The ADHD Skills Lab
Things are starting to fall through the cracks. Not because you're not trying, but because the systems everyone recommends weren't built for a brain like yours.The ADHD Skills Lab is for business owners with ADHD whose responsibilities have grown past simple solutions. Each week, Skye Waterson and guests share research-backed strategies and real-world systems to help you reduce the chaos, make consistent progress, and stop reinventing the wheel every time life gets complex.No "just use a planner." No productivity hacks that last a week. Just honest, practical support from someone who has spent years researching, testing, and refining w...
Does Meditation Actually Help ADHD? What Two Studies Found
Meditation is one of the most common ADHD recommendations—but what does the research actually say?
In this Research Recap, Skye Waterson and William Curb examine two studies on mindfulness and ADHD. The first explores an 8-week mindfulness program for primary school children, while the second compares mindfulness with structured psychoeducation for adults with ADHD.
The children's study found improvements in attention and psychological wellbeing. The adult study found something just as interesting: learning about ADHD in a structured group setting produced many of the same benefits as mindfulness.
The takeaway is...
Why ADHD Founders Quit at Exactly the Right Time
Every founder with ADHD has wondered whether they quit too early. A 2024 foraging study unexpectedly suggests the opposite may sometimes be true. Researchers built an experiment expecting ADHD traits to be a disadvantage, and instead discovered the average person stayed too long.
Skye and Robert explore what that means beyond the lab, why ADHD may be an advantage during the exploratory stage of entrepreneurship, why pivoting is not always a flaw, and why the same trait can become either a strength or a liability depending on the environment.
What We Cover:
Why...The Daily Reminder System That Actually Works for ADHD (Sharon Pope)
She stared in the mirror one night, still wearing the workout clothes she'd put on that morning, and realized she couldn't remember if she'd had a sip of water all day.
Years before being diagnosed with ADHD, Sharon Pope was successfully leading startups while privately struggling with the basics of everyday life.
So she built the tool she wished she'd had: an AI task manager that follows up like a person instead of another notification.
In this conversation, Sharon shares how that breaking point became Shelpful, why she still relies on it every...
How to Stop Panic-Planning and Actually Lower Your ADHD Anxiety
You keep rereading the same task on your list. You know it matters. You still haven't started.
If that sounds familiar, it probably isn't a motivation problem. It may be because you're treating a project like it's a task.
In this episode, Skye and Robbie unpack why hidden complexity makes seemingly simple tasks feel impossible, why the ADHD brain mistakes importance for urgency, and how giving tasks a trusted "home" can dramatically reduce overwhelm. They also share practical strategies for breaking projects into manageable steps without falling into perfectionism or all-day hyperfocus. These ideas are...
The Real Impact of ADHD on Planning, Memory, and Time Management (Mike Legett)
If planning your week, remembering the small stuff, or keeping up with admin feels harder than the actual work, you're not imagining it.
This week, Skye sits down with Mike Legett, an ADHD coach and executive functioning specialist who was diagnosed with ADHD as a child. Mike studied molecular genetics at Emory before leaving graduate school when its vague, paperwork-heavy demands became unworkable. She went on to build a career as an internationally recognized swing and blues dance instructor and now helps adults with ADHD build systems that work with their brains instead of against them through...
If You're Bad At Managing Your Time & Have ADHD Listen To This
Everyone says people with ADHD have "time blindness." But what does that actually mean?
In this Research Recap, Skye Waterson and Will Curb review a decade of research (2012–2022) on time perception in adults with ADHD. Rather than treating time as one skill, the research separates it into three: estimating how long something will take, reproducing a duration, and managing time day to day.
One finding stands out: many ADHD struggles begin with inaccurate time estimation. If your brain can't reliably predict how long a task will take, missed deadlines, last-minute work, and chronic lateness start to...
The Organising System That Actually Works for ADHD (Cas Aarssen)
You don't need another productivity hack. You need systems that still work when your brain doesn't.
Cas Aarssen built the Clutterbug Method, hosted HGTV's Hot Mess House, and grew a global brand by stopping the fight against her ADHD and designing her home and business around how she naturally works.
In this conversation, she shares the hard lessons that came from burnout, why traditional organizing advice kept failing her, and how building systems around real habits instead of ideal ones changed everything. From running a team without endless SOPs to creating spaces that stay functional...
