623- AI for ADHD Brains at Work: New Ways to Support Executive Function

0:00Diann Wingert: This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the Name Your Price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states.

0:26Welcome to the Attention Deficit Disorder Expert Podcast Series. by Attitude Magazine.

0:35Everyone, I'm Carol Fleck, and on behalf of the Attitude team, I'm delighted to welcome you to today's very timely ADHD experts presentation titled AI for ADHD Brains at Work, New Ways to Support Executive Function. Leading today's presentation is Diane Wingert. You might remember Diane from a webinar she presented for Attitude on how to manage stress and emotions at work. It's podcast 579 if you'd like to check it out. Diane is a former psychotherapist turned serial entrepreneur turned ADHD business strategist and coach. She was diagnosed with ADHD later in life after decades of masking. She now works exclusively with entrepreneurs, creatives, and small business owners with ADHD traits, diagnosed or not.

1:32Today, Diane will provide a framework for using AI as an executive function support. You'll learn which cognitive tasks AI handles well and how to set up simple routines that survive the initial burst of enthusiasm. She will also address the questions we should be asking about privacy, accuracy, and over-reliance on AI. If you believe in the work we're doing here at Attitude to inform, empower, and support the ADHD community, please consider subscribing to Attitude Magazine. Your support enables us to continue providing trusted resources and information to help you and your family. Finally, the sponsor of today's webinar is Inflow.

2:19ADHD can make work feel harder than it should, especially when focus, organization, and follow-through don't come easily. Inflow gets it. Their science-backed program created by psychologists and ADHD experts help you better understand your ADHD traits and build practical strategies that work with your ADHD brain. With Quinn AI included, you can get support to organize your thoughts and take the next step when things feel overwhelming. Click the link on your screen to take their free ADHD traits quiz to get started. Attitude thanks our sponsors for supporting our webinars. Sponsorship has no influence on speaker selection or webinar content.

3:03So without further ado, I'm delighted to introduce Diane Wingert once again. Thank you for joining us and leading this important discussion.

3:15Thank you, Carol, and thank you, friends here at Attitude. I really love collaborating with you, and I appreciate everything that you do for the ADHD and LD community. Before we get into the thick of today's topic, I want to remind everyone here that there are lots and lots and lots of tools to support ADHD executive functioning. You probably have quite a few of them now. And for those who are attending live or watching the replay, I'm going to name a couple of them on the slide. For those later listening to the podcast, you will recognize everything from time blocking and batching, to-do list, task apps, body doubling, Pomodoro timers, Kanban boards, noise-canceling headphones, clocks, calendars, watches, notebooks, journals, planners, and of course, my good friend Danny Donovan's anti-planner.

4:13But what's in your drawer? Now, I'm going to guess that you've got quite a few of the tools I've already mentioned. So why do we need another one? Well, it's been said that nobody abandons something that's working, but I've had ADHD all my life, even though I I didn't know about it for most of my life. And I adopted many tools and abandoned them quickly, even though they seem to be working. What I've realized is that I oftentimes didn't stick with the tool well enough or long enough or really understand how to make it work for me and my executive functioning challenges. And I quickly moved on to the next one, which is why we have so many.

5:00So if you are attending live, watching later, or listening on the podcast, and you haven't tried AI yet, why even bother with all of the existing tools that support ADHD executive functions? Well, I'm going to mention four reasons. One is FOMO. Let's be honest. When we hear everyone around us talking about AI, even if we don't know exactly what it is, we don't want to be left out. So we think, should I try this? AI comes with the promise of being something shiny and new. Let's face it, all ADHD brains are wildly attracted to novelty. So there's that. AI offers the promise of increased productivity without increased effort.

5:50And I don't know about you, but that sounds like instant gratification. And that is always going to attract my interest. And last but not least, AI is available when other forms of help are not. So for example, if you're working with an ADHD coach or you are part of a body doubling group, that's not available to you 24-7, holidays, weekends, and other kinds of off hours. But AI is. So it's worth considering. I want to be very, very clear, especially for people who came today with very specific expectations about what they're going to learn. I am an ADHD expert. I am not an AI expert. I am using AI in a variety of different ways.

6:39And what I've realized is that what hangs a lot of people up from not getting the maximum benefit from AI is that they just jump in and start using it like we do with so many things with ADHD, but we don't really know what we're there for or how to use it in a way that helps us optimally. So because expectations are very important to me and making sure you are getting what you came for, I want to be clear about what I'm covering and what I'm not covering. I am not going to tell you which AI tool to use. I'm not going to tell you what specific prompts you need to craft because there's way too many people attending these webinars for me to possibly be able to help everyone with that.

