The ADHD Skills Lab

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...

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...

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 happ...

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 motiv...

If you've ever tried to overhaul your finances in one weekend only to abandon the system a few days later, you're not alone. According to Diane Gardner, that's exactly why most financial systems fail for ADHD business owners. Diane Gardner is a Mastery-Level Profit First Professional, certified tax strategist, certified cash flow strategist, and bestselling author who helps home ser...

Why does your ADHD feel manageable in one situation but overwhelming in another? In this episode, Skye and Robbie explore a little-known 1997 review paper that challenged the traditional view of ADHD. Instead of seeing ADHD traits as fixed deficits, the authors argued that traits like attention shifting, hyperactivity, and impulsivity can become strengths or struggles depending on the environment....

You meet someone, become instant best friends, and a few months later they're gone. Then it happens again. Most ADHD advice focuses on productivity, but Caroline Maguire believes we're missing something just as important: friendship. Caroline is a certified ADHD coach and the author of Friendship Skills for Neurodivergent Adults . In this conversation, Skye and Caroline explore why ADHD...

Meditation is one of the most common ADHD recommendations—but what does the research actually say? In this Research Recap , Skye Waterson and William Curb examine two studies on mindfulness and ADHD. The first explores an 8-week mindfulness program for primary school children, while the second compares mindfulness with structured psychoeducation for adults with ADHD. The children's study foun...

Every founder with ADHD has wondered whether they quit too early. A 2024 foraging study unexpectedly suggests the opposite may sometimes be true. Researchers built an experiment expecting ADHD traits to be a disadvantage, and instead discovered the average person stayed too long. Skye and Robert explore what that means beyond the lab, why ADHD may be an advantage during the exploratory stage of en...

She stared in the mirror one night, still wearing the workout clothes she'd put on that morning, and realized she couldn't remember if she'd had a sip of water all day. Years before being diagnosed with ADHD, Sharon Pope was successfully leading startups while privately struggling with the basics of everyday life. So she built the tool she wished she'd had: an AI task manager t...

You keep rereading the same task on your list. You know it matters. You still haven't started. If that sounds familiar, it probably isn't a motivation problem. It may be because you're treating a project like it's a task. In this episode, Skye and Robbie unpack why hidden complexity makes seemingly simple tasks feel impossible, why the ADHD brain mistakes importance for urgency...

If planning your week, remembering the small stuff, or keeping up with admin feels harder than the actual work, you're not imagining it. This week, Skye sits down with Mike Legett, an ADHD coach and executive functioning specialist who was diagnosed with ADHD as a child. Mike studied molecular genetics at Emory before leaving graduate school when its vague, paperwork-heavy demands became unwo...

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...