of people can't. Two, pattern recognition. We connect the dots other people don't even see are related. Three, nonlinear thinking. We jump around instead of marching in a straight line from A to B to C. Four, fast idea generation. We can throw out 10 different directions before somebody else has even finished writing down the first one. And five, a higher tolerance for trying something messy and seeing what happens instead of needing it to be perfect before we're allowed to start.

Now, that's not a list of symptoms. Listen again. Hyperfocus, pattern recognition, nonlinear thinking, fast idea generation, and a high tolerance for starting in a mess. That is basically a roadmap for using AI well. The world didn't design AI for ADHD brains on purpose, but it kind of accidentally did. So the future belongs to people who think sideways instead of in a straight line, and if that's you, you have been training for this for longer than you think. You just didn't know that that's what you were training for.

Now I wanna pause here because I don't want this to sound like I'm telling you to just blindly trust every piece of AI full speed ahead, no questions asked. That's not it either. There are real concerns about this stuff. I don't think they should just go away because it's convenient for me to ignore them. There's the environmental impact, which is so real. The ethics of how these models get built and what they get trained on is a legitimate conversation. And there are questions about whose jobs are affected and who gets left out of the conversation. Those are entirely valid and important, too.

But here's what I noticed for myself. While I was sitting with those concerns, trying to decide whether I was even allowed to use this stuff, the technology was being shaped without me, without most of us, honestly, and I felt left behind.

So instead of opting out completely or going in with zero thought, I opted in on my own terms. I get to hold my concerns and still use the tool thoughtfully. Those two things are not mutually exclusive, even though they can feel like they are. And this is probably a good place to answer the bigger questions underneath all of this because I know it's in the back of some of your minds. Won't AI make us lazy? Won't it kill our creativity and stop us from actually thinking for ourselves? Here's my answer, and no, it is not, "No, AI is wonderful. Don't worry about it," because I have an AI podcast, and that's what you'd expect. It's this. You're using it for the wrong things if it's replacing the thinking you actually wanted to be doing. So let the robots organize the admin, but you have to have the idea. Don't automate your opinions and your voice. That's the whole AI guardrail, and we're gonna get into that a little more later in the episode.

So to review, opting into AI on your own terms while protecting your peace is not use it for everything and stop thinking altogether. It's choosing on purpose what role it gets to play in your life. You're allowed to have concerns and still decide it's worth your attention. Again, those are not conflicting ideas.

Now that we've cleared that up, let's get practical, because opting in on your own terms doesn't mean much if you're not actually using the thing well.

So last week I was talking to my mom about this new thing I'm doing, this podcast. And she goes, "Oh, I use ChatGPT all the time now." And I said, "That's great, but do you actually use it or do you use it like Google?" And she paused, because that's actually the question I want you to ask yourself, too. Before you tell me you already use AI, are you really using it or are you using it like Google? Because there is a huge difference, and that difference is honestly what's going to make or break how useful this stuff can end up being for you.

Using it like Google looks like typing in one question, skimming the answer, maybe asking a follow-up, and then walking away from it. It's a slightly fancier search engine, and that's not nothing, but it's not even close to what this can actually do, especially for brains like ours. Actually using it looks like a full-on conversation. It looks like dumping in the mess that's in your head and asking it to help you make sense of it. It looks like going back and forth, correcting it, giving it more context, telling it that it's not quite right, trying again, here's what I actually meant. You get the idea. The difference between asking someone for a fact and actually working through a problem with them out loud together.

I actually have a perfect example from this week. We were in the office going back and forth again on a book title for Hard Knock Press, and we'd been circling the same handful of options for weeks and kind of getting nowhere. So I said, "Let's just ask ChatGPT," and I pulled out my phone, and I turned on the voice feature.

So I rambled into it for a few minutes, what the book was about, who it's for, what we already tried, what was working. And then this voice comes back, a guy with a British accent, responding in the most natural human way you can imagine, and everyone in the room looked like they'd seen a ghost. I think they thought that I was just using talk to text, but I was actually starting a conversation with Chad, short for Chadwick, which is the name I call my male British voice assistant on ChatGPT.

So anyway, now I'm chatting about the book title, and the Hard Knock Press publisher jumps in and says something out loud to the room and looks at me and goes, "Can you tell it that?" And I just looked at him and waited for Chad's response. And Chad went, "Hmm, let me think about that for a second." And this guy's eyes lit up 'cause now Chad is answering him, and they're going back and forth in real time, getting feedback on marketing and creative suggestions, and it was a real conversation amongst all of us in the room talking to a phone like it was another person sitting at the table. And it was just hilarious watching their faces.