Why Your Environment Effects Your ADHD More Than You Think
You've been told you pivot too fast. This research suggests your timing might be right.
A 2024 Royal Society paper tested how long people stay in a depleting resource before moving to a new one, using a model from ecology called the marginal value theorem. The prediction was that ADHD traits would cause people to leave too soon.
The data found the opposite. ADHD participants left patches closer to the mathematically optimal point and ended up with more total reward. Skye and Robbie break down the bias built into the original prediction and what it means...
The High Performance Habits Of An 8 Figure ADHD Business with James Wedmore
You get bored with the offer that's working, so you go build a new one. James Wedmore has run the same program and the same live event for ten years and says that's the entire reason it grew. He explains the difference between a real "this isn't working" and a feeling that just shows up the moment things get hard. He also breaks down why he became a bottleneck in his own business, what changed when he got specific about role clarity, and why he keeps his identity and worth separate from his revenue numbers.
What...
The REAL Reason ADHD Could Be Ruining Your Sleep
You're exhausted all day, then suddenly wired at 10pm. That's not random. Research suggests it's tied to a delayed circadian rhythm that's common in ADHD.
In this Research Recap, Skye and Will unpack a paper examining ADHD as a circadian rhythm disorder. This isn't a list of sleep hygiene tips. It's a look at what's actually different in the ADHD body's clock, and why typical advice misses it.
Understanding the delay changes how you plan your day, not just your bedtime.
What We Cover:
Why energy peaks late even when...ADHD Diagnosis Criteria Explained By People Who Actually Have It Part 2
You've reread the same paragraph three times and still couldn't tell anyone what it said.
Skye and Robbie return to the DSM-5 for Part 2 of their criteria breakdown, this time on criterion B: difficulty sustaining attention. They work through real examples, rereading pages, checking out of meetings, losing focus on audiobooks even at double speed, and land on why none of it happens during a good movie or video game.
The conversation distinguishes between attention that drifts because a task is boring and attention that locks in because something is stimulating, and why that distinction...
The Best Way To Build Your Company Around Your ADHD Brain (With Chris Wang)
You spend years building workarounds for your own brain, then realize you could build your company the same way.
Chris Wang did exactly that.
As co-founder and CEO of Shimmer, an ADHD coaching platform that has delivered more than 90,000 coaching sessions, Chris was diagnosed with ADHD at 28 while building the company. Instead of treating her personal systems and her business systems as separate problems, she applied the same coaching frameworks, structure, automation, and strength-based development directly to how Shimmer operates.
In this conversation, Chris shares what that looked like in practice: what she...
ADHD Diagnosis Criteria Explained By People Who Actually Have It
You've read the ADHD criteria a dozen times and still aren't sure if you actually qualify.
Skye and Robbie Waterson and sit down with the DSM-5 itself and read through the inattentive criteria line by line, the same list a clinician would use for an actual diagnosis. They score themselves against each one in real time, and they don't agree on most of them.
The conversation covers why the criteria were written for children and then loosely translated for adults, why "close attention to detail" means something different for someone who triple checks every payment versus someone...
Psychologist With 40,000 Hours of ADHD Clients Speaks On What Productivity Advice Gets Wrong (Ari Tuckman)
Most productivity advice for ADHD is written for people who just need a nudge. If you have ADHD, you need something more honest than that.
Ari Tuckman holds a PsyD and an MBA, has authored five books on ADHD, and has spent over 40,000 hours in clinical work with adults. He co-chairs the largest ADHD conference in the US and has been quoted in the New York Times, CNN, and the Washington Post.
In this conversation, Ari breaks down what productivity actually means for ADHD brains, why "don't get in trouble" is not a...
Why Using Anxiety To Manage Your ADHD Isn't A Good Idea
Running your business on anxiety feels like productivity. It isn't. It's a system built on urgency, and it burns out fast.
Research suggests that goal-focused interventions can reduce anxiety in adults with ADHD. What they don't appear to do is meaningfully improve executive functioning. Skye and Will break down a Norwegian randomized controlled trial on goal management training, what it found, and why that gap between feeling less anxious and actually getting more done matters for how you run your work.
What We Cover
Why using anxiety as a task manager is...Why ADHD Makes You Chase Bad Ideas (& how to stop it)
You've launched things that seemed solid, only to watch them unravel for reasons that felt obvious afterward. That's not a judgment problem. For ADHD founders, retrospective clarity comes naturally. The pre-mortem is a tool that pulls that clarity forward, to the start of a project, when fixing problems is still cheap.