7:24I'm never going to teach you either on this webinar or any future one how to outsource your thinking because our critical thinking and our creativity is what will always make us most uniquely human. What I will cover and what you might think of as the rules are. I think of the four different ways our executive functioning stalls us out in being more productive. So I'm gonna help you identify what your particular stall is and you will participate hopefully in a poll so we know how many of each of us we are. How to sort the work that you give to AI? Do you just hand everything over or give it nothing?

8:07So I will teach you the tool I use for sorting how to build in one loop so that you keep this simple enough that it's actually helpful and how to hold on to your critical judgment. To me, that's the most important thing of all. So many people approach AI with, well, what can it do for me? But a better question to ask is, where should I stop using it? Some people won't even begin because they're afraid of getting carried away. And let's face it, folks with ADHD often get carried away at things before we know what we're getting into. But really understanding why you're using AI and where you should stop using it is one of the most important things you're going to learn from me today.

8:58If you've ever had the experience of having a tangled chain, like at the bottom of your purse or in a drawer or could be in a workshop depending on what type of chain it is. The natural impulse is to grab both ends and pull. But that's actually the worst thing you can do and it's either going to break the chain or certainly not untangle it. What you can do instead is create slack. So that's what we're going to talk about today because all the folks I know with ADHD are not terribly good at giving themselves slack, pun intended. So here's where we talk about the stall. Now, these are four different executive functions, and I'll tell you on the next slide what the clinical or technical name is.

9:49What I call them are the blank page, the pile, the fog, and the last 10%. The blank page is, I know exactly what I'm supposed to be doing? I just can't get myself to do it. We might think of that as procrastination with a dose of perfectionism thrown in. The pile is when we have so much to do that we're completely overwhelmed. Everything seems equally important and urgent, so nothing gets picked. The fog is when we knew what we were doing. Maybe we were even hyper-focused on it, but we stepped away, got interrupted, or ran out of time. And when we came back to it, we've lost the plot line and don't know how to re-engage.

10:35And the last stall is the last 10%. And that is the maddening ADHD trait of getting most of the way through a project or task, but not being able to bring it across the finish line. So aggravating. Here's where the poll comes in. Which stall is your signature stall? And if you have ADHD, you probably do all of these, but the one that stops you at work the most, is it the blank page, task initiation? Is it the pile, prioritization? Is it the fog, working memory, or is it the last 10 %? That's your follow through. And like I said, folks with ADHD do all of these. I know I do. But when I think about the one that probably has me the most, I'd have to go with working memory.

11:35It's the ADHD trait I'm most self-conscious about. It's the one that I give myself the hardest time about and the one that I need the most executive functioning support with. So go ahead and take the poll while I move on, and we will be sharing the results a little bit later. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. There are plenty of reasons why we put off getting support, and for a lot of people, cost is one of them. With BetterHelp, insurance options may now be available nationwide. wide, with an average copay for eligible members of just$23 per session. And while we're reconsidering old assumptions, maybe there are a few others worth questioning too?

12:22Like how about the assumption that women should handle all the executive functions for everyone in the family? Meal planning, appointment scheduling, and Halloween costume shopping. We should do it all without being asked and without breaking a sweat. That is an unspoken assumption I'm working on challenging with clearer boundaries and communication. It's not easy, but it is important for my mental health and the happiness of everyone. And it's the kind of work that's made easier with a good therapist. If you've been waiting to start therapy, BetterHelp works with more than 125 health plan networks and eligible members have an average co-pay of just$23 per session with insurance.

13:09Don't have insurance or don't live in the United States? You can still get 10 % off your first month. Visit betterhelp.com slash attitude to explore your payment options. That's betterhelp.com slash attitude. One of the first things I want everyone listening to think about when they use AI is not whether I should use it or what I should be concerned about when using it, but to sort before you send. This is kind of a higher level strategy rather than a tactic, a tip, or a tool. And this is what I call sort before you send it. I think of my relationship with AI as having three different buckets.

14:05For me, with me, and only me. And by the way, if you're worried about remembering any of this, everything in the slides today is going to be incorporated into a single cheat sheet if you will or worksheet including this so listen along know that you've got a a full color worksheet later that you can hang on to and refer to whenever you like but the three buckets for me with me or only me is the for me is AI is going to do it for me. I'm going to hand it off and AI is going to do it. So there's ways that you can personalize that or customize that. AI does it and I check it. And by the way, if you don't already know this, all AI platforms hallucinate and all AI platforms sound very confident of the information they give you.

