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The Atomic Essays That Became Extra Focus

The Story

The Extra Focus newsletter did not start as a content strategy. “Back in 2021, I joined the Ship 30 for 30 cohort which is a daily writing challenge to write an atomic essay every day. That’s the first time I really started writing about the things I’d learned about ADHD (I was diagnosed in 2017 and had been doing a lot of research and therapy to better understand how ADHD had been impacting my life).” (Source 1).

The newsletter was a downstream artifact, not the goal: “This was my first foray into regular content creation, and it just seemed to make sense that I could use a newsletter as a way of letting people know about the essays I’d written that week.” (Source 1).

Jesse describes himself as overstressed about the format. “I remember at the time I was very stressed about what the format would be. It felt like I needed to figure it all out from the first issue and that it would be permanent for forever.” (Source 1).

He chose Substack because the friction was minimal: “I used Substack to start because it was essentially just signing up and then writing a blog post so it was very little setup.” (Source 1).

The first format had four sections: a quick intro linking to the week’s essays, a reminders section, a feature piece, and a quote of the week (Source 1). It evolved as the intro section kept getting longer: “I moved to a simpler method of just having a main section at the beginning, some resource links, and then ending with some embedded tweets.” (Source 1).

The newsletter started in early 2021 (Source 1) and Anderson eventually became “a writer, designer, developer, and maker of things” who took the diagnosis as a creative mandate: “since my diagnosis… I’ve made it my mission to help others better understand what ADHD really is” (Source 2).

By May 2023 the newsletter had reached 59,000 subscribers (Source 1).

Lesson for Creators

Two creator patterns sit inside one origin story. First: most of Jesse’s anxiety was about the wrong thing. He was paralyzed by “what’s the permanent format” while his actual job was just to publish a list of his week’s essays. Format problems have a way of looking existential and turning out to be cosmetic. Second: the newsletter wasn’t conceived as a product — it was a distribution byproduct of writing he was already doing for a cohort. Joining a daily writing constraint (Ship 30 for 30) generated more than 30 essays, and the newsletter was the cheapest way to compound them. The constraint produced the content; the newsletter only had to carry it.

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