The ADHD Skills Lab

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Do you make your best calls in the moment, then stall when a decision needs careful analysis?

In episode three of our decision-making series, Skye and Robbie look at a 2012 study that tested adults with ADHD on two kinds of decisions. Hot decisions are fast, intuitive and reward-driven. Cold decisions are slow, analytical and depend on working memory. The ADHD group didn’t take worse risks than the controls. Their gap was on the slow, rule-heavy task, and it...

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You have a great call. They love the offer. Then they say “I need to think about it,” and you say “No problem, I’ll send it over.” Two days later, you’re wondering if the leads are bad, the offer is wrong, or you’re just not cut out for sales.

Jay Foster, a high-ticket closer on Dan Martell’s team with over $10M in closed sales, joins Skye to break down what selling with ADHD actually ta...

How much time should you spend making a decision? Two minutes? Four hours? Three weeks?

When you have ADHD, it's not always obvious which decisions deserve your attention and which ones you should just make and move on from.

In Wednesday's episode, Skye and Robbie explored the research behind ADHD, maximizing, and regret. Today, they're getting practical.

Skye shares a decision-making method she's taught for five years: **decide how wrong you can afford to be before deciding how much time to spend.**

A dinner choice might allow a 50% margin of error...

Someone says "we need to talk" and your ADHD brain immediately assumes you're in trouble. Even when you've done nothing wrong.

Maybe you've dealt with a boss who constantly singled you out, colleagues who excluded you, or feedback that felt more like a personal attack than a conversation about your work. You probably called it a toxic workplace. But what if there was more going on?

Brooke Schnittman is the founder of Coaching With Brooke, a bestselling author, and an ADHD coach with more than 20 years of experience. After experiencing bullying herself, she conducted an...

With ADHD, "just wait until later" can feel impossible. Buy it now. Switch to the fun thing now. Say it now. And when you give in to the impulse, it's easy to blame yourself for not trying harder.

In this special episode of the ADHD Skills Lab, Skye Waterson shares a conversation from the ADHD Channel for Women by Understood.org. Host Cate Osborn speaks with Dr. Polaris Koi, an assistant professor of practical philosophy at the University of Turku who researches ADHD, self-control, and decision-making, and has ADHD themselves.

Together, they explore...

With ADHD, you can spend three days researching a $50 purchase, finally make the decision, and still wonder if you chose wrong. Meanwhile, the important stuff isn't getting done. 

Skye and Robbie Waterson unpack a 2012 study from the Journal of Attention Disorders on ADHD, decision making, and regret. The research found that higher ADHD symptom scores were linked to more maximizing, the drive to find the best possible option, and more regret afterward. They explore why trying to avoid the wrong decision can leave you feeling worse even when you make a good one, and how that same p...

If you have ADHD (and especially if you run your own business), you probably know this cycle: push hard to hit a deadline, get it done, then do the same thing next week. It works often enough that you keep relying on it, until the week it doesn’t and you’re running on nothing.

Dr. Tracey Marks is a board-certified psychiatrist with more than 25 years of clinical experience. Skye and Tracey talk about why pushing through is so hard to give up and what it costs your attention and energy over time.

Tracey’s main p...

You're posting consistently, growing your audience, and putting hours into marketing your business. People are watching, liking, and following. But they're not buying.

Kyrus Keenan Westcott, known as The Vibe With Ky, has built an audience of more than two million across Facebook and TikTok while working full time as a director of paid media. Diagnosed with ADHD at 35, he's learned how to turn content into a business without making every post a sales pitch.

In this conversation, Ky and Skye unpack why a bigger audience doesn't automatically mean more revenue, why selling...

You hired people so you wouldn't have to do everything yourself. So why are you still the one remembering every deadline, chasing every handoff, and checking whether things actually got done?

Skye Waterson and Robbie Waterson explain why delegating tasks doesn't always mean delegating the mental load, especially when you have ADHD. Research shows that working memory challenges can make tracking tasks, priorities, and deadlines harder. And when everything lives in your head or gets buried in Slack, your team ends up guessing what matters most.

Skye and Robbie share the prioritisation filter they've developed...

With ADHD, creative ideas are often the easy part. Starting one is harder. So is the project you were sure about, set down just short of finished, and the shame that follows.

In this special episode of the ADHD Skills Lab, Skye Waterson shares a conversation from the ADHD Channel for Women, created by Understood.org. Host Cate Osborn talks with Adam Reid, an Emmy Award-winning writer, director, filmmaker, and producer, in front of a live studio audience. Adam didn't know he had ADHD until he was around 45.

Their conversation explores ADHD and...

With ADHD, a quick client callback runs long, you lose track of time, and the work you meant to do is still sitting there. Dr. Jessica McCarthy stopped taking those calls.