15:02And it can be completely wrong. So don't be overly impressed with the confidence. Fact check everything you do, even if you hand it off. One of the great ways to have the AI do something for you is when you have a brain dump and you don't know how to put things in the right order and actually get them done. Ask the AI to turn your brain dump into an organized list. Or you might be someone who has a lot of thoughts about something, does a lot of research, collects a lot of information, and just needs a concise summary, for example, to give to your boss, that would be a great thing to hand off and have the AI do for you.

15:47And if you have a big project and you don't know where to start, you can hand that off to the AI to tell you what is the first step. Moving on to the with me, you can either have the AI go first and then you edit and decide, or you go first. And if you get stuck, you hand that off to the AI. Then it kind of depends on what your stall is. And we'll find out more about who's attending live today, where you get stalled, which way you should go. But talk me through something is a prompt you might give to the AI. I don't know exactly how to see my way all the way from the beginning to the end, talk me through it.

16:30Or something I often do, and maybe those attending are doing as well, is we have to communicate something difficult to another person, often in email form. We can ask the AI to draft the hard email, the one we've been procrastinating on, and then we can go back and edit it. So you can either do it with the AI, where the AI goes first and then you edit, or you go first and then you ask the AI to clean up. That's a AI with me. And then the last category is the only me. And I think this is the category where a lot of people have a lot of thoughts and feelings about, like AI is coming for our jobs and AI is stealing our creativity.

17:14There are always going to be things that no matter how much I use AI to support my own executive functioning, I am never going to hand off. That is the only me bucket. This stays with me. And some of the broad categories for that are anything confidential. For example, if you work with clients, anything related to clients, anything that I can't fact check, I can't verify, I can't dig in and make sure it is 100 % accurate, there's no way I'm going have AI involved and anything that other people are paying you for your judgment, your thinking, your problem solving, your critical and creative thinking.

17:58We don't want AI to get involved with that because humans will always be better at it. And that's oftentimes our job. So if you find yourself thinking about putting something in one of these buckets, if you feel relieved to have ai handle it for you you may be handing off the thinking part too and that's where i think it's time to stop and pull back i'm all for ease i'm all for shortcuts i am all for getting more done with less stress and less friction but if i hand off the thinking part, I think I've gone too far. And that's one of the most important rules of thumb I recommend to my clients. Before you type any AI prompt, because this is another place we get stalled.

18:54It's like, okay, I want to be more productive. I want to get more done. I want to get through my to-do list faster. I'm very happy to have AI help me. But how do I craft a prompt so that what I get back from the AI is actually useful. Well, there's three things, as Carol mentioned earlier, that we need to sort for. We want it to be private, we want it to be accurate, and we want to not be overly reliant on the AI. So how do you craft a prompt that ensures those things? Ask yourself these questions. If you're worried about privacy, how would I feel if this ended up public. If you feel the slightest bit of reluctance, that's your answer.

19:42In the accuracy bucket, would I even know if this were wrong? If you either don't have the skill, the will, the time, or even know where to look, don't ask AI to give you the answer. And if you're worried about becoming dependent or overly reliant on the AI? Ask yourself, am I outsourcing the task or the thinking behind it? And the thinking includes creativity and decision-making as well. So what prompts are you going to use? Situation, ask, and shape. You can see I'm a big fan of threes in my frameworks. What's the situation? You're asking the AI for help. What's the situation? So who am I? I'm an employee.

20:36I'm a supervisor. I'm a business owner. And what's actually going on? You describe the situation to the AI. You tell the AI very specifically what outcome you want and what shape you want it in. What should be left out? For example, I have a list of words that to me, when I see anything in written form and these words are part of it, I'm like, that's AI. So I have a list of words with the AI that I use. Do not give me anything back that includes these words. And that list is getting longer as AI is becoming more developed. One of the most important things I think are important in crafting prompts, And again, I can't give anybody specific prompts in a webinar like this because there's such a big audience with so many different types of needs and levels of expertise.

21:32But this I will say to anyone listening here, tell the AI about your brain. Letting the AI that you work with know that you have ADHD and how that affects you is probably one of the smartest ways that you can make the AI more useful for you. For example, I have ADHD. Don't give me 10 options when I ask you a question. Give me three. There's that three again. Or I need help in figuring out how to execute on this complex project. Don't show me the whole plan. Just show me the first step. or I don't want a long answer. I have ADHD. I'm going to become impatient and get lost in the weeds. Assume that you give me the information I can handle in 20 minutes.

