Freelancing with AuDHD

How I run my life as an AuDHD freelancer

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Freelancing gives me the freedom my brain craves, but not always the structure it needs.

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I love the autonomy, the variety, and the ability to build my work around how my brain actually works. But as an AuDHD freelancer, I have also learnt that freedom without guard rails can very quickly become overwhelm, dopamine chasing, missed reminders, and ten half-started things that all feel equally urgent.

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So this is not a post about having the perfect productivity system.

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It is about the small bits of structure that help me move through the week without relying entirely on memory, motivation, or whatever task happens to feel most interesting in the moment.

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Google Workspace is my home base

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The biggest part of my system is Google Workspace.

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I know there are more aesthetic tools. I know Notion works beautifully for some people, and honestly, I am almost jealous of them. I love the idea of one calm, colour-coded dashboard where everything has a place.

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But for me, trying to build the perfect Notion setup became its own project. I would spend hours designing the place where I was supposedly going to do the work, and then the actual work still needed doing.

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So I came back to Google Workspace, because it is familiar, visual and simple enough for me to keep using.

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Google Calendar is where I run my life. Not just meetings. Everything. Client work, appointments, gym, therapy, coaching, reminders, personal stuff, buffer time, and the things I would like to pretend I will remember but absolutely will not.

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I use different calendars for different parts of my life, with different colours for my work, freelance work, learning new things, fun stuff, and the other bits that need space in my week.

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I use Google Tasks too, because tasks sitting separately in a list are very easy for me to forget exist. When my tasks sit in my calendar, they help keep me moving.

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I also use GCalPlus, which lets me expand the month view grid. Tiny detail. Huge difference. If my calendar is how I understand my life, I need to actually be able to see my life.

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And then there is my Google Site HQ, which is probably the most me thing in the whole setup.

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I made myself a Google Site that acts like a little home base for my work. It gives me somewhere to land when I am trying to get into work mode. I do not just want a random pile of tabs. I want a space that gives my brain a gentle cue: this is where the work lives.

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The little guard rails

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Outside of Google, I have a few tools and rituals that help keep things from slipping.

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Toggl is for paid client work and invoicing. I do not use it to track every minute of my life, because that would make me want to crawl out of my own skin. But for client work, I need a reliable record of what I have done, how long it took, and what needs to be invoiced.

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I export invoices from Toggl, then track them in Google Sheets so I can see what has been billed, paid and recorded. It means I do not have to reconstruct my work from vibes, which is probably best for everyone.

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I also have a wall of wins.

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It is a physical magnetic whiteboard on my wall, and I put everything on it. Work things. Non-work things. Big things. Small things. Lovely feedback. Client wins. Personal wins. Even doing a shop or replying to an email can go on there.

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Because honestly, those things count too.

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The wall helps with imposter syndrome, but it also helps me notice the small stuff I would normally skip over. My brain can forget the good things very quickly, so I need somewhere to put the evidence.

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My reMarkable 2 is more of a grounding tool than a full system. Sometimes handwriting helps me slow down enough to understand what I am actually thinking. Less tabs, less noise, fewer ways to immediately distract myself.

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Then there is my visual rainbow kid’s timer.

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Hyperfocus can be brilliant, but it can also swallow the day whole. I use the timer for blocks of work, and to help me come out of hyperfocus. Sometimes I add five minutes onto the end as a kind of landing strip. Not “stop immediately”, because my brain does not always respond well to that. More like: finish the thought, close the loop, and then we stop.

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I will literally say to myself, “Okay, that is it. We stop now.”

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And finally, I have a tear-off daily desk calendar. Every day, I tear off the page, scrunch up the past day, and move into the new one. It is small, but it helps. AuDHD time can feel strange, and physically tearing off yesterday makes today feel a bit more real.

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None of this is about becoming a productivity machine

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When I look at all of these things together, I can see that they are not really about productivity.

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Not in the usual sense anyway.

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They are about externalising the things my brain struggles to hold.

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Google Workspace gives me a home base. Toggl helps me capture paid work properly. My wall of wins helps me remember that small wins still count. My reMarkable helps me ground myself. My timer helps me come up for air. My daily calendar helps me land back in today.

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None of these systems make every day easy. They do not make me less autistic. They do not make me less ADHD. They do not make me magically consistent, calm, focused, rested, hydrated and fully caught up on admin.

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But they do make my life more workable.

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And I think that is the point.

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The goal is not perfect consistency. The goal is having things to come back to.

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