Why Online Membership Communities Are Great For ADHD Business Owners

(Please enjoy this lovely guest blog post from my student + friend Priscilla!)

Have you ever found yourself knowing exactly what you should be doing but you just can’t seem to get yourself to do it? Or maybe you have a gazillion-and-one ideas of how to start, but starting feels like too much. Or maybe you experience the spark of a new, novel idea, go all-in for a few days, and then somewhere midway through…you lose all momentum and never come back to it. If you’ve been on the fence about whether or not a membership would actually be helpful for your creative business goals, here are 8 reasons community-focused memberships can be especially helpful for squirrely entrepreneurs.

I said it on Threads at the beginning of 2026 that this would be a pivotal year for done-with-you services, including memberships, and here I am in…four myself?!?

As both a mental health therapist who has worked with ADHD and a creative entrepreneur who has facilitated groups in both clinical and business settings, I have some thoughts about why this format works so well.

Especially for entrepreneurs with diagnosed ADHD, those who suspect they may have ADHD, or creatives who recognize some of these executive-function struggles in themselves.

All that aside, I think we can all agree that *most* of us do not need another half-finished course decaying in the digital abyss. We need support to DO the damn thing. 

Hi! I’m Priscilla — Therapist turned Website Copywriter, ½ of Kinfolk Creative, and Member of the Squirrel Community (which, if you’re an avid reader of Sara’s, you’re familiar with!).

I’m a creative business owner diagnosed with ADHD who also spent years as a mental health therapist specializing in working with neurodivergent folks.

Now, I get to bring both sides of my brain to the table: helping creative entrepreneurs communicate what makes their work worth choosing while being very aware that sometimes our brains have approximately 111 tabs open at once.I’m a founder of The Publishing House — a blogging community for creatives, and entrepreneurs that know allllll the reasons why blogging is that girl for sustainable growth, but find themselves struggling to publish the damn blog. Connect with Kinfolk Creative on Instagram and Threads!

What is a Creative Business Membership?

A creative business membership is a membership hosted by a creative business owner for other creatives or entrepreneurs. 

It’s basically a community meets accountability meets done-with-you support. Which, honestly, is an iconic trio for ADHD brains IMO. 

8 Benefits of Membership Communities for Entrepreneurs with ADHD

I think y’all know this already, but in case you don’t, one of the BIGGEST challenges of living with ADHD is trying to figure out how to work with your brain when it’s squirreling. 

Sometimes that’s days of having no fucking idea of how to start a task or deciding where to start. While other times it’s a chaotic mix of struggling to focus and maintain attention longer than 1 minute (that’s dramatic, but sometimes we don’t get to decide the level of drama our brains are giving that day okay?!). All of that to say, that’s exactly why memberships are such incredible strategies for creative business owners, specifically folks working within the online space. 

Think of it as borrowing executive functioning, if you will. 😉

1. Time-Blocking Community Hours 

Most memberships include some form of community hours, whether that be co-working calls, office hours, mastermind hours, or implementation sessions. These time-blocked calls provide ADHD’ers with external structure around your time. 

Instead of saying, “I should probably work on that blog sometime this week,” you have a block on your calendar that says: Wednesday at noon. We are writing the damn blog.

That visual cue is important because it removes one more decision your brain has to make about when the task is going to happen.

Bonus points if that time block is designated for a specific task because that can reduce some of the decision fatigue that happens before you even start.

For example, inside our own blogging membership, The Publishing House, we have two weekly community hour blocks. One is intentionally structured while the other isn’t.

• Co-Writing Wednesdays are exactly what they sound like. You come in, work on your blog, ask questions, and leave having moved the thing forward.
• Monday Office Hours are more open. You can ask questions about blogging or SEO, use the space for coworking, or bring literally any focused work you need to get done.

2. Body-Doubling & Accountability 

Going off the benefit of time-blocking community hours, this also provides a space for body doubling. 

Body doubling is a common productivity strategy for ADHDers where you perform a task in the presence of others. This can help improve focus, attention, motivation, and external accountability. 

The other person does not even have to be helping with the task. Sometimes they’re just…there. I always share the story that, as far back as I can remember, I would intentionally invite friends over just so they could sit in my room while I cleaned it.

They never cleaned with me or told me what to do next. They just hung out while I did the damn thing. I was 20-something when I realized I was practicing body-doubling as a crafty 8 year old. 

Maybe you can relate to how incredibly useful it is when working in a space where other people are also working, especially when someone is going to ask:

• What are you working on?
• How’s it going?
• Where did you get before we hop off?

This is an exact example of how I use this kind of external accountability during our co-writing calls that help our members turn an intention of writing a blog into an actual action of publishing the blog.