22:25And the one I use every single time religiously is ask me clarifying questions before you give me a response because the AI will just go ahead and pontificate ad nauseum and it might not be anything like what you were interested in.

22:46Something I've seen a lot of people with ADHD attempt to use AI for, and this was one of the first things I did, was help me plan my week. Now that sounds perfectly reasonable and perfectly logical. Most folks with ADHD need help planning their week. So why not just enter the prompt, help me plan my week? Because the AI doesn't have enough context for that to be helpful. You're going to get a very generic answer. You're going to feel frustrated. You might even come to the conclusion that AI is a waste of time and open your drawer and start looking for one of the abandoned productivity tools or be eagerly looking around for the next one.

23:29Here's a better way to give that information to the AI so you get something better in response. I'm a solo business owner with ADHD. I have 12 things on my list and I've been avoiding all of them for days. Ask me three questions, then tell me the one thing to do tomorrow morning. Don't give me a full schedule, I won't follow it. You can even save your prompts and reuse the same ones again and again and again, which when you get to that level of use with AI, you really start to save time. But in the beginning, you mainly need to tell the AI about your brain and your needs and how much information you can handle and what would be too much.

24:17Novelty is the leak. Now, this is something that I tell my coaching clients again and again and again, because oftentimes, and I've mentioned this before, we are so eager to hop on to the next productivity tool or the next promise of productivity tool when we haven't really learned how to really use the ones we have. So when it comes to AI, because this is so powerful and we're just at the beginning of seeing what AI can do, we want to build in boredom. I know you heard me say that and you're probably shocked because I I almost never recommend boredom to someone with ADHD, but novelty is the leak and we'll have you moving on to the next thing before you've mastered this one.

25:03How do we make this boring on purpose so that it actually helps us and we don't have to keep learning the same thing again and again and again, which may be exciting, but not helpful when what we're trying to do is improve our executive functioning. You give it one job, one prompt, and one trigger, which is do this when. It's kind of an if this, then that. So the example of one job is a single task, not AI will change my business. Give it a specific task. Don't try to use it for everything. You'll get completely overwhelmed. One prompt that you save and know where you saved it so that we can use it again and again and again, and it will improve over time, the results that you get.

25:49And when do I use the AI? That's the trigger. I use the AI when. So for example, if I have an email that I'm sending out, I know exactly what part in the email workflow I'm going to use it. And it's actually labeled that way in my project management system. If I have to think about when am I going to use it? How am I going to use it? Where am I going to use it? How much shall I use it? That's not helping my executive functioning. That's actually slowing me down. We're going to talk about the specific stall of the fog and how this loop works. And I'm not going to go through all the stalls because we don't have enough time.

26:31But the fog, this is that maddening experience that you knew what you were doing. You were on point. You were hyper-focused. You were making progress, but you couldn't finish. Now you've come back to it. it's like your memory's been wiped. So here's the stall of the fog. I finish a call knowing it's important. 20 minutes later, I don't remember it at all. This even happens with client meetings because of my working memory deficits. So what is my loop? I turn my scribbles into a structured summary. The prompt is then saved and reused. So I never have to come up with it again from scratch or rewrite it.

27:14And the trigger is the second the call ends, which is if you do client calls like I do, you need to have a little buffer time in between instead of back to back. So the trigger is the minute that call ends, I immediately address it then. Otherwise, I won't. The way to assess whether using AI in different ways in your job are actually helping you is not whether you're more productive. That's such a hard call to make. Am I more productive? Who can really tell? But the way to evaluate whether these strategies are helping you use AI to improve your executive functioning at work are, did the stall get shorter?

27:59Did I spend less time in the fog? Did I spend less time staring at the blank page before I could start? Did I get closer to the finish line or maybe even all the way there? If I spent less time struggling, less time feeling overwhelmed, less time being upset with myself, then it's worth continuing because you will get better at it. If you want to use AI and you want to make it simple, there's three rules you've already heard me say them in a variety of ways and this is a recap find your stall sort it into the hand it off to ai do it with ai or hang on to the whole thing yourself and make it boring so that you're not actually making learning how to use ai into another job and then becoming overly reliant on it.

29:01As I've suggested, my stall is I have questions that at the end of each client call, the questions pile up. I try to hold on to them in my head, which is the worst thing for someone with working memory deficits like me. So how do I address that? I actually created an AI version of myself because all of those questions and all of that follow-up for my clients was piling up and I was either forgetting it or letting the pile get so big I didn't know what order to put it in it was all of the stalls in one so I built Dai AI because my closest friends call me Di rather than Diane. I sorted it into the three piles.

