The ADHD Skills Lab

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 da...

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 trad...

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 clos...

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 b...

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 cloc...

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 durin...

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 p...

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 wh...

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 th...

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, wh...

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 cognit...

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 ent...

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 capt...

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...