By the end of it, we had our title. We had our subtitle. We had our sub-subtitle for the cover only. And then I asked it to mock up a cover, and it came back in, like, five minutes with something genuinely beautiful and good enough that we might actually use it for the real book. That's the whole difference right there. Nobody typed in one question to a search bar and skimmed an answer. We talked through a problem out loud together until we landed somewhere that was so much better than where any of us had gotten after weeks of brainstorming.

So with that distinction in mind, here's what actually using it looks like for me in practice.

I think of AI as an outsourced executive function. If that's a term that's new to you, an executive function is basically your brain's management system, the part of the brain that plans and prioritizes, starts tasks, switches between tasks, and keeps track of time. It's conveniently exactly the part of the ADHD brain that tends to struggle the most. Here's what it looks like in practice with actual examples, not just theory.

You know when you've got like two dozen things circling in your head at once and you genuinely can't figure out which one to start? Instead of sitting there spinning, I will brain dump the entire mess into AI, every single thing, no order, no filter. I'll even talk it in so I don't have to type, and then I'll say, "Organize this into an actual plan for me." All of it goes in, and out comes something I can actually follow in an order that actually makes sense. That alone has probably saved me more mental energy than almost anything else I use it for.

Or decision paralysis. I will straight up tell it, "I have 10 things on my plate today. Help me prioritize." Or, "I'm stuck in between these two options and I can't make myself pick. Help me think it through." Not because I want AI making my actual life decisions for me, and we're gonna talk about exactly where that line is in a minute, but because sometimes you just need to hand the spinning to something else for 60 seconds so your brain can actually land somewhere instead of circling the runway forever.

I also use it for scheduling. If I've got a bunch of errands all over town, I might ask it to batch them so I'm not wasting time and gas driving back and forth all day. I use it to help plan meals and groceries for the week because left to my own devices, I will rebuild the same mental list from scratch every single Sunday and then forget half of it anyway. And lately, I've even got it connected straight into Instacart, and it pulls up what I reorder every week and asks a couple quick questions about what I need this time, and it orders it all for me.

I use it to plan workouts around my actual energy level and what my calendar already looks like. Since it's synced up with my health data and Apple Watch, it can look at things like my sleep and energy patterns and then cross-reference that with my calendar, to-do list, project timelines and deadlines, and come up with a workout plan I can actually handle. Because let's face it, I'm not great at exercising. I don't have the same amount of energy or motivation every day, so why would I build a workout routine that assumes I do? I needed something that could meet me where I actually am, not where I think I should be.

I also use AI to help draft complicated emails, especially the ones I've been avoiding. You know, the ones that are sitting in my inbox making me feel guilty every time I open my phone. I give it the email along with a list or a quick blurb about what I wanna say, and sometimes even the tone that I wanna use. It reads the email, drafts a response, and then, and this is the most important part, then I edit it. Because AI's never going to have the final say. But once I've made it sound like me, then it's done. The email is out of my head, out of my inbox, and no longer sitting there causing that low hum of stress in the back of my mind.

There's also a new AI tool I found on Instagram maybe a month ago called Little Bird that basically watches what I'm doing on my computer. So if I start something in Claude and bounce over to check my email while that's working, and then I somehow end up editing a podcast while also working on two different Canva projects and am nine tabs deep in Chrome and I've completely lost the thread of what I was doing in the first place, I can just ask Little Bird what I've started today that I haven't finished, and it tells me.

It also learns just from watching. So after a few weeks of me producing my other podcast, I asked it to build me an SOP for the whole process, and it figured out the steps just from watching me do it. Even though editing that podcast happens over a few days and I do so much on my computer while and in between editing, it's crazy. And the SOP it came up with was really good.

I also just recently started having Little Bird run a report every Sunday night that tells me exactly how many hours I spent on each client and project that week. It combines data from my computer and my calendar. Then I tell it if I made any money doing any of it, and it gives me data that helps me decide what kind of work I should lean into, you know, for the highest ROI, or in layman's terms, the most bang for my buck, or buck for my time. You know what I mean. Anyway, it's just wild how easy it is to get this kind of critical information for shaping my business into a successful and productive machine.

