The Rundown

• ADHD brains are prone to wandering. That's a secret weapon in the workplace

• The State of AI in the Creator Economy in 2026

• I cut my screen time by 2 hours a week with one Android setting nobody uses

• Anthropic's Claude Cowork now keeps working when you close your laptop

• Claude Fable Is Back! I'll Make You An Expert In 20 Minutes

👉Did you miss an issue? Check out previous Productivity Stacks issues anytime here

In case you missed it…

Earlier this week I opened the doors to The Time Vampire Cure, a 7-day action sprint I first ran in 2024 and just brought back.

This one's for you if you're putting in full days…busy from the moment you sit down until way past when you meant to stop…and yet the output never seems to match the input. All that effort should be adding up to more than it is. I get it. There was a stretch of my life when my brain gave me about 4 good hours a day (I was suffering from PTSD), and this system is what I built for myself to survive it…years before it ever became a course.

The format respects a busy brain and life: one short video a day, one 10-minute action a day, and a backup week for when life happens. Past participants recovered an average of 4.23 hours a DAY. Their numbers, not mine.

It's $47, everything's included, and doors close Monday, July 27 at 9:00am Pacific…the exact moment our live kickoff party starts (replay included).

🔥Quote/Prompt

Use the quote as a writing or thinking prompt to finish your week strong.

A bit from mine:

(posted in our Doer Entrepreneurs Free Community — off social media)

Did someone forward this to you?

📈 Performance

ADHD brains are prone to wandering. That's a secret weapon in the workplace

You sit down to focus and your brain heads out the door without you. If you have ADHD, or a decent helping of its traits, you've probably spent years treating that wandering like the enemy of your work.

This Fast Company piece rounds up new research suggesting the wandering might actually be earning its keep. In one study of 299 college students, the people with the MOST ADHD symptoms and the people with the fewest both out-solved everyone in the middle. And the high-symptom group wasn't grinding through logic to get there...they were solving in flashes of insight. Aha moments, on tap.

Key Insights:

1. Creative problem-solving followed a U-shape in the study, with the highest and lowest symptom groups solving the most puzzles and the middle of the pack solving the fewest. Strong focus wins at analytical work, and a wandering mind earns its keep on open-ended problems where nobody knows what the answer looks like yet...which describes about half of running your own business, if we're honest.

2. The researchers suggest matching brains to roles, with high-symptom thinkers thriving in strategy, marketing, and innovation while low-symptom folks shine in budgets and precise detail work. If you're running your own show and can't hire two versions of yourself, split your week instead: creative work in wander-friendly blocks, with systems and support wrapped around the detail work.

3. The typical work setup actively fights this advantage. Noisy spaces, rigid schedules, and packed calendars leave zero room for the mind-wandering that appears to fuel the insights. Whether you're solo or have a small team, you're the one who controls the environment, so blocking real, unstructured thinking time is a legitimate business move.

Read the full article for the full breakdown of both studies, the Cannes Lions neurodivergence report findings, and Kounios's take on which roles fit which kinds of brains.

Note for the extra deep divers: The 299-student study held up in our fact-check...it's published, peer-reviewed, and the U-shaped finding is exactly what the paper reports. The Radboud mind-wandering study is still at conference stage and correlational, so treat the mechanism as promising rather than settled. And the "30% more productive" and "87% better decisions" numbers come from consultancy reports and an industry survey, not peer-reviewed research. The core finding is solid either way.

⚙️ Optimization

The State of AI in the Creator Economy in 2026

You see "creator economy" in a headline and scroll right past it. Influencers, brand deals, someone filming themselves in a car...none of that is YOUR business, right? So here I am on my rooftop again: if you have an audience, you're a creator. Content is how the people you serve get to know, like, and trust you, which means what happens in this industry happens to you next.

This Net Influencer analysis cuts through the "will AI replace creators" panic with an answer that's genuinely reassuring and genuinely urgent at the same time. The human is the one asset nobody can synthesize. What AI is eating is the expensive middle...the finding, vetting, negotiating, and reporting layer...and work that took months now takes days.

Key Insights:

1. Your face, your voice, and the trust you've built are the parts AI makes more valuable, because the technology lets one talented person produce ten times the output. For anyone running a small operation, that's permission to stop hiding from the tools and get more visible, since the human is now the scarce ingredient.

2. The "intermediary tax" is collapsing fast. Vetting that took thirty minutes per influencer (about fifty hours for a hundred-name list) now happens through discovery engines screening tens of millions of profiles, and deals that took months of email ping-pong close in about two days. If you pay an agency or partner with brands on either side of these deals, percentage-of-spend fees priced for months of manual work deserve a hard look.

3. The article draws a sharp parallel to programmatic advertising, where the industry eventually discovered roughly a quarter of ad spend was evaporating somewhere between advertiser and audience. Ouch. For freelancers, small business owners, and founders, the smart move is tying your content and partnerships to measurable results now, before the audit era arrives and takes the fuzzy budgets with it.

Read the full article for the side-by-side of the same seven-figure campaign run manually versus AI-native, the full intermediary tax math, and the programmatic advertising history lesson on what happens when a growth channel finally gets audited.

⏲️ Time Management

I cut my screen time by 2 hours a week with one Android setting nobody uses

Let me guess...you're not a doom-scroller, so screen time isn't really your problem. Except your version is RSS feeds, research rabbit holes, or "quickly checking" one client thing at 10pm. The hours vanish either way, and they vanish fastest at night.

