The ADHD Skills Lab

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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...

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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...

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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...

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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.

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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...

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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:

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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...

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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:

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:

Presented by Understood.org

You built something that works. Now you cannot stop working without everything feeling like it might fall apart.

Krista Mashore is a powerhouse in digital coaching. She built a $70M business after leaving real estate at her peak. She is the gold standard for fast execution and high-output growth, and her systems come directly from managing her own ADHD at scale.

We break down what burnout actually looked like behind the scenes. From selling 150+ homes a year to walking away overnight. Krista explains her “stop, sn...

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You’re guessing how long things take.

That guess feels reasonable.

It’s just wrong, over and over again.

In the last episode, we broke down why ADHD time blindness happens. This one is about what to do about it.

Because the real problem isn’t planning. It’s relying on estimation at all.

In this episode, Skye and Robert walk through how to replace your internal clock with systems that actually hold up in real...

Presented by Understood.org

You think it’ll take two days.

Your team knows it’s two weeks.

And after a while, they stop saying anything.

In this episode, Skye and Robert break down why ADHD founders consistently underestimate time, not because they’re overconfident or disorganized, but because their perception of time is genuinely off.

They walk through the research behind time blindness and estimation failure, and how this shows up in real businesses:

Presented by Understood.org

You’re funding everything yourself, and it’s quietly slowing your business down.

Not because you’re doing anything wrong, but because you’re relying on the most limited resource you have: your own cash and capacity.

Kat Weaver has helped founders raise over $70M and won 22 out of 23 pitch competitions herself. But her approach isn’t about chasing investors, it’s about using the right kind of money at the right time.

In this episode, she breaks down:

We usually think of ADHD as behavioral.

But what if some of the earliest signals weren’t behavioral at all?

In this Research Recap, we break down a large population-based study examining pain-related diagnoses in children before they were diagnosed with ADHD.

Researchers looked at over 700,000 medical records to ask a simple question:

Were children later diagnosed with ADHD already showing higher rates of pain-related medical visits?

The association was clear.

The explanation is not.

No fear-based framing.

No causation claims.

No...

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Presented by Understood.org

You approve the direction. Then change everything at the end.

Wednesday’s episode showed why ADHD planning creates late-stage corrections. This episode shows how to stop that pattern.

Skye and Robbie break down a system built around checkpoints, prototypes, and early feedback. The goal is not better briefs. The goal is catching problems when they’re still cheap to fix.

What We Cover:

Presented by Understood.org

The plan made sense in your head. It falls apart when someone else runs it.

This episode looks at research on prospective memory and verbal planning. The findings suggest ADHD impacts how plans are built, not just remembered.

Skye and Robbie explain why this creates a gap between intention and execution. And why teams end up producing something that feels “close, but not right.”

Friday’s episode will focus on systems that reduce this gap.

What We Cover:

Presented by Understood.org

You already know what needs to get done.

It’s not a knowledge problem. It’s not a lack of ideas.

But you still don’t start.

Instead, you overthink it, wait to feel ready, or tell yourself you’ll do it later, again.

Eric Zimmer is the creator of The One You Feed, an award-winning podcast with 50M+ downloads and 800+ conversations on behavior change. He is the go-to voice on sustainable habit change, and his work shows what actually...

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You keep setting deadlines and somehow everything still ends up happening at the last minute.

You plan ahead. You move things around. You even set earlier deadlines.

And it still compresses into a final push.

This episode explains why that keeps happening and what to change.

We build on Wednesday’s breakdown of time blindness and show why most deadline strategies fail over time, especially the fake ones you don’t really believe.

Then we walk through how to structure work so u...

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Deadlines exist right up until they don’t.

You can see it on the calendar. You know it’s coming. You’ve even thought about it a few times.

Then suddenly it’s urgent and everything else gets dropped while you scramble to catch up.

This episode explains why that keeps happening.

We break down what research shows about ADHD and time perception, and why this isn’t just poor planning. Future time doesn’t create pressure until it’s right in front of you, so you...

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Jamie Sea built two seven-figure businesses.

From the outside, everything looked successful. But behind the scenes, the pressure, urgency and burnout were becoming impossible to ignore.