Skye and Robbie break down the pre-mortem method, developed by cognitive psychologist Gary Klein and later popularized by Daniel Kahneman, and explain why it fits ADHD-wired brains in particular. ADHD founders tend to communicate broad vision without the full set of dependencies, leaving teams misaligned and...
How ADHD Pulled This Entrepreneur Out Of $600k Debt (with Galel Fajardo)
Sitting in a parking lot after leaving the bankruptcy attorney's office, $600,000 in debt written off, home gone, Galel Fajardo told himself no one would ever hire him again.
Galel Fajardo is a business coach, digital marketing consultant, and fractional CMO with 23 years of entrepreneurial experience and a Master's in Performance Psychology. He specializes in helping high-performing entrepreneurs, especially those with ADHD, whose businesses look successful from the outside and feel like a prison from the inside. His clients have doubled their revenue, with one scaling from $2.5M to $10.1M in three years, not by working harder, but...
The Real Reason Structure Doesn't Stick When You Have ADHD
You've built systems before. You probably built them well. The problem wasn't creating them. The problem was maintaining them once the novelty wore off.
Wednesday's episode explored why ADHD founders often struggle with operational consistency. This episode covers the structural solution.
The systems integrator role sits between the ADHD founder and the rest of the business. It captures ideas, filters priorities, protects the team from constant pivots, and builds the documentation that turns founder insight into repeatable execution.
Skye and Robbie break down the four functions of the role, how it differs from...
The Hidden Burnout Nobody in Your Business Is Talking About
Your business is doing well. Momentum is real, clients are happy, and structure feels like the enemy right now. But if you turn that camera around and look past the founder, you find a stressed team running on broken systems, one sick day away from everything slowing to a stop.
Research on ADHD traits and project management suggests operational effectiveness, specifically goal setting, milestone tracking, and resource allocation, drops measurably when ADHD traits are present. The mediating factor is not inability. It is role stress: the compounding weight of having more tasks than your brain can hold...
Why Simple Tasks Feel So Exhausting With ADHD (with Jenna Free)
You've tried the calendars, the timers, the hacks. They work for two weeks and then stop. Jenna Free says that's not a discipline problem. It's a regulation problem.
Jenna is a counselor for ADHD with ADHD, author of The Simple Guide to ADHD Regulation, and has worked in-depth with over 1,000 people through her ADHD Regulation Method. Her position is direct: dysregulation is not a fixed trait of the ADHD brain. It is a learned response to a lifetime of friction. And it is the reason every other system eventually fails.
We cover her three-level regulation...
Why 50% of People With ADHD Quit Their Medication
Why do so many people start ADHD medication... and then quietly stop within a year or two?
In this Research Recap, Skye and Will unpack a systematic literature review examining why over half of all patients discontinue or significantly reduce ADHD medication within 2 to 3 years of starting.
This episode isn't about whether you should take medication.
It's about something more practical: what the data actually found about why people stop, where expert assumptions conflict with what patients reported, and how access barriers, drug holidays, and whether someone chose treatment for themselves...
Why Progress Never Feels Permanent With ADHD (Even When You Do Everything Right) Nicole Stanley
You're generating real revenue. But every time you open your banking app, your brain shuts down and you close it again.
Nicole Stanley is the founder of Arise Financial Coaching and creator of the Money Momentum Method. Late-diagnosed with ADHD at 30, scoring in the 99th percentile for severity, she built a financial method that turned out to be designed for ADHD brains before she knew she had one. She crossed $250,000 in revenue last year and has helped clients save an average of $40,000 annually.
Nicole explains why standard budgeting fails ADHD brains, why most business owners...
How Casey Neistat Nails Productivity Advice For ADHDers
You know what your most important work is. You still spend the first four hours of the day doing everything else.
Casey Neistat recently posted a video called *Navigating the Matrix* showing how he organizes his workday as a creator with ADHD. He tracks his tasks in real time, explains the system he uses to manage everything, and ends by accepting the chaos as part of the deal.
Skye and Robert disagree with that conclusion.
In this standalone episode, they break down the hidden problem underneath Casey’s system — why ADHD business owners keep...
