How To Deal With Deadlines With Your ADHD Brain

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 internal clock with systems that actually hold up in real work:

• why you can’t “get better” at estimating time
• how to use past projects instead of guessing
• how teams quietly adjust for you (and why that creates tension)
• why buffers and “extra time” don’t work
• how to build timelines that don’t collapse halfway through

If you’re tired of missing deadlines you genuinely thought were realistic, this will show you what’s actually going wrong, and what works instead.

If you're enjoying ADHD Skills Lab, you may also enjoy Understood.org’s new podcast, Sorry, I Missed This.

Listen here: https://lnk.to/sorryimissedthisPS!theadhdskillslab

 P.S. Losing work because the admin layer around your business can't keep up with you? Invisible Systems is a 90-day done-for-you sprint where I (Skye) extract the processes from your head, build the operating layer, and find the right person to run it. Six spots left at the founding price, book a call at invisiblesystem.co

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

The most powerful way to understand what is going to happen is to look at what has already happened and actually look at it. Not just imagine how long it could take, like actually having data for how long this took specifically. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the ADHD Skills Lab brought to you by understood.org, the leading nonprofit helping millions of people with learning and thinking differences like ADHD and dyslexia. Today we're going to be getting into a little pairing with what we spoke about earlier in the week. We're going to go through some practical strategies when you are either the founder who is time blind or you're on a team with somebody who's running the team who's pretty time blind. But we're going to go into what you can do to basically get the full picture of exactly how long something's actually going to take. And as always, I am joined by my wonderful co-founder and husband, Robert Waterson, to chat this through.

SPEAKER_01 0:58

I think just to, yeah, just to briefly recap, I think the simplest recap is just that ADHD founders have a very optimistic internal club. So we're always measurably underestimating how long something's going to take.

SPEAKER_00 1:11

Yeah, we really are. We really are. Thinking about all of the projects that I've told you guys we're going to do. And uh we've changed scope and done pretty much everything that has been on the list of the things we've talked about. Yeah, you know, and I think it's a good reminder that we all need these systems. You know, it's not like once you know about these systems, you are fixed. It's about implementing them and consistently implementing them. That's like really important part. So we talked a little bit about the idea of that inaccurate internal clock, the idea that we're just not really good at estimating time, and that problem gets bigger the more the span of time is. So when we did the study, scales with the duration. Yeah. Yeah. So they did like six seconds versus twenty-four seconds in the study we talked about. But you know, we're talking about a week versus six months versus a year and kind of having that really long span of time.

SPEAKER_01 2:07

Yeah, longer projects are gonna have the same problem. And we and we know that from the other study we looked at, which is it was showing up in workplace environments.

SPEAKER_00 2:14

Exactly, exactly. Really showing up in workplace environments.

SPEAKER_01 2:17

The employers didn't need to know that you had ADHD to know that you were having time estimation problems.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

Yeah, yeah. So if you're listening to this and you're like, I'm not a founder, well, it's still gonna affect you. That's what we know for sure. So one of the biggest things that we can't do is we can't make your internal clock more accurate. This is a process that is independent. This is just how your brain is wired. We're not going to build a better internal clock. And a lot of people think that that's the case. They think if they just try really hard and imagine really hard, they're gonna get better at this process.

SPEAKER_01 2:54

Think it through longer. Generally speaking, we want an external solution, not a brute force solution. That's what we're advocating for.

SPEAKER_00 3:01

You know, asking somebody, for example, and if you're this, if you've been on the other side of this, you'll know how frustrating this is. Asking someone to just think harder or try harder, it's not gonna work. They're not gonna be able to suddenly pull more accurate time estimations out of their brain. And so we need better external scaffolding. That's what we're gonna do, talk about today is external scaffolding for time estimation. Some of it's working with a team, but a lot of it you could apply if you're just a solo person or you just have one person on your team as well.

SPEAKER_01 3:34

Yeah, if you don't have a CEO, for instance, potentially leveraging AI or some of the tools out there.

SPEAKER_00 3:40

We are gonna talk about AI. The most powerful way to understand what is going to happen is to look at what has already happened and actually look at it, not just imagine how long it could take based on, you know, oh well, you know, it was Thursday and then da-da-da. Like actually having data for how long this took specifically.

SPEAKER_01 4:04

Yeah, our internal clock can't accurately estimate how long, like a two-week project is actually gonna take from scratch. But we can look at the last three times we've done something similar and look at how long it did take.

SPEAKER_00 4:15

And this is why often you get told to write down how long things took, keep a log. If you have ADHD, you've probably been told this and you didn't do it. So if there is anyone on your team, ask them to keep the log. It's great. And if you don't have any of those things, then maybe you can start asking AI to help you, you know, like create a project, put the data in, as anything you can do to make like this. Is always going to be a quick and dirty approach when it comes to estimating. Try and like release yourself from the imaginings of like a perfect, you know, timesheet system and just try and get data put somewhere as best you can so that even if you don't end up doing it, somebody can end up going back through and getting a sense of how long these things took.

SPEAKER_01 5:01

Yeah, probably having again having that sort of full project management system with the column for estimated duration, and there's too much data to entry, like it's not actually sustainable. At the very least, for each project, have these five fields, like what type of project was it? What was the estimated duration? What was the actual duration? And what was the main source of that expansion? Like in retrospect, what caused that, plus some notes for the next time. If you have three of those similar type projects that you can look back on, even just those five pieces of information, it's gonna allow you to do a better estimate for the next one.