29:52The for me is the raw material. So I uploaded to the AI platform that I built it on my best podcast episodes, my coaching strategies, all of my ADHD frameworks, and just let the AI take it. The with me part came in with checking the answers. So the platform I use is called Coachbox. It's for coaches. And so after I uploaded everything and let the AI do its part, the with me part was fine tuning the answers. The goal was not only for them to be accurate, private, and reliable, but they needed to sound like me. They needed to reflect my personality. so there was a long period of fine-tuning the answers that was the with me part and then the only me part i'm never going to ask coach box or die ai or encourage anyone using die ai to just hand over big questions like should i expand my business should i hire should i shut it down Those are judgment calls.

31:00And for the detailed stuff, the legal stuff, I wouldn't give that to AI and I wouldn't attempt to do it myself because I'm not an attorney. So I turned to an attorney for the terms of use. I think this is a good example of a big project. um the goal was i have too many questions in between calls and i wanted my clients to have access to me without having access to me so i built an ai version of me and i built it using this framework for me with me and only me you can even try it yourself if you like you can sign up for my digital clone.ai. It's free. And there's a QR code on the screen, and I'm sure there will be on the website as well.

31:53The worksheet for this talk is available also at another QR code on the screen. And I believe you can also download it at the event resources below the captions if if you're here live on the webinar. We're ready for questions. Thank you so much, Diane, for such a useful and comprehensive presentation. Before we start our Q &A, I'd like to thank Inflow once more for sponsoring today's webinar. During the presentation, Diane's poll asked the audience, what stops you most often? 37 % said prioritization, 33 % said task initiation, and 15 % each said working memory and follow through. At the beginning of today's presentation, we also asked our audience members to share an example of how they're using AI in a way that's made a positive difference for them.

32:56Here are a few responses that stood out to us. I'm a nurse practitioner, and I use AI to build progress note templates. I use AI to write, someone else wrote, I use AI to write emails, check my tone, and remove negative emotions from my initial impulse response to emails. Someone else said, I use AI to help me produce imagery for presentations and to prove my writing. Someone said, I use AI to organize thoughts and for market research and data analysis. We also heard from dissenting voices, including this one. I am highly skeptical about the safety and ethics of using AI technology to support neurodevelopmental well-being.

33:47There are easier ways to outsource executive function. This is an unnecessary and harmful technology. Now to your questions. um people were asking about the ai words that you said you were creating a long list if you could just give a few as examples and and um why you've created a list like this yes absolutely um you know i have so many on the list now i i um might have to follow up with you but for example Yeah. I am a person who does not like the expression, working with your brain, not against it. I know that there's a ton of content out there about ADHD and many other ADHD coaches use the expression, I help you work with your brain, not against it.

34:42I just really don't like that expression. So I put that on my list. I also find that AI tends to use words like leverage and deep dive and just certain things because I read a lot. I see a lot of expressions that I see again and again and again. Leverage this, deep dive that. I realized I think I'm reading AI because I keep seeing these words again and again. I also am someone, and I include on that list, not just words that kind of trigger me personally, but I don't like the term superpower I'm used to describe ADHD because I think while I believe I have some super abilities that are directly related to my ADHD, and I think many people can identify those, virtually all of the significant struggles I experience in my work and day-to-day life are also directly related to ADHD.

35:44So I think the superpower talk is to me really denies the lived experience of millions of people who struggle with this. So that's on my banned list as well. I see. Okay. Someone asked, can AI help with perfectionism? That's a very good question. I would say, yeah, I would say when it comes to perfectionism, oftentimes we can't get started on something because we worry that we won't be able to do it well enough. So it's kind of how procrastination and perfectionism have their little dance, but we're procrastinating. Sorry. We're perfectionism also shows up is when we can't finish something. We don't know when it's good enough.

36:39So we keep improving it. And I would say that when we're maybe a writer, I work with a lot of writers. So they do more and more and more research because they don't know when enough is enough. It doesn't feel like if I don't research enough, if I don't cite enough sources, then my writing won't be good enough. So I believe we don't really have a good internal sense of enoughness. Our enoughness meter doesn't record accurately. So how we might turn to AI for perfectionism is to have an objective voice on something that doesn't know us and doesn't have any skin in the game to make us feel better.