Your ADHD Productivity Might Actually Be Perfectionism (Here's How to Tell with Dani Donovan)
You built something people love. Running the business of it is a different problem entirely.
Dani Donovan is the creator of The Anti-Planner, a self-published ADHD productivity workbook that generated over $1 million in its first year and has now sold more than 115,000 copies with a 4.9-star rating. She built it without a business plan, without onboarding documents, and without a team that had done any of this before.
In this conversation, Dani explains how a single ADHD comic from 2018 nearly never got posted, how a business coach’s field guide exercise became the product she ac...
Why ADHD Brains Hire People And Then Do It Themselves Anyway
Nobody agreed on what done looked like. The handover happened anyway. That is where it fell apart.
This episode is the practical follow-up to Wednesday. Skye and Robbie walk through the specific hiring and handover process they use with ADHD founders, including what they have lost money figuring out so you do not have to.
The hiring side covers why video applications and paid test projects replace interviews, how to write a role description that filters for initiative rather than compliance, and what it looks like when you have found the right person versus when...
Why ADHD Entrepreneurs Struggle With Delegating
You hired someone good. The work was fine. You still sent the late-night Slack message, redirected the task, and checked in on something that had already been handled.
This episode looks at what the research suggests is actually driving that pattern. Not trust issues. Not a bad hire. A specific kind of perfectionism that shows up differently in people with ADHD.
Two studies help explain it. A 2016 study found perfectionism was the most common cognitive distortion in adults formally diagnosed with ADHD, endorsed by 55% of the sample. It was not close. A 2023 study then looked...
ADHD, Parenting, and the Pressure of Entrepreneurship (With Jessica Shaw)
The school sent her daughter to a desk with her head down because she could not sit still during circle time. That was the moment Jessica stopped waiting for someone else to figure it out.
Jessica Shaw is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, and Vanity Fair. She is the host of Everyone Gets a Juice Box, Understood.org's podcast for parents raising neurodivergent kids. She is also a mom of two teens who think differently, and someone who recognized her own ADHD only after researching her children's.
<...Can Pregnancy Inflammation Influence ADHD in Children? (New Study Breakdown)
Understanding why ADHD happens can feel like chasing a moving target. This study adds a biological angle most people haven't considered.
We discuss a prospective study examining whether maternal inflammation during the second trimester is associated with ADHD symptoms in children later in life. Researchers measured cytokine levels in 62 pregnant women and followed up on ADHD symptoms in 68 children using teacher and parent reports.
The study suggests there is an association between those inflammation markers and later ADHD symptoms. It does not establish cause. The sample was small, blood draws were not standardized by time...
The Hidden Cost of ADHD Novelty Seeking (And How to Fix It)
Description:
Presented by Understood.org
You don’t have a lack of focus. You have too many ideas pulling it in different directions.
This episode builds on Wednesday’s breakdown of ADHD novelty bias and shows you how to actually manage it without shutting it down.
Because the goal isn’t to stop having ideas. It’s to stop them from constantly disrupting execution.
You’ll hear how to treat novelty as input instead of immediate action, how to capture ideas so they stop feeli...
The ADHD Habit That Is Silently Killing Your Business
Presented by Understood.org
You keep switching direction mid-project, and now nothing in your business is fully built.
In this episode, we break down ADHD novelty bias and why new ideas don’t just feel exciting. They feel urgent, important, and hard to ignore.
You’ll hear how this shows up in real businesses. The team is aligned, work has started, and then a new idea comes in. It sounds better, feels right, and within days everything shifts. Six months later, you’ve got multiple half-built projects and no clear...
Why ADHD Labels Can Hold You Back (with Nir Eyal)
Presented by Understood.org
Getting diagnosed with ADHD explains a lot. Then it starts explaining too much.
In this episode, Nir Eyal breaks down what happens after that initial relief. When ADHD stops being useful information and starts becoming your identity.
He shares how that shift can quietly limit effort, create anxiety loops, and turn every struggle into “this is just how I am.”
This isn’t about ignoring ADHD. It’s about understanding the difference between what’s real and what you’ve started to believe about it.
How Negative Environments Impact Your ADHD Brain(with Brandon Smith)
Presented by Understood.org
Bad environments can train ADHD entrepreneurs to second-guess themselves long after they leave those environments behind. Brandon Smith shares how years of struggling in school, standardized testing, and constant negative feedback shaped the way he saw himself, and why finding practical work completely changed how he viewed his ADHD brain.