In this episode of ADHD Skills Lab, Skye talks with Jamie Sea, entrepreneur, educator and host of The Jamie Sea Show about the moment she realized the businesses she built no longer fit the life she wanted.

Jamie shares what it was like to feel trapped inside success, how ADHD patterns and nervous system pressure...

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You know how to do the work. But when a task is actually a project, you have to figure out the steps again every time you come back to it.

On Wednesday we looked at the research behind this problem. ADHD planning challenges often show up when the brain has to manage the structure of a project internally.

This episode looks at the practical solution.

Instead of trying to carry the whole project in your head, many ADHD entrepreneurs externalize the planning layer.<...

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You can handle individual tasks all day. But the moment something becomes a project, everything slows down.

Research into ADHD executive functioning suggests the difference often comes down to planning demands, not motivation or intelligence.

In this episode, Skye and Robbie break down what these experiments reveal about ADHD and why complex projects require building a sequence before starting. That requirement can create real cognitive friction for many ADHD brains.

On Friday, we’ll look at the practical systems that reduce this planning lo...

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You make a to-do list.

Then you avoid it all day.

For many ADHD professionals, the problem isn’t motivation, it’s how the workday is structured.

In this conversation, Skye speaks with Kyle Vamvouris, founder of SalesThread and the strategist behind 87 B2B sales teams, about how he actually works.

Instead of rigid productivity systems, Kyle relies on open calendar space, rapid experimentation, and what he calls “sandbox days.”

In the episode, Kyle explains:

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Many adults with ADHD feel like they have to repeat the same instructions again and again.

You explain a process to your team, everyone nods, and a week later it feels like no one remembers what they learned.

Earlier this week on ADHD Skills Lab, Skye and Robbie explored research on why ADHD brains often struggle during the encoding stage of learning. When information isn’t encoded properly, it never makes it into long-term memory.

In this episode they focus on wh...

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Many adults with ADHD feel like they have a bad memory.

You learn something in a meeting or training session, but a few days later it feels like the information has disappeared.

In this episode of ADHD Skills Lab, Skye and Robbie break down research on memory and ADHD. They explore how information gets encoded into long-term memory and why this stage of learning often breaks down for ADHD brains.

The discussion covers a major meta-analysis on effective learning techniques, research on long-term...

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You start a business for freedom.

Then one day you realize the business no longer fits the way your brain works.

Taki Moore is often called the business coach’s favorite business coach. Through his Million Dollar Coach community he has helped thousands of coaches grow their businesses and create more than $1 billion in client results.

Along with that success was something he didn’t fully understand until recently: ADHD.

In this episode of the ADHD Skills Lab, Taki joins Skye Wate...

Many adults with ADHD struggle with tools that seem simple at first but quickly become overwhelming. Dashboards full of icons, systems that require too many clicks, and constantly changing interfaces can quietly drain focus.

In this episode of ADHD Skills Lab, Skye and Robbie explore practical ADHD work systems that reduce visual overload and make digital tools easier to navigate.

Earlier this week, they explored research on object recognition memory in ADHD and why visual systems like software interfaces can create unexpected cognitive load.

This episode focuses on what to do about it.<...

Why does a simple software update suddenly make everything feel impossible to use?

In this Research Recap, Skye and Robbie break down a meta-analysis examining object recognition memory in ADHD.

Object recognition memory helps your brain recognize visual information like icons, folders, faces, and layouts. It’s what allows you to quickly identify the right button in a menu or remember where something lives inside a complex interface.

Researchers reviewed 28 studies involving children and adolescents with ADHD to examine whether object recognition memory differs from neurotypical controls.

Sk...

When creative work gets hard, most people with ADHD assume something’s wrong.

Wrong idea.

Wrong project.

Wrong career.

In this conversation, Andy J. Pizza (author, illustrator, and host of Creative Pep Talk) breaks down the moment his work completely dried up — and why that crisis forced him to stop winging it and start creating strategically.

We talk about perfectionism, rejection sensitivity, creative droughts, collaboration fights, and the uncomfortable shift from “I hope this works” to “I’m building this on purpose.”

This isn’t about hacks or hustle.