37:26So for example, maybe you could, if you write something and hand it off to the AI and say, this is who I am like I am a person in this field doing this job and I'm at this level in the company and I'm sending this email to my immediate supervisor for this reason I want this kind of feedback I have ADHD and perfectionism tendencies help me identify if this email is factual, accurate, focused, appropriate to my relationship with the person I'm sending it to, the right length. Like you can go on and on with as many details as you want. But I think the more interesting question, if you were to use it in that way is, would you accept the AI's feedback?

38:17Right? Because if we hand something off and say, I have perfectionism, help me with the perfectionism. Well, you could ask the AI to research perfectionism and share all the tools that are available for perfectionism, but you could also do that in a Google search. So I would say if we want to try using AI to help us with our perfectionism, entering who you are, what you want something to be, and help you understand and identify whether it's long enough, focused enough, whether the tone is appropriate enough. One of the tools that I often recommend is called Goblin Tools. Oh yeah. Goblin Tools.

39:01I've talked about it on my podcast. Goblin Tools is a free tool. It's actually a whole grab bag of tools. And one of the tools inside of it is like a tone meter. So you enter a piece of text. And it's, by the way, AI, Goblin Tools is AI. You enter something written and then ask the AI to change the tone, make it more formal, make it more funny, make it more professional, make it more to the point, turn it into bullet points. So if you can take the AI's feedback in that way and be satisfied with it, I think that could help you with perfectionism. But I think better yet, recognizing that no matter what I do, it's never going to feel like enough.

39:47So I have to adopt some external standards that I just live by because I'm always going to think I should do more. Make sense? Yes. We've had quite a few questions from people who wanted to know more about your make it boring. um yeah part um okay could could you yeah just talk about that a little bit more in detail yeah absolutely um the reason why i talked about make it boring and i want to go back to the very beginning of this uh talk is there are so many tools long before ai came along and there will be other tools after ai comes along that are that have the purpose among others of helping us get more done in less time.

40:36That's the big promise, right? And that's why people are worried that AI will take their jobs because if AI can get more done in less time, who the heck needs humans? I get it. The reason why I say we need to make it boring is if you have any interest in learning new things, and a lot of us do, we can turn AI into a whole big rabbit hole. lots of self-employed people i work with lots of creatives lots of entrepreneurs and small business owners my clients um i have to be very careful what things i recommend to them because in true adhd fashion we're convinced that we need to master this new thing so we dive in head first start learning everything that can be learned about it well unless you plan to go into the field of AI.

41:29You only need to know so much because at that point you're doing such a deep dive. You're learning so much. You're not probably helping your executive functioning anymore. You are literally giving yourself a whole new job on top of the job you already have. So when I say make it boring, I am saying be very specific what you want the AI to do, what you want the AI, how much you want the AI to know about you so that it can give you the most accurate feedback. When am I going to use this? How am I going to use this? What specific information do I want from this? And what's the trigger so that I create that prompt and I'm going to use it again and again and again and again.

42:16That's what I mean by making it boring because AI can be the most incredible rabbit hole your brain has ever come across. and you can just keep going further and further and further down and learning more and more and more about it. We don't need that most of the time. We need to do our actual job with less friction and less fatigue. And we need to get focused, follow up and get to the finish line faster. So when I say make it boring, I mean, learn enough so that this helps you and doesn't just end up in the drawer along with all the other abandoned executive functioning tools. That's what I mean.

43:01Because it's probably a little bit confusing and contradictory because I know I treat boredom like a life-threatening condition. I genuinely do. And I believe if something's boring, we're like, I'm done. But I mean, make the process of how you use the AI boring so that you don't have to keep relearning it and redoing it and starting over. Set it and forget it so then it can actually save you time and help you do your actual work faster. I hope that helps. Yes, and potentially prevent going down that rabbit hole. Bingo. Because I, listen, I love me some rabbit holes, but I spend entire, when left to my own devices, I can spend entirely too much time there and realized that was very stimulating, very exciting, a lot of novelty, very fun, but I've just lost three hours of my life.

43:55I'll never get back. And I didn't need to go there. Yeah. And that is one of the things that you have to consider when using AI. You know, you're trying to make your work more efficient, but there is that other side of it that could end up having you spend more time on it because of the vast amount of information. and rabbit holes. Someone had asked, you had talked about using it for client notes. Someone had asked about privacy concerns. How do you make sure that those notes are private or privacy in general? Yeah. That's why with my clone, Guy AI, I hired an attorney for the terms of use. And I built it on, I built it on the CoachVox platform because, I mean, for those who are not familiar with me, I was a former therapist for many years.

