Jamie King, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of The Slay Coach, is a mother and entrepreneur whose company made $1 million in revenue during the past three years. She also has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). How? King structured her day to work with her neurodivergent flow. More simply, she thinks differently and figured out a workaround.
Her company, The Slay Coach, is designed to help entrepreneurially-minded women identify profitable products, bring them to market, and scale their businesses. On her podcast, she told audiences that she quadrupled her income from 2019 to 2020, all while creating a schedule around her ADHD.
King homeschools her three children in the mornings and books any calls for the day starting at noon or later. She has a routine with her family in the evenings, but she’s back to work from midnight to two in the morning. She credits her husband, a stay-at-home father, for taking care of the home and children while she’s working.
King told audiences that her nontraditional family and nontraditional business work with her ADHD’s “type B cycles,” which make sustaining attention, organizing tasks, and following instructions difficult to do. King is also highly distractible and has a poor working memory, making it challenging to remember conversations or keep track of items.
To create an environment that works best for her, she avoids time-bound pressures in her household. Her days include to-do lists and outlines but not strict timelines or schedules, aiming to reduce any shame that often accompanies neurodivergent mental processes. During the times when she is “hyperfocused,” experiencing a spurt of highly sustained attention often seen in ADHD cases, she leans on her husband for help.
“I will allow myself to stay in that state and I will tell my husband, ‘Hey, I’m in a really good creative space right now. I need to go away for 24 hours.’”
And she does, booking a hotel or an Airbnb. At these times, she said that she is able to get five days’ worth of work done in just one.
