Most ADHD business owners I work with aren't losing clients because their work is bad. They're losing them because the follow-up was in their head, and then it just wasn't.

The check-in you meant to send. The invoice you forgot to chase. The "I'll get that to you on Friday" that turned into two weeks. Each of those costs you something real. Maybe it's a client who quietly doesn't rebook, or money you've already earned and never collected.

Here's the thing though. The fix is almost always a smaller setup than the one you already tried to build.

There are three pieces: a place to dump everything, four big buckets, and one place to look every day. Everything here works on the free Asana plan.

You can either keep reading or watch the video:

Step 1: Get it all out of your head first

Most people skip this step. They open Asana and start building teams and projects and sections right away.

But you can't sort what's still stuck in your head. You end up building the setup around whatever you happen to remember that day, and then the real stuff shows up later with nowhere to go.

So we start with a brain dump. One project, one job: catch everything.

1. Click the plus button and create a new project. Start from blank.

2. Call it Brain Dump, or whatever makes sense to your brain. Random Stuff works too.

3. Use the list view. You don't need any sections, because it's just one long list. No custom fields, no colours, nothing fancy.

4. Dump in everything client related that's rattling around in your brain right now. Follow up with Sarah. Send Mary her welcome email. Take as long as you need.

Notice you're not deciding anything. You're not picking dates or thinking about where things go. You're just listing them out.

So many people I work with tell me they want it all in one place. Well, this is that one place. It doesn't have to be pretty. It just has to exist.

How I capture tasks day to day

On a normal day, when a random task pops into my head, I open the Asana app on my phone and add it into My Tasks with a due date of tomorrow. Every time.

Then when I sit down to work, it's right there. I either do it, move it to the project it belongs in, or move it to my random tasks and ideas project if it's not for now.

The whole point is that I don't have to decide anything in the moment, and I don't have to remember it until the next time I'm at my computer. When you're in mom mode or errand mode, you don't have the space to decide. So just don't.

Step 2: Four big buckets

Now that everything's out of your head, it needs somewhere to live.

This is where people get way too detailed. They create 30 projects, every client in a different place, and suddenly they're spending more time filing than working.

So keep it simple. Four buckets, and that's it. In Asana, these are your teams:

• Client Work

• Marketing

• Operations

• Products

If you want the full why behind keeping it this simple, I go way deeper in my minimalist Asana setup video for ADHD entrepreneurs.

Sorting the brain dump (and the 5-second rule)

Go back into your brain dump and move each task to where it belongs. For example, "follow up with Sarah" goes into Sarah's client project. Open the task, click the add project button, search for her project, and add it.

Here's the rule that keeps this from turning into another overwhelming job: if you can't decide where something goes in about five seconds, it stays in the brain dump.

That's not failing. It's just not decided yet, and that's totally allowed.

That rule matters more than it sounds like it should. The moment sorting starts to feel like a big decision, your brain wants to close the tab and walk away. So we take the decision out of it.

If you want this set up properly but don't even know where to start in Asana, that's exactly why I made Asana Made Simple. It walks you through signing up, setting up and actually using Asana in under two hours, on the free plan, with no experience needed. I built it to be neurodivergent friendly, because so many of us have tried tools like this and couldn't make them stick.

Step 3: My Tasks is your one place to look

This is the part that actually stops things from slipping.

You now have a place to dump things and buckets to put them in. But if you have to go through all four teams every morning to figure out what's due, you won't. I wouldn't either.

So in Asana, you get one place to look every day, and that's My Tasks. It's free, and it pulls in every task that's assigned to you from every single project across your Asana account.

You can view it as a list, a board, or a calendar. The calendar view is my personal favourite. I like to see just my week laid out, so when I open Asana in the morning, it defaults to that and I can see everything I need to do this week in one clear view. I can move things around, check things off, and see the details right inside each task, all without going into my projects. (I walk through my daily My Tasks habit in this My Tasks video.)

Make your follow-ups recurring

Here's how we fix the follow-up problem from the beginning.

The things you keep forgetting are almost always the things that happen over and over: checking in with clients, sending invoices, following up after you deliver something.

So let's stop remembering them and make them recurring.

1. Create the task, like "Check in with Mary."

2. Assign it to yourself.

3. Give it a due date, like next Monday.

4. Click "Set to repeat" and choose weekly. You can also do something like Monday and Thursday if you need it twice a week.

When you tick that task off, Asana automatically creates the next one. And because it's assigned to you, it lands right in My Tasks.

So I'm not remembering to follow up anymore. It just shows up and reminds me to do the thing.

Bonus for paid plans: you can add rules to move tasks between sections automatically. You don't need that to make this work. It's just another little tip.

What happens when you have more clients

This setup works really well when it's just you and a couple of clients. But once you've got three, four, five clients going at the same time, their stuff starts blending together, and you can't tell at a glance where each client stands.

There's one more layer that fixes that. I show you how to set it up in How to Manage Multiple Clients in Asana (Without Losing Your Mind). And if you'd like to see how my own client setup looks inside Asana, The Asana Tour walks you through my real client management system.