The ADHD Skills Lab

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 ass...

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...

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 ab...

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...

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 t...

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,...

P.S. If you’re a founder who’s tired of the mad scramble of disorganized systems and stressful HR, and you want a business that feels as easy as plugging your headphones into an iPod shuffle , I’ve got something for you. Want to grow your business?  My Focused Balanced Growth Program has everything you need to build consistent ADHD-friendly routines and processes to grow. Click here to learn more....

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...

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 AD...

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 adul...

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 change...

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...

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 dr...

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 mis...

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 physi...

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 medi...

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...

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 r...

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” t...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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 so...