And now that I've given you all these examples, here's the thing that I really want you to hear. This is not just for people who are already comfortable with technology. I've heard of people setting this stuff up for their parents, people in their 60s and 70s, not the early adopters, and they just walk through their to-do list out loud, and it gets organized for them. So if somebody's retired dad who's never been the tech person in the family can use this to free up more time to spend with the people he loves, you can do it too. This isn't about becoming a different kind of person. It's about using a tool that finally works the way your brain works already to help you.

So for me, the actual tools that I use the most are Claude and ChatGPT, depending on what I'm doing that day, and I pay for both of them. If you're going to rely on this for anything that actually matters, get a paid plan. I cannot stress that enough. They're both, like, $20 a month, which I think is more than worth it, because the free versions are fine for a one-off, like when I accidentally end up in free Gemini because I Googled something and clicked on Gemini's attempt at an answer, but that's about it.

And I should probably say this too, because I use both. ChatGPT and Claude are not exactly the same thing, and I don't really think that one is necessarily better than the other. I use ChatGPT more like an all-purpose AI assistant, 'cause it can do a little bit of everything, from brainstorming to writing to creating images, searching the web, talking things through with me, and connecting with other apps. And then Claude is the one I tend to reach for when I have something really long or complicated that I need to work through. If I have a giant document, a ton of information, a bunch of files, or something where I really need to dig in and follow a very specific set of instructions, Claude is really good at that. And honestly, I think Claude has slightly more of a natural writing style right out of the box, while ChatGPT can sometimes sound a little more like, well, like AI, honestly. But here's the thing, I don't think you need to pick a team right now. I use both. The trick is figuring out what you're actually trying to do and then using the tool that's best suited for that job. And once you get deeper into this stuff, the specific tool starts to matter a little more. But for now, if you're just getting started, I'd just start with Claude or ChatGPT. And maybe we'll get into different types of AI in future episodes.

Also down the road, we will definitely get into how to teach AI about your life and/or your business so you're not re-explaining the same content over and over again. But for now, just grab one of them, start a paid subscription, and when your brain is looping, hand the mess to AI and ask for a plan. That one move alone will change how this whole thing works for you.

Now here's the flip side, and I think this might be the most important part of the whole episode, so stay with me here. There's a difference between using AI as a thinking partner and using it as a replacement for thinking altogether. When you outsource the struggle, the actual little bit where your brain has to wrestle with something and work through it, you lose the very thing that makes you good at what you do. That struggle isn't a flaw in the process, it is the process. That's where the skill actually lives.

So here's the test I use for literally all of it. If it's replacing the thinking you actually wanted to be doing, you're using it for the wrong thing. If it's clearing away the thinking you never wanted to be doing in the first place, the scheduling, the admin, those 15 small decisions standing in between you and the real work, that's exactly what it's for.

So here are a few ground rules. Don't use AI to have your ideas for you. Let it organize your life, but you still need to have the ideas. They need to originate from you. If you're asking AI to come up with what you actually think or what you actually wanna make, that's not saving you time. That's outsourcing the one part that's supposed to be yours in the first place. And here's the thing, it's not going to be good. People are gonna be able to tell that you used AI.

Also, don't hand out judgment calls about people or relationships. Whether you have to have a hard conversation with someone or you need to figure out how to read a situation with somebody you care about, those are not productivity problems, and those were never AI's job to solve in the first place.

And lastly, don't treat it as your only source of truth. AI gets things wrong confidently and on a regular basis. So verify before you act on what it tells you, especially when things matter.

There's one more layer here, and it might be the one I think about the most, which is protecting your own brain while you're using this stuff. Because AI can hijack your dopamine without you even noticing it's happening. It's fast, it's responsive, it always has one more thing to show you. And if you've got an ADHD brain, that combination is basically rocket fuel for a rabbit hole. You ask it one question, and it hands you back seven new ones you didn't know you needed answers to, and before you know it, it's 1:00 in the morning, and you're wide awake and completely wired and no closer to bed than you were five hours ago. I have absolutely done this to myself more than once, so I'm speaking from experience.

Actually, recently, one of the first nights that I really started building out The Pretty Shiny Things, I was talking out loud with Claude for hours, building the entire Notion database, setting up my SOPs, my brand voice and aesthetic, a whole master roadmap. By the end of the night, I was so wired I could not get my brain to settle down. It was so bad that I didn't sleep literally one wink that entire night, and it was brutal.

So I've learned from my mistakes, and I've done a lot of research recently on how to use AI safely and in a way that actually works for my brain. And these are the five rules that I try to live by now.

