#77✍🏽 Finding your why to write a weekly ADHD newsletter
My secret to successfully writing an ADHD newsletter each week
Welcome to Tech Atypically 👋, your weekly blog for navigating the challenges of ADHD and being in the tech industry.
I am an ADHD and product management coach helping you change one belief and take one action each week.
🐼Are you looking to be more productive at work and spend less time procrastinating? We can help.
Part 2 of the Self-Care series
🦋 The Takeaways
Belief: A successful newsletter is about audience growth.
Reality: A successful newsletter serves you and your audience.
Action: Serve yourself first.
⭐️ Introduction
My goal for writing this newsletter has never been fame or subscribers. It’s been a form of self-care, a way to reflect and tackle the challenges I'm facing.
I’ve written for nearly 84 consecutive weeks because my newsletter isn’t about serving others; it’s about serving myself. That’s my secret to writing consistently.
I never run out of things to deal with, so I always make the time to write. This approach has the secondary benefit of helping others, which I love, but it isn’t my top priority.
Making myself the top priority helps me to serve you and me sustainably.
Today, I’ll share how you can make you can put yourself first to maintain self-care practices or creative projects.
💭 The Belief – A Newsletter is About Subscribers
I often see a common trap for both neurotypical and neurodiverse folks.
They have an idea for a newsletter or creative project and spend months planning and creating, agonizing over what might be right, wrong, perfect, or messed up. This leads to emotional paralysis.
They’ll publish a few pieces, then stop when their subscriber growth isn’t what they expected. It then gets added to the shelf of well-intentioned hobbies that were started and abandoned.
If you’re one of these people, I don’t mean to shame you. I’ve been guilty of this cycle countless times with other hobbies and creative endeavors.
However, it didn’t happen with this newsletter. I consciously did something different to avoid the quicksand of external motivation: I gave it a selfish purpose—a newsletter that serves me, with the hypothesis that there might be others like me.
🔍 The Reality - You can serve two audiences at once
It’s acceptable to have something that serves two purposes simultaneously if you’re aware of the tradeoffs (classic product manager move).
For me, the newsletter serves me first and my audience second. The topics I write about serve me as the audience. The problems I address and solve are my own, which helps me show up with something each week.
This approach works for me, but there’s a tradeoff. I don’t think my newsletter will ever grow to the size of some of my more successful peers. It will always be small because its most important audience member is me.
I may alienate or outgrow my audience at some point. Let me elaborate.
A few days ago, one of my closest friends and supporters, a fellow product manager, asked me some newsletter questions out of the blue:
“What is your current strategy for your newsletter? Is it to drive consulting gigs? Expand your audience? Find opportunities? Refine your message? What are the ideal outcomes from this?
What’s your why, Rawi Nanakul?”
I don’t have good answers to these questions. People like
and probably have better answers, and their subscriber counts of 22,000 and 67,000 respectively show it. (They’re both great newsletters and people.)My why is me. However, my why came with a product management hunch.
When I started writing this newsletter in 2022, I found only one article on product managers with ADHD. I had many friends and colleagues with ADHD, and a YouTube talk from the Product School had over 1,000 views.
There had to be more like me. The best thing I could do was write stories to let them know they weren’t alone. Twenty months later, my why hasn’t changed, and I’ve had 1,300+ subscribers confirm my hunch.
🛠️ The Action - Prioritize yourself
Here are three tips to create space for your next self-care routine and creative endeavor.
When you prioritize yourself, you enable yourself to prioritize others.
My flavor of ADHD makes me believe that it’s more important to prioritize the needs of others over my own. This gets me into trouble because I eventually get exhausted from repressing what I need. When this happens, I either get overwhelmed and withdraw or get angry and explode.
To avoid these negative outcomes, I prioritize my needs first. This gives me the emotional space to tend to my needs and increases my capacity to help others. It also invites others, like my wife, to let me know what they need for their self-care.
Self-care creative projects can increase our capacity, but it still takes effort.
If you’re burned out, starting a newsletter is probably not the first thing you need to do to start recovering. Yet I often see people falling into this trap. They think that if they can “just get into a routine,” they’ll be able to maintain their newsletter.
If your energy is at zero, starting and maintaining a new project is going to fail because you have nothing more to give.
Before starting a new creative project, ask yourself if you have the energy to start and maintain it.
If not, prioritize a regular sleep and exercise routine first. They’ll give you the most energy and allow you to start your next project.
If you can’t maintain it, why build it?
This quote from Jason Feifer reminds me to think about the routine over the result of what I’m trying to do.
With ADHD, you often blame yourself for any failure. However, sometimes you were set up to fail from the beginning. That’s not a personal problem; it might be a capacity problem.
Asking this question will help you avoid chasing a shiny object and then feeling shame when you’re unable to achieve or maintain it.
✨ Conclusion
For the record, my response to my friend’s questions earlier was:
“It’s none of those. It’s self-care. It’s my journaling time to work out my issues.”
I hold that true as I published this week’s newsletter five days late. However, I’ve been putting in hours of reflection and self-care for the last 13 days.
I may be late, but because I served myself first, I’ve been able to continue my streak and help connect with others like me.
🐼Join other tech professionals learning how to thrive at work with their neurodiversity.
⏭️Next Week
Sleep, self-care, and why it’s so hard to manage when you have ADHD.