In this conversation, Brandon breaks down how environment affects confidence, self-trust, business growth, and leadership. He also shares lessons from building a construction company, learning to delegate, and realizing that many ADHD business owners stay stuck trying...
Does Bluey ACTUALLY Have ADHD?
Presented by Understood.org
You feel seen by something that wasn’t meant for you.
Skye and Robbie explore whether Bluey reflects ADHD patterns or just captures behaviour accurately.
Using DSM criteria, they break down distraction, unfinished tasks, and how patterns are identified over time.
This episode sits right on the line between observation and diagnosis and shows you how to think about both.
What We Cover:
Where observation stops and diagnosis startsWhy realistic behaviour can feel diagnosticHow ADHD criteria actually gets ap...How To Turn ADHD Into Your Company's Biggest Asset (with Craig Ballantyne)
Presented by Understood.org
You build a new system, follow it for a few days, then quietly stop using it.
Craig Ballantyne has coached high performers across multiple industries and his approach focuses on building systems that survive real life, not perfect conditions.
This conversation looks at why most systems fail for ADHD brains. Craig explains how self-awareness, environment control, and honest constraints matter more than motivation.
You will leave with a different way to think about systems that actually hold when your brain resists...
ADHD Shiny Object Syndrome Is Killing Your Projects
Presented by Understood.org
You get a new idea and immediately want to drop everything else.
This episode builds on Wednesday’s research around ideation bias in ADHD. The research suggests people with ADHD prefer the idea phase and are more likely to move on before execution is complete.
We break down how this creates the “never-ending pivot” and why projects keep getting abandoned halfway through.
You’ll learn how to use minimum viable product thinking to actually finish things, even if your brain keeps pulling you toward t...
Why ADHD Brains Overbuild Before Starting
Presented by Understood.org
You spend weeks building something before anyone ever sees it.
Not because it needs to be that big. Because once you start, it keeps expanding until it feels impossible to finish.
This is where minimum viable product actually matters. Not as a business concept, but as a way to stop overbuilding everything and start testing things earlier.
ADHD makes it easy to over-scope, get pulled into the wrong details, and delay real feedback. So instead of finding out what works, you stay stuck...
Why ADHD Makes You Start Too Many Projects (with Katy Weber)
Presented by Understood.org
You keep starting new things and abandoning the ones that were working.
Katy Weber is the go-to voice behind the Woman and ADHD podcast, reaching millions of listeners and building a multi-stream business from lived experience. Her approach to growth is grounded in what actually works with ADHD, not what sounds good on paper.
She explains why ADHD pulls you toward new ideas, how pivoting too early kills momentum, and what changed when she stopped rebuilding from scratch. The conversation also covers how she used...
Why ADHD Symptoms Might Not Be Just Genetics
You keep being told ADHD is genetic, but part of you suspects something in your environment is making it worse.
In this next episode of the Research Recap Series Skye and Will (Hacking Your ADHD) discuss research on environmental exposure and ADHD-related behaviors.
Together they explore what the science suggests about how certain chemicals may influence attention, impulsivity, and neurodevelopment. The focus stays on association, not certainty, and what that means in practice.
The conversation also breaks down how to think about risk without spiraling. What matters. What is still unclear...
The ADHD Pattern That’s Killing Your Business
Presented by Understood.org
You keep improving the idea instead of finishing the project.
In Wednesday’s breakdown, we showed why ADHD brains prefer ideation and discount future rewards. Today is about building around that.
This episode gives you three systems. A written decision log. A structured ideation window. And a clear threshold for when changes are allowed.
These systems help you move from “this could be better” to “this is done.”
What We Cover:
Why ideas expand until you force a stopping p...Why Your ADHD Brain Has 62 Ideas and ZERO Finished Projects
Presented by Understood.org
You have a good plan. But your brain keeps pulling you back into new ideas.
Skye and Robbie explain why ADHD brains get stuck in ideation.
This episode connects real-world behavior to research. ADHD brains perform well in divergent thinking. But they also prefer it. And they value immediate rewards over delayed ones.
That combination makes finishing harder than starting.
What We Cover:
Why ideation becomes a loop instead of a phaseResearch showing ADHD strength in divergent thinkingThe...