This How-To Geek piece is one writer's account of clawing back 2 to 4 hours a week with Digital Wellbeing, a tool that's been sitting in Android settings this whole time like an unused gym membership. No third-party apps, no subscription, just the settings menu. iPhone folks, Screen Time pulls most of the same tricks, so the strategy travels.

Key Insights:

1. The graying-out is the whole trick. When the timer hits, the apps fade and stop working, which removes that little in-the-moment negotiation with yourself right when your willpower is weakest. If your phone doubles as your office, set timers on the leisure apps only, so client email stays reachable while the 11pm rabbit holes lock themselves.

2. The author's reclaimed hours went somewhere specific: a new song, a Gunpla model kit, home lab projects, and time with his wife. Whether you're solo or have a small team, decide up front what the recovered time is FOR, because unclaimed hours have a way of leaking right back into the screen.

3. For moments when a blanket timer is too blunt, the free Focus Friend app gamifies leaving your phone alone...a little bean knits as long as you don't touch the screen, and picking up the phone stops the knitting. Betraying a cartoon bean turns out to be surprisingly effective motivation. 🧶

Read the full article for the exact settings path, all four Digital Wellbeing tools explained, and the download link for Focus Friend.

💻 Tools & Technology

Anthropic's Claude Cowork now keeps working when you close your laptop

You hand your AI assistant a real task, close the laptop to make dinner, and everything grinds to a halt until you open the lid again. Some assistant...it only works while you stand there watching it.

The New Stack covers Anthropic's fix. Claude Cowork, its agent built for people who will never touch a terminal, now runs on web and mobile with the work living in the cloud, so scheduled tasks keep chugging even when every device you own is off. Beta access starts with Max subscribers on the $100/month plans and expands to more plans in the coming weeks. And the usage data tucked into this piece might be the most useful part for us.up.

Key Insights:

1. Always-on delegation no longer requires a computer that never sleeps, since new scheduled tasks run in the cloud with no device online. One catch worth knowing: existing scheduled tasks keep running locally until you move them over from the Scheduled tasks page, so migrate them if you want the magic.

2. More than 90% of Cowork usage is NOT software development. Business operations and content creation make up roughly half of all sessions, which for those of us without a developer on staff is real-world proof these agents are absorbing spreadsheet reconciling, report pulling, and the rest of what Anthropic calls "the work around the work"...rarely in anyone's job description, but a big share of everyone's week.

3. The desktop app is still the home for deep work since it can reach your local files and browser, so treat web and mobile as your delegation and check-in layer. If you're running a small operation and want to find out whether an agent can absorb your admin grunt work, the doubled usage limits through August 5 make right now the cheap time to experiment.

Read the full article for the full usage category breakdown, the scheduled task migration details, and how Cowork and Claude chat now share a single interface.

🤖 AI

Claude Fable Is Back! I'll Make You An Expert In 20 Minutes

You've probably got a handful of tasks you repeat every single week. Scanning what's happening in your industry, flagging the emails that actually need you, reviewing which content performed. You do them manually, every time, because handing them off never felt realistic.

This video walks through the four things to set up the moment you open Claude Fable 5, and the timing matters. Anthropic extended Fable 5 access on all paid plans through July 12...after that it moves to pay-per-token usage credits. So if you want to test Anthropic's most capable model without paying extra, this week is the window, even if you don't plan to keep using it once the paywall kicks in. You get up to 50% of your weekly plan limits to work with, and this setup is how to spend them well.

Key Insights:

1. Loops turn one-off prompts into recurring systems. Instead of asking Claude to research your market once, a loop can scan every morning, skip what it already found, and add only genuinely new developments to a running brief. For freelancers and small business owners, that's research happening while you sleep.

2. Skills are the training layer that makes loops worth running. You teach Claude how you do a task once, then give it feedback after each use so the next run gets a little better, such as a writing skill that improves from your real engagement data. Whether you're solo or have a small team, this is how quality compounds instead of resetting with every new chat.

3. The context setup is the unglamorous part that makes everything else work. A local folder with a company map, a memory file, and an instructions file gives Claude the background a real thinking partner needs, and because it's all plain documents, you own it and can move it to any model later. If you're running your own show, that portability matters more than any single tool.

Watch the full video for a live loop demo, the goal-versus-loop command breakdown, three ways to build a skill with the skill creator, and the exact three-file folder setup for context and memory.

Note for the extra deep divers: The video says Anthropic will "automatically route some coding back to Opus 4.8" because of the government situation. The actual mechanism is a new cybersecurity classifier Anthropic built after the June export-control pause...when it flags a request, which can occasionally include normal coding and debugging, that single request reroutes to Opus 4.8. So it's flagged requests, not coding across the board. The 50% usage cap, the July 12 extension, and the shift to usage credits after that all check out against Anthropic's own announcements.

🎉 Celebration Corner

Every week Doers Inner Circle members do a weekly review & get help when they need it — check out the progress they made this week!

• I received feedback from the author whose article I polished last month (it was accepted for publication!) and a testimonial.

• Lots of work came in over the last 2 weeks!

What did you do this week? We feature non-member successes too. Just post them here!

🔒Inner Circle: Events & Announcements

• Monday: Doers IC Mastermind  RSVP here

• Monday: {EU Time} Work ON Business. Theme: 2️⃣ Process & Productivity  RSVP here

• Tuesday: Work ON Business. Theme: 2️⃣ Process & Productivity RSVP here

• Monday/Friday: Goal Setting + Plan Your Week Party

• Accelerators: July 17 is your Office Hours  RSVP here

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Wishing you much productivity!

- Jenae :)