Business Diaries #2: Actually, I want to make uneven progress

This post is part of Business Diaries, where I document my journey to grow a business around my blog The ADHD Homestead. You can read the full series here.

Having just hit the midyear mark, I want to talk about managing goals as an indie. At the beginning of 2019 I listed several goals I wanted to accomplish this year. Some, like forming my LLC, felt mandatory. But most fell under the broad umbrella of self-directed work. I want to do this stuff, but I don’t have any external accountability.

Working for myself makes me both boss and line worker. I chart the course, then steer the ship the best I can.

That requires me to strike a tricky balance between the daily grind and the big picture. While I have a deeply-ingrained work ethic and I live for the daily grind, I don’t always feel confident about my ability to accomplish long-term goals. For a while I abandoned them entirely because I so rarely accomplish them.

As I reflect on my work this spring, I feel pretty good about my progress even though it’s uneven at best. I should never have expected to earn a gold star for each of those bullet points. Even if I had been able to accomplish that much, it would’ve been a waste of time. Sketching out rough goals from time to time is important, but so is listening to my people and focusing my efforts on the projects with the most value.

In other words, sometimes lack of progress reflects poorly on me, but sometimes it reveals important insights about my goals.

My annual reader survey: the key to using time wisely.

This is the second year I’ve run a detailed reader survey to assess how I’m doing and what my readers actually want from me. I’ve found it enlightening and surprisingly liberating. My survey helps me let go of some goals and double down on others, and it provides way more useful information than Google or social media analytics.

Perfect example: In January I set a goal to grow my Instagram following. I even paid for a little online course to help me do it.  My progress since then has been debatable, but that’s totally okay with me. I no longer see Instagram as a critical piece of my platform.

I enjoy posting to Instagram occasionally and I think my posts have value. My current readers just don’t seem to care about it. This may have something to do with age and other demographics, or some other factor outside my control. Who knows. But the verdict from my core supporters seems pretty clear:

It’s okay not to go viral.

That’s not to say I don’t want my Instagram to blow up. I’d love 10,000 followers and a blue checkmark as much as anyone. Most of us tend to look to numbers for validation.

Plus, a lot of ADHD voices have gone viral lately. Part of me knows this has nothing to do with me. My audience doesn’t lend itself as readily to viral hits. All the same, it’s hard not to compare. I can’t deny wishing I could see those big numbers sometimes, too.

But I also acknowledge that not every viral post deserves the attention. Virality often has little correlation with actual value. You don’t need to cite reputable sources or fact-check your work or communicate ethically with your audience to hit the social media jackpot. You just need something that compels people to click “share.”

I’ve been working on being okay with none of my content going viral. I have other sources of validation: consistent book sales, heartfelt emails and comments thanking me for my work, respect from experts in the field. And those should feel more validating than celebrity retweets.

What currency does my business trade in?

Not only that, I need to consider my personal mission and what feels like the most effective use of my time. Late last year, when I decided to move forward with DoTheThing.app, I forced myself to justify it in the context of my business. How did it support what I was trying to accomplish?

To that end: what was I trying to accomplish?

My work for the ADHD community boils down to one thing: potential. When I think about all the women with a missed ADHD diagnosis, living with untreated ADHD, or simply settling for less because they think it has to be that way, I see wasted potential. And we’ve wasted women’s potential for too long.

For human society to last on this planet, we can’t afford to leave a whole subset of our best thinkers behind. And that’s why I do what I do. If my work helps one person reach their potential and leave the world better than they found it, I’ll be happy.

But I also want more. And in thinking about how to reach the most people, to help reclaim the maximum amount of leaked potential, I realized I had to build this app. Not just because it’s the tool I want but haven’t found in the App Store, but because I know I’m not the only one. My readers have expressed a lot of excitement for it, and it’ll give me a new and unique channel to get my ideas out there.

I’ve always worked behind the scenes, and maybe that’s where I belong.

Will my work give me a blue checkmark on my social media accounts and an interview on Good Morning America? Probably not. But at the moment it seems like the most efficient way to accomplish my mission. And my mission isn’t about me.

My favorite jobs have all placed me behind the scenes. Some, like my roles in IT support or working a busy copy and print center, employed my heroic efforts to make others look good. I didn’t mind that at all. I’m an introvert and I don’t need or want every eye in the room on me. Knowing my work made someone else’s day provided all the satisfaction I needed.

In my current life as an indie, I still choose work that facilitates others’ success. You could even view products like Order from Chaos or DoTheThing.app as tech support for the ADHD life.

So as I look at the goals January-me laid out in a nice bulleted list, I’m trying to feel okay with letting some of them go. Because while increasing my Instagram following 100-fold might sound flashy in this blog post, it hardly moves the needle on my core mission. With that in mind, I’ve spent the spring working quietly on several big and challenging projects with very slow payoffs.

And for someone who loves checking items off lists and reporting success by the numbers as much as I do, that’s an accomplishment worth celebrating.