Dr. McCarthy is a licensed clinical psychologist and clinical neuropsychologist, and the founder and clinical director of Elements Psychological Services, a two-location assessment and therapy practice in New Jersey. She has ADHD and runs the practice around it.

She walks Skye through what she handed off, what she kept, and the one test she applies to every task. She also shares the...

You finally hire people to get some time back. Then somehow you have even more to keep track of.

What did you delegate? Is it getting done? What did you tell them was most important? Where is everyone actually spending their time?

For ADHD business owners, growing a team can make it feel like the systems you spent years building for yourself suddenly stop working.

Skye Waterson and Robert Waterson look at why. Working memory was already carrying too much when you were managing your own tasks. Now you're trying to keep track...

You are working every spare minute, and the business still is not growing the way it should.

Amy Marie Hann spent 10 years hustling in a sales business that never really scaled. She worked constantly, burned out, and eventually realized that more effort was not going to fix the way the business was built.

Amy is the creator of Master the Mundane, a book and membership community for mothers with ADHD. In this conversation, she explains why people with ADHD can stay with the wrong thing for too long, how slowing down brought back...

You start an email, remember a purchase, open another tab, and suddenly five tasks are each 20 percent done. For adults with ADHD, working memory problems don't necessarily disappear with age.

Skye Waterson and Robert Waterson unpack a 2013 meta-analysis of 38 studies on working memory in adults with ADHD. The researchers expected older adults to perform better. Instead, the review found adults with ADHD performed moderately worse on both verbal and visual working memory tasks, with age not changing the overall picture.

Then Skye and Robert get practical: how to stop relying on your head to hold...

Rejection sensitive dysphoria gets talked about constantly in ADHD spaces, but there isn't much research behind it yet.

In this Research Recap, Skye and Will unpack a small study that tried to measure what happens when people with ADHD symptoms experience social exclusion. Using a deliberately unfair ball-tossing game, researchers compared how rejected participants said they felt with changes in their heart rate and blood pressure.

The results didn't line up the way researchers expected. This isn't proof that RSD is or isn't real. It's a look at what one study found, where...

You hired help. You still find yourself taking things back on.

Kara Kushnir built A Work of Heart Counseling and Wellness from a part-time practice into a fifteen-provider team. But growing the team meant learning that she couldn't keep doing everything herself.

In this episode, Kara talks about the temptation to say yes to everything, the burnout that follows, and how she learned to delegate, ask for help, and build a team she trusts enough to tell her no.

What We Cover

ADHD treatment works. But does it keep working the same way eight years later?

In this Research Recap, Skye and Will dig into the MTA study, one of the largest and most influential ADHD treatment studies ever conducted, and what researchers found when they followed the same kids over eight years.

They unpack why the strong early treatment gains had disappeared by year eight, why medication use dropped dramatically over time, and the surprising finding that even the group still taking medication didn't maintain the same early advantage.

They also look...

You know what you want in the future. You still can't make yourself do the boring task today.

Skye and Robbie break down the goal setting system Skye actually uses, adapted from Dan Martell's framework. It works backward from a 25-year vision to one specific goal this year, then down to one daily non-negotiable that makes that goal inevitable.

They also get into what happens when you miss a day, why trying to focus on five goals at once backfires, and how immediate rewards can make the thing you keep avoiding easier to actually do.<...

You know what needs doing. You have the ideas. So why is actually finishing the thing so hard?

Jason Chatfield has written and drawn the syndicated comic strip Ginger Meggs for sixteen years, writes for The New Yorker, and built a career across cartooning, comedy, and writing. But he learned he cannot rely on his brain to generate ideas and execute them at the same time.

Instead, Jason built physical systems that separate thinking from doing: external deadlines, index cards, a wall calendar, batching, and pairing difficult tasks with things he actually enjoys.

...

You built the business because you were good at the work. Nobody warned you that promoting it might be harder than doing it.

New research on neurodivergent entrepreneurs found that maintaining a social media profile was the most commonly reported self-employment challenge. Ahead of work-life balance, unpredictability, and financial pressures.

In this episode, Skye and Robert unpack why social media has become such a difficult part of running a business, what else neurodivergent entrepreneurs say they struggle with, and the support and habits they find most helpful.

What We Cover:

Carlos Gutierrez spent 25 years rising from sales representative to CEO of Kellogg, then served as U.S. Commerce Secretary. He did it all without knowing he had ADHD.

When he was diagnosed later in life, Carlos began looking back at his career differently. The disorganization, procrastination and impulsivity he had treated as personal flaws finally had a name. So did some of the traits that helped him succeed, including intense hyperfocus, intuition and an ability to connect with people.

In this conversation, Carlos and Skye unpack the role ADHD played at the highest levels of...