One, let your brain go first. Before I ask AI to solve something, I try to spend a little time thinking about it myself, especially when I'm doing deep work. I don't want my first instinct to be, "Let me ask AI." I want to give my own brain the chance to wrestle with the problem, make connections, come up with ideas, even the bad ones. Then I can bring AI in and help me organize, challenge, expand, or refine what I've already started. Because if AI is always doing the first round of thinking for me, eventually I stop practicing that skill myself.

Rule number two: AI is a tool, not a crutch. I want AI to make me better at thinking, not make thinking something I no longer do. There's a difference between asking AI to help me work through an idea and asking it to just give me the answer. I wanna stay in the driver's seat.

Three, never open AI without a reason. Have an intention before you open it, because if you just wander in to see what happens, it'll happily keep you there for hours. It's like doom scrolling with better production value.

Four, productivity does not get a bedtime pass. No screens for an hour before bed, AI included. I don't care how productive it feels in the moment. Your brain doesn't know the difference between doom scrolling and productive scrolling at 11 o'clock at night.

And five, know when to shut it down. And this one is personal for me. That AI voice assistant that I love to brainstorm with, I have to put that one away even earlier in the evening, 'cause those creative back-and-forth conversations that get my brain going at 100 miles an hour, I've learned that I can't do that and go straight to, "Okay, time to wind down and go to bed." My brain just does not make that transition quite that easily.

And really, all five of these rules come down to the same thing: AI should make your life easier, not make your brain busier. This isn't just about screen time. It's about protecting your nervous system and paying attention to what AI is actually doing for your brain. If you're already overstimulated, regulate before you sit down. If you're waiting on something, take the screen-free break instead of automatically filling that space with more stimulation like doom scrolling. And if you notice that AI is leaving your mind more wired or more distracted, or you're having a harder time shutting off your brain, pay attention to that, 'cause that is your cue to step back. Because the goal isn't to use AI as much as possible, it's to use it in a way that actually makes your life better.

So let's bring it all the way back down to the ground for a second because I just gave you a lot. Your ADHD brain is genuinely built for this. The hyperfocus, the pattern recognition, the nonlinear thinking, those are all assets here, not liabilities. You're allowed to have real concerns about AI and still opt in on your own terms. That is not a contradiction. Stop using it like Google. Start actually using it as a conversation, not a search bar. Use it as an outsourced executive function for all the boring stuff, the scheduling, the brain dumps, and the decision paralysis. Don't use it to replace the actual thinking and ideas that were supposed to be yours. And protect your brain while you're at it with boundaries, intentions, and an actual bedtime. And that's the whole episode in a nutshell.

But if there's one thing I want you to walk away today with, it's this: AI should make you more yourself, not less. If it's making you more anxious, more scattered, more dependent instead of more capable, that is your sign to recalibrate. It's not a sign you're doing AI wrong, it's a sign that the balance has slipped, and you get to adjust it. So remember, you are the genius here. AI is the tool, not the other way around, ever. And the whole point of clearing all that mental clutter off your plate isn't so you can cram more onto it. It's so that time goes back to something that actually matters to you. Your family, your community, the project you've been trying to build or the hobby you've always wanted to pursue, whatever your version of that is, that's the actual trade you're making if you do this right.

Everything I mentioned today, the tools I use, the way I actually do the brain dump thing, all of it is in the show notes at theprettyshinythings.com/blog/2. And if this is the episode where your brain went, "Oh, that's me," go back to episode one for the whole story of how I got here, because none of this started with a plan. It started with one text message from my best friend. So no, AI is not going to replace your creativity. It is the reason I have any creativity at all left over at the end of the day.

Thanks so much for hanging out with me on this week's The Pretty Shiny Things podcast. If your brain just relaxed a little, you're gonna love my newsletter, The Shiny List. Three useful AI tips and tricks, two things I'm loving this week, and one AI prompt ready for you to use, all straight to your inbox each week. And yes, I know you already have enough lists. This is the one you'll actually want. You can sign up at theprettyshinythings.com, where you'll also find the show notes and links to any tools or resources I mentioned in this episode.

And I really wanna hear from you. If there's anything about AI you want me to explain, something in your life you wish was easier, or something you're wondering if AI could help with, tell me. Message me on Instagram at @hey.katmurphy or email me at kat@theprettyshinythings.com. And if you know someone who's trying to figure it all out too, send them this episode. We'll get caught up together.

I'll see you next week. Until then, go be present, be creative, embrace the pretty shiny things, and let the robots handle the rest.