I wasn’t diagnosed as a kid.
Nobody looked at the girl who couldn’t sit still and thought, “Maybe she needs help.” They looked at her and thought, “She’s just a lot.”
I am a lot. I’ve always been a lot. Too many ideas, too many tabs open (in my brain and on my laptop), too many projects running at once, too many things started and not enough things finished.
For most of my life, I thought that was a personality flaw.
Turns out it was ADHD. Once I understood that, so many parts of my life suddenly made sense.
People hear ADHD and picture a kid bouncing off the walls.
They don’t picture a 50-year-old woman running a marketing agency, building digital products, writing a children’s book, raising a 5 year old, and building a house in Tonga.
All at the same time. All while trying to remember where she put her phone.
I try to start every day with a plan, but by 10am it’s already off track. Not because anything went wrong, but because my brain spotted something more interesting and wandered off without asking permission.
I can hyperfocus on the big things but also forget the little things, appointments, deadlines, conversations I had yesterday.
Then, at 11pm, while I’m in bed, my brain decides to replay every task I dropped.
I feel everything at full volume. Rejection hits like a truck. Criticism sticks for days. Small wins feel like fireworks. My emotional thermostat doesn’t have a middle setting.
But the hardest part isn’t any of that.
It’s the shame.
The shame of running successful businesses while forgetting to pay a bill. The shame of helping other people build organised systems while your own life sometimes feels held together with caffeine, reminders, and crossed fingers.
You know you’re capable. You know you work hard.
So when you forget something important again, you don’t think, “That’s my ADHD.” You think, “What’s wrong with me?”
But the real shift didn’t happen overnight.
Instead of forcing my brain to work like everyone else’s, I started building systems that worked with the brain I actually have.
I realised very quickly that I couldn’t keep everything in my own head anymore. It needed somewhere else to go.
That’s when I built Frank.
Frank isn’t just another AI tool. He’s the AI assistant I built around my actual life. He knows my projects, my businesses, my priorities, and all the things I’d otherwise forget.
Every morning I check in with him.
One conversation, and I know what’s waiting for me, what’s overdue, and what actually deserves my attention today.
I also stopped relying on to-do lists entirely. My brain looks at twenty tasks and somehow decides they’re all either equally urgent or equally boring.
Time blocking works because I’m committing to a block of time, not an endless list. Mornings are for creative work. Afternoons are for the admin my brain would happily avoid forever.
AI now handles the repetitive work my brain constantly resists.
Email replies that take ten minutes to write but somehow steal an hour of my energy. If I don’t automate those jobs, they sit there quietly draining me.
I stopped trusting my memory, and started trusting my systems instead.
ADHD hasn’t taught me how to be more productive. It’s taught me to be kinder to myself.
If your brain works anything like mine, maybe you don’t need another planner or productivity app.
Maybe you just need systems built for the way you actually think.
That’s exactly why I built mine. Your Control Room grew out of that.
If it helped me stay afloat while running three businesses, writing a book, raising my kids, and building a house across the ocean, maybe it’ll help someone else too.
