The ADHD Skills Lab

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 t...

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 f...

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:...

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 ha...

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 dis...

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 do...

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...

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...

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...

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 ch...

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 a...

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, fe...

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...

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...

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....

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 hon...

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...

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-scop...

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 i...

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 neurodevelopmen...

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...

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...

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 brea...

Description: Presented by Understood.org 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 inter...

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 estim...