ADHDFive ADHD Coaches Have Said, On the Record, How They Really Use AI. It's Boring. That's the Point.
We went looking through published interviews, podcasts, and blog posts for what real ADHD coaches actually do with AI, not what they tell their clients to do in a workshop. Five coaches have described their habits publicly — in their own podcasts, blogs, and interviews. Not one described a transformed life or ran every hour of their day through a chatbot. What they described was small, daily, and honestly a little boring. That's the whole finding, and it's the useful part.
What five coaches actually do
Paula Engebretson uses ChatGPT to build analogies when she's trying to learn a new concept, since a comparison sticks better in her head than a raw explanation does. She checks her email tone before sending anything that matters. She has it summarize long articles she doesn't have time to read start to finish. She uses it for meal planning, because deciding what to cook five nights a week eats up more brain space than it should. On privacy, she's blunt about her own limit: "I'm not asking ChatGPT anything I wouldn't be comfortable having anyone else see anyway."
William Curb plans his day with the ChatGPT phone app at breakfast, before the day has a chance to run away from him. He uses AI for what he calls "easier starting points," things like packing lists before a trip, where staring at an empty list is harder than editing one that already exists. Then he says the part most people in his position wouldn't: "I don't personally use most of these tools." He covers ADHD apps and AI tools professionally, and he's straight about the fact that trying every tool and actually living inside a tool are two different things.
Marla Cummins writes her own email drafts first, blunt and unfiltered, exactly how the thought landed in her head. Then she has AI soften the tone before it goes out, while keeping it "still sounding like me." She didn't jump into this easily. She's said she had real ethical hesitation about handing any part of her communication to a tool, and she worked through that before it became a habit rather than skipping past it.
Tara McGillicuddy drafts a response to an emotionally charged email before she lets herself react to it for real. Writing the draft first buys her a pause between the feeling and the sending. In her words: "That pause alone, before reacting, can be life-changing."
Lynne Edris uses AI to beat blank-page syndrome. When she can't get a first sentence out of her own head, she asks AI for a rough one and edits from there. "Even if it's not exactly what I want, it gets me moving," she says. She's also turned AI into a game for chores she avoids, unloading the dishwasher included, because a task with a small game wrapped around it is easier to start than a task with nothing around it at all.
Three buckets, not ten tools
Line up all five habits and they sort into three groups without much effort. The first group is about starting: Curb's packing lists and Edris's blank-page workaround both exist to get a person moving when the first step feels too big to take. The second group is about tone and communication: Engebretson's email check, Cummins's softened drafts, and McGillicuddy's pause-before-reacting all use AI as a filter between a raw feeling and a sent message. The third group is about planning and learning: Curb's breakfast-time day plan and Engebretson's meal planning, analogies, and article summaries all use AI to organize information before the day gets messy.
Five coaches, three habit buckets
Grouping their publicly stated AI habits by what the habit is actually for
The honest part nobody had to say
"I don't personally use most of these tools," says William Curb.
Curb didn't have to say that. He could have listed every app in his coverage as something he personally swears by, and most people in his position do exactly that. Instead he drew a line between the tools he writes about and the tools he actually opens. That line matters more than any feature list, because it tells you the gap between covering a tool and living inside one is real, and it's fine to stay on the smaller side of that gap.
No study measures whether AI makes an ADHD adult's day faster or easier. That's a real gap, not a small one, and every "AI changed my life" claim you'll read is a personal account, not a lab result. What these five coaches gave us instead is more useful than a speed claim would have been anyway: five specific, repeatable, boring habits that took less than a minute each, tried and kept because they worked often enough to stick. None of them describe a 10x version of themselves. All of them describe a slightly smaller problem, most days, for a minute or two.
Why boring is the whole point
The Yap Method runs on the same idea these five coaches landed on independently. YAP means you talk messy into AI and don't organize while you're dumping it out. MAP means AI sorts what you said into five piles: Tasks, Worries, Ideas, Feelings, Questions. TAP means you pick one tiny action from those piles, something that takes two to ten minutes. SNAP means you save a short restart note for next time. Starting, tone, and planning are just three specific jobs inside that bigger loop. None of it requires you to use ten apps or trust AI with your whole brain. It requires you to use it for one small, boring, repeatable thing, the same way these coaches do, and to say SMALLER the second it stops feeling small.
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