This is an excerpt from my workshop, Alternative, Sustainable Income Sources for Autistics and AuDHDers.
Automate where you can
If you’re running your own business, or trying to do some sort of passive income scheme or whatever, or even honestly working for someone else, if it’s administrative type jobs, they’re just routine tasks that have to happen over and over and over: I encourage you to build repeatable systems that will take care of some of that for you, or will streamline it or will make it easier, or will make it, what can automate some of it.
Basecamp, Workflowy, Amazing Marvin, ConverKit, Less Annoying CRM are all apps that can help you automate. I use most of these myself. Some of them I don’t use, but I’ve looked at and I kind of liked but they just didn’t meet my particular needs.
Basecamp is great for project management. Workflowy is like a bullet point type style of journaling, of keeping notes. You can even do longform notetaking with that. Amazing Marvin is a to do list slash reminder type tool. ConvertKit is an email program for mass emailing. Less Annoying CRM, it’s a CRM that, as the tin says, it is less annoying than a lot of the others that I found, but that can just keep track of people that you have to work with in your business.
I’d encourage you to automate as much as possible.
More options for assistance
I use Acuity Scheduling for scheduling all of my appointments. And that way I don’t have to deal with the back and forth of, “Does this time work for you?” “Does this time work for you?” “Does this time work for you?” I hate that. I just set it up and I can set it to know what my schedule is, what times I’m okay with, and people can book during the times that I’m okay with. And they can check their schedule against mine. And we’re good, and it also takes care of the payment processing for me. And I don’t have to track people down for invoices and payments later on, it’s done.
Zapier or Webhooks are a great way to get different programs to work together so that when someone signs up for the workshop, you automatically get my emails for my newsletter. And they all work together.
Buffer and Fedica are both ways to schedule out social media posts in advance, so that you don’t have to do it all in real time all the time, and that task switching and minutiae, it lowers the executive function load.
On having appointment reminders, I set a reminder for every appointment that I have five minutes before. That way I have enough time that I can make myself a cup of tea, and go to the bathroom, and shift my thoughts to “Okay, I’m going to do something else now. But not enough time that I get distracted doing some other task and then lose track and I’m late.”
So those are the things that that I use.
You don’t have to deal with all of the administrative stuff.
You can also use marketplace seller platforms. So if you’re selling Adobe paint brushes, or if you’re selling music, or you’re selling a PDF, or you’re selling a course or whatnot, if you use one of those marketplace seller platforms that you can sell through Gumroad, or Payhip, or Spring, or things like that, they can take care of the payments, the taxes. A lot of the administrative stuff is just taken care of for you. You pay them a small cut to do it. But you don’t have to deal with all of the administrative stuff.
You can also find someone to outsource some tasks to, either for pay or for trade. Someone who can work for you for just a few hours a week or month and build that cost into your prices. There are a lot of people in the disability community who would love just a few hours of work to get some money, but not enough to jeopardize their support. And to have something to do and to feel good about themselves and it eases up their burden a little bit. And then it’s a win-win. Everyone gets what they want.
Or you can trade services, like your service for theirs. They can do some things for you and you do some stuff for them. I do that with a few things. I have a couple of people who I trade with for like video editing, and then I don’t have to do that.
