02 Your ADHD Brain Was Built for This | Outsourced Executive Function

Written By Kat Murphy

✨ AI Is Going to Replace Your Creativity. Actually, It's Doing the Opposite.

That's the headline everywhere right now, and if you've got an ADHD brain, it probably stings extra. The tangents, the big ideas, the way you connect dots nobody else sees—that's supposedly the first thing on the chopping block.

Here's the twist: for a brain like mine, AI is doing the opposite. Stick around, because by the end of this you'll believe it too.

Most people are overwhelmed by AI right now. It showed up fast, it does about a million different things, nobody handed out an instruction manual, and everyone's quietly panicking that they're already behind. I've felt that panic too—it's part of why this podcast exists. But here's the part almost nobody's talking about: this stuff might actually be built for brains like ours.

💬 The Book Title That Chad Helped Us Land

Think about what ADHD brains are already good at: hyperfocus, pattern recognition, nonlinear thinking, fast idea generation, and a high tolerance for starting messy instead of needing things perfect first. Read that list again—that's not a list of symptoms. That's basically a roadmap for using AI well.

I've got a perfect example from this week. We were in the office going back and forth on a book title for Hard Knock Press, circling the same handful of options for weeks and getting nowhere. So I pulled out my phone, turned on ChatGPT's voice feature, and rambled into it for a few minutes—what the book was about, who it's for, what we'd already tried.

This voice comes back, a guy with a British accent (I call him Chad, short for Chadwick, don't ask), responding so naturally that everyone in the room looked like they'd seen a ghost. Then the publisher looked at me and said, "can you tell it that?"—and just like that, he's talking to my phone like it's another person at the table. By the end, we had our title, our subtitle, and a mocked-up cover good enough we might actually use it.

Nobody typed one question into a search bar and skimmed an answer. We talked through a problem out loud together until we landed somewhere better than weeks of brainstorming had gotten us on our own.

🔑 Stop Using It Like Google

Last week I was talking to my mom about the podcast, and she said, "oh, I use ChatGPT all the time now." I asked her: do you actually use it, or do you use it like Google? She paused—because that's the real question.

Using it like Google looks like one question, a skim, maybe a follow-up, then walking away. It's a slightly fancier search engine. Not nothing, but nowhere close to what this can do.

Actually using it looks like a full conversation—dumping the mess in your head, going back and forth, correcting it, giving it more context, trying again. It's the difference between asking someone for a fact and working through a problem with them out loud.

Once you make that shift, here's what it looks like in practice. I think of AI as an outsourced executive function—the part of your brain that plans, prioritizes, starts tasks, and keeps track of time, which also happens to be exactly the part that tends to struggle most with ADHD. A few real examples, not just theory:

Brain dumps into a plan. When I've got two dozen things circling my head and can't figure out where to start, I dump the entire mess in—no order, no filter, sometimes talked in instead of typed—and ask it to organize it into something I can actually follow.

Decision paralysis. "I have 10 things on my plate, help me prioritize," or "I'm stuck between these two options and can't pick." Not because I want AI making my life decisions—because sometimes you need to hand the spinning to something else for 60 seconds so your brain can land.

Scheduling and meals. Batching errands so I'm not driving all over town twice, planning groceries so I'm not rebuilding the same mental list every Sunday (it's connected to Instacart now and just asks what I need this week).

Workouts that match my actual energy. It's synced to my sleep and calendar data, so the plan it builds actually accounts for the fact that I don't have the same energy every day.

The emails I've been avoiding. I give it the gist and the tone, it drafts a response, and then—this is the important part—I edit it, because AI never gets the final say. Once it sounds like me, it's out of my inbox and out of my head.

Little Bird, a tool I found on Instagram, watches what I'm doing on my computer and can tell me what I started today and never finished. It's learned my other podcast's editing process just from watching and built me an SOP for it. It also runs a Sunday report on how many hours I spent on each client and project.

📋 Quick Recap

  • Stop using AI like Google—a real back-and-forth conversation beats one question and a skim, every time.

  • Use it as an outsourced executive function for the boring stuff: brain dumps, decision paralysis, scheduling, drafting the emails you're avoiding.

  • Don't use it to have your ideas for you—let it organize your life, but the ideas have to come from you.

  • Don't hand it judgment calls about people or relationships—that was never its job.

  • Don't treat it as your only source of truth—verify before you act, especially when it matters.

  • Protect your brain: let your own brain go first, treat it as a tool not a crutch, never open it without a reason, no screens (AI included) for an hour before bed, and know when to shut it down for the night.

🌱 If You Haven't Tried This Yet

If everything above sounds like a lot, start smaller. Grab the free 5 AI Prompts to Get Your To-Do List Under Control Today—five copy-paste prompts, no AI experience required, just paste and go. One small usable win beats a vague "I should really start using AI" resolution.

🔗 Resources & Links

🧡 AI Should Make You More Yourself, Not Less

Your ADHD brain is genuinely built for this—the hyperfocus, the pattern recognition, the nonlinear thinking, those are assets here, not liabilities. You're allowed to have real concerns about AI and still opt in on your own terms. That's not a contradiction.

So stop using it like Google. Start actually using it as a conversation. Let it handle the boring stuff so your brain has more room for the parts that are actually yours—the ideas, the relationships, the judgment calls.

If this is the episode where your brain went "oh, that's me"—I'd love to hear it. Message me on Instagram at @hey.katmurphy or email kat@theprettyshinythings.com and tell me: are you using AI like Google, or are you actually using it?

Until next week—go be present, be creative, embrace the pretty shiny things, and let the robots handle the rest.

Kat Murphy https://kat@kat-murphy.com
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