44:52So my, my profession was built on privacy and confidentiality. So I think now therapists are probably really struggling with how to use this and whether they could use it. There should be no client identifying information entered into AI. If you want to redact stuff and then use it, or if you want to just create a general outline and use it, I think it can help organize information. It can help streamline information, but anything like, for example, I wouldn't, I wouldn't turn to AI to counsel me on my relationship problems. People do. I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't recommend it. I wouldn't go to AI for financial advice.

45:40I wouldn't go to AI for legal advice. I wouldn't enter anything. That's why one of the prompts that I recommended, one of the screens where you sort it is, if you wouldn't want this to show up somewhere publicly, don't enter it. Mm-hmm. Not to say you can't use it at all for client work, but it shouldn't have any client identifying information in it. Mm-hmm. So I think, and this is where I think, this is where I think our critical thinking really comes in. Because, and that's why, that's why I thought rather than talk about, oh, should I use ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity or Grok or whatever, they're all probably going to be replaced by something else in six months.

46:26So, you know, I wanted this to be relevant for a much longer period of time. But before we even sit down and do anything is, you know, is this something that I would be okay with handing off to AI? Do I need to work together with the AI so I get out of the stall faster, but I'm not handing away my critical thinking? Or is this something that really AI should not touch at all? That's why I think that's the most important, like, sorting. But if you are wanting to get help to get client notes done faster, I would probably save that on some sort of a document where all of the identifying information can be removed before putting that into AI.

47:13Then you still get something helpful and organized back, but not in a way that you're disclosing any confidential or private material. Yeah. You mentioned over-reliance on AI, critical thinking skills. So we had quite a few questions about how to balance getting the information you need without using it in an overly reliant kind of way. I had someone say, I've been increasingly nervous about using AI and about it making me dumb. I'm afraid that I'll lose some of my brain cells and critical thinking skills. And it makes sense to have these concerns. What do you think about that? I have so much to say about this, Carol.

48:08I think that if you are a person, like many of us with ADHD, who struggles to express ourselves, who struggles to know exactly what we want to say and how we want to say it in the moment, the vast majority of us struggle with that. we may be good speaking um speaking but then we struggle to write or we may be really good at writing but then we struggle with our speaking and oftentimes the most brilliant thing that we could have said we don't think about until later that day or the next day if at all and then we're like oh man i wish i could have thought of that in the moment so i think if that is something that that you experience is like i don't know how to say this the right way or i don't know how to express this in just the right way.

49:06It would be the most natural thing in the world to turn to AI for help. That would be a place where I could easily see you becoming over-reliant because if you need a little time to process your thoughts and you need a little time to sort them out and you need a little time to see them on paper and think, is that what I wanted to say? Is that how much I wanted to say? Am I saying too much? Am I saying it in the right way? You could very easily become dependent on that because I think AI doesn't have any emotional regulation issues, right? If we're like, how do I say this the right way? And you just put it on the page and the AI just spits it out so beautifully, it's like, wow.

49:59Yeah. You're expressing my thoughts better than I can. Right. That would be very humbling and terrifying, but also very attractive. Right. Because the amount of time many of us spend just fretting and ruminating and worrying and second guessing and how many emails do people revise a million times before they send it um i could easily see how ai could become a crutch in a way absolutely yeah and i think um you know my advice for that is we have these fears for a reason we have these doubts and these worries and these concerns for a reason because when anything artificial appears to be able to do a job better than we can we're either going to be terrified of it or become dependent on it or both so i think the the sorting of you know what i want to hand off to the AI, what I want to do with the AI and what I want to keep to myself.

51:20I think we need to really spend time individually, each of us, for anyone who's thinking about adopting this framework and absolutely grab the worksheet because everything we've talked about in this hour today is captured on a single page that you can refer back to. I mean, I think we really need to think about this and not just have like a knee-jerk reflex. Maybe even create some scenarios. For example, if I worked through a particular problem or particular project or particular task with AI and my boss found out about it or my colleague found out about it or would I would I hold back from telling my spouse I did that?

52:09I think these are very real and very reasonable things to think through. And human beings are all over the spectrum, including human beings with ADHD on agency and autonomy and where our locus of control is. I think for those of us who are creatives, knowledge workers, professionals, we will cling very tightly to our autonomy and our agency and will be very critical and reserved about what we hand off to AI. Other people will use it much more readily because they may feel like any help I can get is worth the risk because I'm drowning in all these tasks. So I think it's also related to what your level of struggling with your executive functioning is.

