How to Build a Marketing System That Works on Your Low-Dopamine Days Too
Almost every marketing system you've been sold was designed by someone neurotypical or a neurodivergent having a good week.
They had the idea, tested it while they were energised and interested, saw it work, and wrote it up. What they probably didn’t do was stress-test it against a week where getting dressed was the sole accomplishment. So the system arrives in your red-hot hands with a hidden requirement in the very fine print; this works if you can show up like I did when I made it.
Then you have a low stretch (low mood, energy and motivation) — and every entrepreneur with ADHD traits has them, including me, and the system produces nothing. Not less. Nothing at all. Because it had no version of itself that runs at reduced capacity. The one I call the MVV - Minimum Viable Version.
That's not a discipline failure. That's a system that doesn’t take fluctuating capacity into account, and fluctuating capacity is something you can count on with ADHD, so we might as well count on it and plan for it.
Judge the system by its floor, not its ceiling
Ask most business owners how their marketing is going and you'll get a description of their best month. That's the ceiling, and the ceiling is damn near useless as a measure, because your best month isn't the one that determines whether your business survives. Your floor does.
The real question about any promotion system is: what does this produce on my worst week?
If the honest answer is nothing, you don't have a system. You have a plan that happens to work sometimes, which is a different and much more fragile thing.
Most gyms and fitness centers have regular hours, but Planet Fitness and Anytime Fitness are two of the chains that operate locations 24/7. Instead of closing from 10 PM to 5 AM, they keep the doors open for the night owls, running the facility with less staff on site, a narrower scope (weight room and cardio rooms are open, but no group classes) and have clear protocols for what still happens and what waits until morning (no personal trainers available.) The doors stay open, but services are restricted. That's what a floor is. Not full capacity, and not zero either.
So the strategic work is to decide, in advance and in writing, what the ceiling and the floor of your business look like. Helping my clients make these kinds of decisions is why I call myself a business strategist, not just a business coach. I help them make the strategic decisions and I help them implement them. Not one or the other - both.
Define your minimum viable week
Be specific and be realistic, which usually means cutting your first estimate roughly in half.
Something like: one piece of content goes out, one existing asset gets recirculated, one conversation happens with a referral partner. That's it. That's the floor.
It should feel almost embarrassingly small. If it doesn't, you've described a normal week rather than a bad one, and you'll blow through it the first time you actually need it.
Then the important part: deciding ahead of time that your floor week is still a success. Not a compromise, not falling behind, not something to make up for later. Hitting your floor during a rough stretch is the system doing exactly what you designed it to do, and treating that as failure is how people end up abandoning perfectly good systems out of shame. Don’t underestimate how important this mindset shift is. Bypass the shame and claim the win. It’s a win because you decided it was before it happened, not as a justification after the fact.
Slack is what makes a floor possible
You can't run a reduced capacity week on willpower alone. There has to be something produced and already sitting there, created ahead of time during a week when making things was easier
Three kinds of slack do most of the work:
Batching. Not because batching is better or morally superior in some way, but because it separates production from publication. Content created in September can be released in December. Paying attention to your seasonal rhythms in mood, energy and motivation are really helpful in determining when you you can batch and when you’ll be grateful that you did.
Reusable assets. Templates, swipe files, formats you don't reinvent. A repeatable episode format, a standing email structure, a post shape you can drop new material into. The point is to remove the blank page, which guarantees that nothing happens a low-capacity day. Take the shortcut. Low capacity days/weeks are the reason they exist.
Pre-decided defaults. Decide now what will happen when you aren’t able to decide later. Which piece gets recirculated. What goes out if nothing new gets made. Decision-making is one of the first things that goes when our capacity drops, so make the decisions while you still have some executive functioning to spare.
"But that's not authentic"
This objection comes up all the time, and it deserves a straight answer: batching and templates are not inauthenticity. They're infrastructure.
Nobody accuses a wedding photographer of being inauthentic for having a checklist of the types of photos they take and nobody would judge an operating room nurse for visually and verbally counting and reconciling the sponges, sharps and other miscellaneous tools before they close a patient’s surgical incision. The belief that your marketing only counts if it was created during a spontaneous burst of inspiration is fairy tale that should be retired.
What's is inauthentic is disappearing for two months and then reappearing with a post about how you've really been thinking about consistency lately. Your audience doesn't need you to be spontaneous. They need you to show up consistently, but how you make that happen behind the scenes is up to you. Spontaneous creativity and inspiration are awesome but they don’t happen consistently enough to build your marketing strategy around.
And here's the part that we hate to admit: the business owners who’ve been around for a decade or more and are the most consistent with their marketing are rarely the most creative ones. They're the ones who built the most boring, most repeatable infrastructure and then got out of its way.
The pause you plan for versus the one that happens to you
Both involve stepping back. Only one of them is a problem.
A planned reduction — where you've decided in advance what still runs and what waits — keeps your visibility intact and your findability compounding. An unplanned collapse takes your marketing to zero and leaves you rebuilding momentum from scratch, which always takes a lot longer than the break itself did.
That distinction sits at the center of Planned Pauses and Pivots, the fifth pillar of The ADHD-ish Method and it's the reason the floor question matters more than almost any tactical decision that you'll make about promotion.
Build for the week you'll actually have
Somewhere in the next quarter you’re going to have week where very little is available to you. You probably aren’t going to know which week it will be, but you know it's coming, because it always is. This is life with ADHD, whether you’re running a business or not.
Being strategic in your business means planning and designing for that week now, while you can. Then when it happens, your business remains visible and you get to be unwell, or depleted, or simply checked out — without also watching your pipeline dry up as a punishment for being a human being with a nervous system.
That's not lowering the bar. It's putting the bar somewhere you can actually clear on a bad week.
More on how planned pauses and pivots look in practice in Episode #335: Implementing Pauses & Pivots in Your Service Based Business. It’s also a key feature of how I helped Kim Van Lue redesign her coaching and consulting business in Ep #329, a Client Success Story. If you want to design the floor version of your own promotion system — and figure out which part of your marketing strategy is carrying too much weight to survive a planned pause or pivot — book a free consultation and let’s talk about how I can help.