Waking up exhausted after eight hours of sleep isn't just bad luck. In this Research Recap, Skye and Will break down a meta-analysis on hay fever and ADHD, including the finding that people with allergies are significantly more likely to also meet the criteria for ADHD. They talk through how swollen sinuses can disrupt sleep, how that can show up as brain fog and forgetfulness, and why the researchers still can't say which condition comes first. Want more of Will's work? Visit HackingYourADHD.com or subscribe on YouTube.

What We Cover:

You hit a growth ceiling and your first instinct is to change what you're doing, not fix how you're doing it.

Matt Verlaque has coached founders past a million in revenue and sees the same pattern over and over: something works, the novelty wears off, growth stalls, and suddenly a new marketing channel, AI tool, or strategy looks like the answer.

Matt and Skye unpack the “pivot chaser” trap, how to tell when a strategy is genuinely broken versus when you've simply gotten bored of executing it. They also dig into AI mania, the dopamine hit...

Tom Reber built successful businesses while privately believing he wasn't smart enough to fight for his own ideas. That belief followed him from childhood special ed into business ownership, where he went bankrupt once and later sold another business for far less than he believed it was worth.

Tom, founder of The Contractor Fight and a former Marine, explains where that belief came from, how it affected the decisions he made, and what changed when he finally stopped confusing not knowing something with being stupid.

What We Cover:

You spent real money on a system nobody uses.

Skye and Robert Waterson see this problem regularly working as fractional COOs with ADHD business owners. The owner gets excited about a new system, the team agrees to the change, and a few weeks later everyone quietly slips back into the old way of doing things.

The problem usually isn’t the software. It’s how the change was handled.

In this episode, Skye and Robert break down the six phases they use to move a team onto better systems without losing people halfway thro...

Most people don't struggle to put themselves out there because they lack ideas. They struggle because they're afraid of what people will think once they see the real version of them.
So they post the safe version instead. The version nobody remembers.

Chris Do, Emmy-winning designer and founder of The Futur, has spent more than 20 years helping creatives build businesses by becoming more visible. He believes a brand people care about isn't built on sharper positioning. It's built on being willing to be seen. That means getting comfortable with the parts of yourself you've been editing...

Most ADHD interventions only work if you actually stick with them. So what happens when the intervention is something your brain actually wants to do?

Skye joins Will to unpack a systematic review of 22 studies on virtual reality interventions for ADHD. They look at surprisingly high adherence rates, what the research suggests about attention and working memory, and whether improvements inside VR actually carry over into everyday life.

They also dig into the different ways VR is being used, from cognitive games and movement-based training to simulated real-world scenarios, plus where the evidence is still...

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 work:

You can be successful on paper and still feel stuck.

In this episode, Skye talks with entrepreneur and investor Kassidy Warren about leaving the corporate “safe path,” taking real risks, and the identity shift required to stop playing small. They unpack rejection, procrastination, reinvesting before results, and what it actually means to turn pro — especially with an ADHD brain.

If you’ve built something stable but know you’re capable of more, this one will hit.

What we cover:

Click the link below to see which founder type you are!

https://www.unconventionalorganisation.com/adhd-founder-types


You keep solving the same business problems, but they keep coming back in different forms.

After reviewing more than a dozen research episodes on ADHD founder struggles, four recurring founder patterns emerged: the Last Minute Hero, the Overwhelmed Architect, the Vision Caster, and the Pivot Chaser.

These aren't random quirks. They're recurring ways ADHD can show up as a business grows. More importantly, all four point back to the same underlying challenge: there isn't...

You've read the books. You've tried to think your way into a better mindset. But the changes never seem to stick.

In this episode, Mick Hawes shares why he believes that's because mindset isn't something you change directly. Drawing on more than 35 years coaching business owners in high-complexity industries like custom home building, he explains why your mindset is the result of the systems, environment, habits, language, and other external influences shaping your daily life.

Skye and Mick explore why changing your environment often works better than relying on motivation, how to make decisions based...

You start medication or therapy, things get better, and then a few years later the old struggles creep back in. You wonder if you did something wrong.

This week, Skye Waterson is joined by Will Curb from Hacking Your ADHD for a Research Recap on the MTA study, the largest and most influential ADHD treatment trial ever conducted. Nearly 580 children were followed for 8 years to understand what happened after the initial treatment period.

Together, Skye and Will unpack why the early differences between medication, behavioral therapy, combined treatment, and community care had largely disappeared by...

You've probably heard it before:

"Just start."

"You'll feel better once you begin."

"Get rid of all distractions."

If you have ADHD, you've probably also discovered that this advice often doesn't work.

In this episode, Skye and Robbie unpack the dopamine transfer deficit theory and explore why ADHD brains may not receive the same anticipatory motivation signal that helps neurotypical brains get started. They explain why so much conventional productivity advice misses the mark, why dopamine detox can backfire, and how Skye developed The Dopamine Dial<...