3. Beating Decision Fatigue 

Don’t ask me how to start something because my brain will immediately go into overdrive and find seventeen possible ideas and never start the thing. Remember those 4 memberships I told you that I’m in? Yea, they tell me what to do so I don’t even have to decide (Sara’s Swipe File newsletter support membership for example!)

If your brain looks anything like this before starting a task…

• What should I work on?
• Which task matters most?
• Which lesson do I need?
• Where did I save that template?
• I need to respond to ____ in Slack before
• Should I write a blog or work on Pinterest?
• I should update my homepage first
• I haven’t been on stories yet
• Actually, I need to write my sales sequence

…that may be a good sign that your brain needs more structure and accountability. 👀

One of the things I’ve learned both in the therapy room and in business is that people often need fewer barriers between themselves and the next action rather than MORE options. 

4. Shorter Feedback Loops

Inside of The Publishing House, we have a channel specifically for helping our members close their open loops without spiraling through the cycle of overthinking, Googling, asking a bot, overthinking again, and ultimately scraping the whole thing in the end. 

Instead of sitting on a question for two weeks or feeding into your perfectionism, a community membership gives you the space to bring it to community hours, a Slack/Circle channel or community chat to get your loop closed by someone who understands and gets it. 

For many with ADHD, uncertainty can be one of the greatest forms of friction for moving forward. 

5. Novelty Without Starting Over 

If you’re someone who has a million-and-one ideas and not enough hours within the day to implement them, go ahead and x-out of this blog right now and go find your community…I’m being so forreal. 

One of my FAVORITE parts of the many 4 (!!!) communities that I’m a part of is the novelty that I get to experience month after month. Whether that’s a new guest speaker, a fun resource drop, monthly challenge, or community events—COUNT ME IN!

In my opinion, the best memberships are the ones that offer some form of novelty while maintaining the focus on the core reason we’re all there. 

Inside The Publishing House, for example, we make blogging feel fresh through monthly challenges or community themes without changing the actual goal of publishing useful long-form content consistently enough so that it can keep working for your business while you’re off the clock. 

6. Somewhere to Land a Thought/Question

I am the type of creative that has Slack and Circle open at all times. I also have tons of sticky notes, 5 notebooks, and my reminders app nearby. Sometimes, I even underestimate the value of being able to quickly drop a question while I’m working in the community chat to come back to. 

I did it just last week inside of one of the memberships I’m in. I asked a question about LinkedIn mid-work, it’s now a week later and I finally have the capacity to go back in and see the response without the visceral reaction of annoyance from forgetting the question that I wanted to ask. 

Instead of trying to hold every question, idea, task, or problem in your own head, the community becomes another place where that information can live.

And while a membership is obviously not replacing your executive functioning, it can help externalize some of the things you would otherwise be trying to remember or manage on your own.

That is a big deal when your brain already feels like it has a fuck ton of tabs open at all times.

7. Witnessing Others Doing the Work

There is something powerful about watching other people work through the exact thing you’re struggling with.

• Someone asks a question you were embarrassed to ask
• Someone shares a messy first draft
• Someone publishes the blog they have been talking about for three weeks
• Someone finally sends the email
• Someone admits they disappeared for a month and came back anyway

A community that normalizes the process = 🤌

When you see another person make progress that in turn gives you just enough evidence that you can make progress too.

I saw versions of this constantly in my clinical group work.One person says something out loud and suddenly three other people in the room are nodding. “Oh.” or “I thought that was just me.” 

Community Memberships can create a similar sense of relief.

8. A Built-In-Way Back In 

ADHD makes consistency…complicated (to say the least). 

• You miss a co-writing call? No biggie, there’s another next week. 
• Spaced the guest call? That’s okay, there’s a recording being uploaded right now. 
• You stop blogging for a month? No sweat, you pick back up with the new community challenge.
• Drop off the face of the earth? Life happens, the community will still be there. 

My point is, a membership gives your squirrely brain permission to exist as it is because no matter how much your consistency adjusts when life is life-ing, the structure is always going to be there. You just have to come back. 

Not Every Membership is ADHD-Friendly

I also want to be clear that a membership being a membership does not always mean that it will be ADHD-friendly. Some are information/resource packed, 6 weekly calls, a Slack workspace with 12 channels blowing up at all hours of the day or everything is categorized as important. 

Those are probably not your community. 

When looking for an ADHD-friendly community, I recommend finding a membership that leaves room for flexible participation. Meaning, if life starts life-ing for a month and you disappear for a bit, you shouldn’t have to work through built up shame just to come back.

The membership structure should make it easy to re-enter. You should feel supported, not like you failed the membership because you weren’t perfectly consistent.

At the end of the day, the right membership community should give you space to show up when you can and still feel supported when you come back.