I mentioned a folder on my desktop called “Systems.” Nineteen things in it. I use two.
This one is about the two.
That ratio is not a discipline problem. That is ADHD doing exactly what ADHD does: getting genuinely, unreasonably excited about a better way to organize everything, building the whole damn thing in one sitting at eleven at night, then never opening it again.
I run Gabe Rene LLC across five brands. Weddings, commercial work, boudoir, a photo booth company, and portraits. Somewhere in there I trained my fiancé to shoot alongside me and rebuilt our whole CRM from scratch. None of that happened because I finally got disciplined.
It happened because I stopped building systems that needed me.
A system that needs you to remember it is not a system
It is a promise. And ADHD breaks promises.
Every system I abandoned had the same flaw. It needed me to show up and maintain it. A daily review. A Sunday planning session. Inbox zero every Friday afternoon. All of it works beautifully for about eleven days, which is exactly how long the novelty lasts.
The ones that stuck do not need me at all. They run whether I am paying attention or not.
That is the whole test. Not “is this a good system.” The real question is whether it still works on the day I forget it exists.
Here are the five that passed.
1. The follow-up is not mine to remember
For years, follow-up was the leak in my business. Not because I did not care. Because a lead would come in on a Tuesday, we would have a great conversation, and then Wednesday happened. And Thursday. By the following week that person had booked someone else who simply emailed them back.
I was losing real money to a memory problem.
So I stopped trying to remember. Every inquiry now drops into a workflow that follows up on day three and day ten whether I think about it or not. The emails are already written. I do not compose anything, I do not decide anything, and I do not lie awake on a Sunday running through who I forgot.
The number I care about is not how many leads I follow up with. It is that the number is now all of them, and my brain has nothing to do with it.
2. Decide the hard thing once, then never decide it again
Pricing used to live in six places. A PDF, the website, the CRM, the contract template, an old spreadsheet, and my head. Guess which one was most current. Guess how many times I quoted a number that did not match what the client read twenty minutes later. It is a great feeling. Highly recommend.
Now pricing lives in exactly one file. Everything else pulls from it. The proposal, the site, the contract, the PDF I send people.
The ADHD part is not the organization. It is that I removed a decision. When somebody asks what a wedding costs, I am not doing math or trying to remember what I told the last couple. There is one answer and it already exists.
Decision fatigue is the tax nobody warns you about. Every choice you make twice is a choice you are paying for twice.
3. Never start from a blank page
A blank page is where my work goes to die. I will rewrite the same opening paragraph nine times and call it progress.
So almost nothing I send starts from nothing. Proposals start from a template that is already eighty percent right. Contracts render from a standard format. Even our brand audits have a fixed structure I drop findings into.
This gets read as lazy. It is the opposite. Starting at eighty percent means the only work left is the twenty percent that is actually specific to this client, which is the part that deserved my attention in the first place. The other eighty percent was never where the value lived. It was just where the resistance lived.
4. Put the question in the form, not in my head
I used to run discovery calls on vibes. Great conversation, hang up genuinely excited, then realize I never asked about the budget. Or the timeline. Or, one memorable time, whether there were two ceremonies.
There are now questionnaires for every service we offer. Weddings, portraits, headshots, brand shoots, product, real estate, all of it. The right questions get asked every single time because they are written down and sent automatically, not because I remembered them mid sentence.
That one had a side effect I did not expect. Once the logistics live in a form, the call gets to be an actual conversation. I am not interviewing anybody. I already have the facts, so I can spend the whole call on what they actually want out of this.
5. Make the lazy path the correct path
This is the one that holds the other four together, and honestly it is the only real principle here.
I will always take the path of least resistance. That is not a character flaw I am going to fix at forty. So the systems that survive are the ones where the easiest available action is also the right one.
Files get named correctly because the template already named them. Follow ups happen because not following up would require me to go turn something off. The right price gets quoted because the wrong price does not exist anywhere anymore.
Every system I ever abandoned asked me to become someone I am not. The ones that stuck just made it harder to do the wrong thing than the right thing.
What still does not work
I am not going to pretend I solved this.
I still start shit I do not finish. I still have that folder with nineteen systems in it. I still get a real chemical hit off a new tool, and I still have to talk myself out of rebuilding something that already works perfectly fine, at midnight, for no reason.
The difference is that none of it touches a client anymore. The chaos stays on my side of the wall. What reaches the people paying me is a follow up that arrived on time, a price that matched, and a question that got asked before it turned into a problem.
That is not a cure. It is containment. Containment turns out to be enough to run a real business on.
If you are building your own
Stop asking whether a system is good. Ask whether it survives you at your worst.
Not you on a Monday with fresh coffee and a clean desk. That guy is a liar. You in week three, mid project, tired, with something far more interesting on fire in the next room. If it does not work for that guy, it does not work.
Build for that guy. He is the one who is going to be running your business most days.
