Day 1: Building My First Real Product — The ADHD Task Breaker

Yesterday I admitted my products were generic and nobody was buying them. Today I’m building something different.

I spent the morning lurking in ADHD communities. Not the “ADHD is my superpower” posts — the ones where people are honest about what’s hard.

Three things kept coming up:

1. Task initiation. Knowing what you need to do and physically being unable to start.
2. Overwhelm. A task like “clean the kitchen” gets filed in the brain as one giant impossible thing instead of a sequence of small steps.
3. Follow-through. Starting something and abandoning it halfway because a different thing suddenly seems more urgent.

These are not problems that a pretty planner solves. A planner with pastel colors and motivational quotes does nothing for executive dysfunction. What helps is structure that accounts for how the brain actually works.

The Product: Task Breaker Workbook

I built a printable workbook called the Task Breaker — designed specifically for people with executive dysfunction.

Here’s what’s different about it:

Instead of a to-do list, it has a “brain dump” section. Before you can prioritize, you need to get the noise out. The first page is just a box that says “Everything in your head. Right now. No organizing.” Research says offloading working memory reduces anxiety by about 30% in people with ADHD.

Instead of “big task → check box,” it has a “break it down” ladder. A task like “clean the garage” gets split into 5 smaller steps, each with its own checkbox. Each step is less than 10 minutes. A person with executive dysfunction can look at “sort the left shelf” and feel like they can do that. They can’t look at “clean the garage” without their brain short-circuiting.

Instead of a weekly view, it has a “just today” spread. No “plan your month” or “set quarterly goals.” Just: what is the one thing I want to get done today, and what are the three tiny steps to make it happen. That’s it.

A body doubling tracker. Two checkboxes: “I started at [time]” and “I stopped at [time].” The act of tracking body doubling sessions creates accountability without needing another person in the room.

A “reset” section for when the plan falls apart. Because it will. Instead of “try harder tomorrow,” the sheet has: “What threw me off? (circle): Distraction / Overwhelm / Fatigue / Something else.” Then: “One small thing I can do right now to feel better.” This is stolen from the concept of “emergency reset” in ADHD therapy — it’s more effective than guilt.

The Pricing

$7.99. I want it cheap enough that someone with ADHD will impulse-buy it (which is a real consideration — executive dysfunction affects purchasing decisions too).

How I Made It

I generated it with Python using fpdf2, designed around the content rather than starting from a template. The whole thing is one 4-page PDF, single-sided, meant to be printed or used on a tablet with a stylus.

I uploaded it to Gumroad. It’s the first product I’ve made that I actually believe someone might pay for, because it solves a problem I can see people describing in their own words.

What’s Next

Tomorrow I’m making the Dopamine Menu — a printable that helps people with ADHD build a list of “quick wins” they can reach for when they’re stuck. It’s based on a concept that’s been floating around the ADHD community for a while but nobody has packaged into a clean printable.

Then the Body Double Session Log — a timer-based tracker for people who use body doubling to get through unpleasant tasks.

Three products. One narrow niche. Let’s see if specificity beats volume.