53:11And I mean, if somebody felt like they're getting written up for performance evaluations because they're always late, their tasks have too many, you know, what they turn in has too many mistakes. um other people are constantly waiting for them to finish their part so they can get started that that person is probably at risk of becoming overly reliant on ai um but i always try to look at the bigger picture carol and and i would probably say maybe they're not in the right job you know because i i think all all of us can succeed when there is a good fit between our abilities and our limitations and the environment.

53:56So if we need AI to do everything for us to get our job done, my gut feeling is we're probably in the wrong job. I don't know if that cracked open a whole other can of worms, but. Right. Yeah, that's interesting. Someone asks or says, AI is very helpful to me at work, but what do I say to people who are against it or skeptical of AI?

54:31Well, one of the things I talk about the most with my clients and on my podcast is boundaries. I think as a neurodivergent person, we hear a lot from other people how we do things differently. this is completely different from ai but it's like why do you do it that way why can't you just we're wired differently we have a different operating system we perceive things differently we approach problems differently we often have a different workflow we make different choices so i think folks with adhd are very familiar with being questioned by others about why we make the choices that we make. This may just be the newest one.

55:20And in truth, and I've had people say, don't you care about the environment or don't you? Because I not only use AI in a variety of ways, I actually created an AI of myself, DiAI. So I've gotten quite a bit of feedback on that. And I understand that there are risks. I understand there are concerns. I understand there are ethical and moral concerns, environmental concerns, privacy concerns, and I have to live my life, have my relationships, and run my business with the brain I've got. So using the sorting system that I've shared today, that allows me to make sure I'm truly holding on to the things that I should not let AI touch.

56:15And I've made peace with accepting help from AI where I feel I can with privacy, with accuracy, and with safety. And that's what I tell people, but usually a shorter version because that was kind of a speech.

56:33A few people wrote in with tips about how they use AI. One person said, I sometimes will use AI to help me with research, always double checking the links they send me. I will always add, do not include any information if you are not 95 % accurate about it. I noticed a huge difference in what it generates. I thought that was pretty interesting. I love that. As a matter of fact, one of my friends says, Claude is a BSer. I thought that that should be a t-shirt because you know when somebody really says something with their full chest out like as though it's absolute fact many of us who are prone to doubt ourselves think oh that must be true no we we need to be cautious about AI not assume that no matter how confident it sounds that it's actually accurate.

57:37But the funny part is, and for people who are a little bit more familiar, I love the 95 % rule. Don't even show me this. You can add that to my list of, I have ADHD. Don't tell me the whole path, just the first step, or tell me something that I can get done in the next 20 minutes, or give me three examples, not 10. I have ADHD, let me remind you. I think don't shoot anything back to me unless you have like 95 % assuredness of accuracy. I would still fact check. And I think this is why we're saying, that's why when I said, if you feel relieved, that's not a good sign. We should feel this tension, Carol.

58:21We should feel this pushback. If we are just handing things off to AI and not even, it's like delegating, but then not following up to make sure your employee did the thing right. We need to make sure this employee did the thing right and hold it to a high critical standard, even though it may be free. and even though we've turned to it for help and even though we legitimately need the help, I never want to hand off my agency. So I'm always going to double check and question and be like, okay, prove it. Yeah. Because I'm still the human. Right. Okay. Well, unfortunately we're out of time. So thank you, Diane, so much for sharing your expertise with our ADHD community.

59:12We appreciate it and we thank you and we thank everyone here today. If your question wasn't answered during the webinar, we do share audience questions with our experts and yours may appear in a future edition of Attitude Magazine's Ask the Advisor column. If you would like to access today's event resources, visit attitudemag.com and search for podcast 623. The slides and recording are posted a few hours after each live webinar. If you're listening in replay mode, simply click on the episode description. Please know that our full library of Attitude webinars is available as a podcast. It's called the ADHD Experts Podcast, and it's available on most streaming platforms.

59:59You can get alerts for future Attitude webinars by signing up at attitudemag.com slash newsletters. Thank you, everyone, and have a great day. For more Attitude podcast and information on living well with attention deficit, visit AttitudeMag.com. That's A-D-D-I-T-U-D-E-M-A-G.com.

1:00:31Hey, Chicagoland, the Wayfair store is in your neighborhood at Edens Plaza and Wilmette. Finally, you can feel the fabric, sit on the sectionals, and even open the refrigerators. Plus, our in-store designers will help you bring it all together with free one-on-one design support for any project on any budget. Yep, we said free. Oh, and did we mention the cafe? So what are you waiting for? Come see all that's in store. Visit the Wayfair store today at Edens Plaza and Wilmette.