SPEAKER_00 5:34

Yeah, exactly. And and really look at it because generally speaking, your estimation is gonna be about half. You're gonna think it took you three hours, it actually took you six. You're gonna think it took you, you know, a week, it actually took you two. So, you know, you're gonna probably think your estimate, your actual historical information is wrong. It's probably not wrong. That is probably actually how long it took.

SPEAKER_01 5:58

Yeah, I think it's one of those things you you sort of think the founder is going to, I think it seems silly. Like, surely this is going to naturally feedback and you are just gonna be able to make a better estimate the next time. But I think it's one of those things, if you know someone with ADHD or yourselves, are you actually getting more accurate with your estimation of how long it's gonna take you to get to your appointment? Like, have we stopped being late to appointments just because we got better at estimating? Because we're we've done a bunch of appointments in the past, so like surely we're good now. Surely we're getting better at estimating this. And I think what you'll find is the reason you got better at turning up to appointments if you did is because you externally scaffolded something. You have done something like set a rule where you're going to go to Google, get the time estimate for the journey, then you're gonna add half an hour, and then you're gonna set that as an alarm. And when the alarm goes off, you're not gonna snooze it thinking, well, you're basically ready to go. I mean, you will do that the first few times, but then eventually you'll set a rule that says, and I get up and I start getting ready at that point. Because it's not until you're up and getting ready that you realize, like, oh, I actually don't know where my keys are, and oh, I need to go find a phone charger battery pack because it's nearly dead, and all the things that, yeah, if you put it off, if you start removing that buffer again, or that expansion.

SPEAKER_00 7:13

And I think part of this is also just a realization of how little you get done during a day, which is depressing. You know, I I'm I'm right there with you. I wish that my days were more productive. I've worked with so many clients who've, you know, they get a sense of time and they get an understanding of how long things take. And then comes the secondary thing, it's almost like a grief feeling of like, oh, so you're telling me I was never gonna finish everything on my to-do list today. I was never gonna fit. It was never gonna, it wasn't just me not working hard enough, trying to trying hard enough. There was, it was just no time. And that can be a that can be a tough reality to realize because you realize things are gonna take longer than you thought.

SPEAKER_01 7:53

Because I think we talked about last episode the beating yourself up about not having got all of your unrealistic task list for the day done. But then you're saying even the acknowledgement that you have to reduce the scope of your task list, there's still like a aggrieving to that where you're like, I think I think silver lining to that though is there is this concept of you'll what is it, you'll underestimate what you can get done in a week or a month or even a year, but you'll massively underestimate what you can get done in five years.

SPEAKER_00 8:20

That compounding is a big difference, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:23

We might be a little bit optimistic, delusional about what we can get done in the short term, but it doesn't mean we're not gonna reach our goals.

SPEAKER_00 8:31

Yeah, a hundred percent. And it might your goals might come sooner than you think. And honestly, they'll come sooner than you think as a result of you actually taking that smaller piece of action every day.

SPEAKER_01 8:41

Yeah, I was gonna say you're not gonna reach your goals faster because you underestimated the timeline for your project, rushed everyone, harassed everyone, and ended up missing deadlines instead of setting realistic deadlines.

SPEAKER_00 8:51

We focus on productivity here at the ADHD Skills Lab, but our executive functioning challenges do not disappear at 5 p.m. In fact, they follow us home, affecting every aspect of our lives. That's why I'm recommending the podcast Sorry I Miss This from the team at understood.org. Hosted by Kate Osborne, it's a thoughtful look at life, love, and neurodiversity. Instead of masking, it looks at how to build a relationship and a life that actually works with your brain, not against it. I've been listening to Sorry I Miss This and the discussion on decisions, decisions, ADHD, and the trap of analysis paralysis. This episode talked about how decision fatigue depletes our working memory, and by the end of the day, we can find ourselves really struggling to make decisions. This really resonated with me. I know so many of you guys talk to me all the time about decision making in ADHD, and it's something that I struggle with as well. Kate and Dr. Shrine provide a helpful perspective on how narrowing down your options can help protect your cognitive energy. To listen to sorry I missed this, search for sorry I missed this in your podcast app. That's sorry, I missed this. Whatever is gonna work for you. So you have things like Timo, I think it is, or the, you know, there's other ones. We used to use toggle, you know, to track time. So you can use those, and if those work for you, then amazing. There's a ton of them. You can drop things into a specific AI project or GBT or whatever you're using. You can just take information and write it down in a journal. And like if that's gonna work for you and that's the only way you're gonna get time, at least we have something. So trying to just grab the information as quickly as possible is the goal.

SPEAKER_01 10:37

Yeah, at the very least, a post-project review, any project that takes more than a week, for instance. How much over the expectation did it go? And just some notes about why that are gonna help with next time.

SPEAKER_00 10:48

And if you don't have a project log at all, like you've never done a project before, you can ask the AI to estimate it for you. So you can say, like, we're doing this, this is the brief, ask me a couple of questions for scope, and then get an estimation of time. So that will happen. Chances are it will overestimate according to you, but always remember if you have if you're the ADHD person that you are underestimating how long it's gonna take. The AI might not be wrong about this one. Sometimes it is, sometimes it's like it'll take two years. And you're just like, okay, I think I did something wrong.

SPEAKER_01 11:21

That that brings us on to our next strategy, which is scope review with your team as like a standing team process.

SPEAKER_00 11:28

Definitely, definitely. This is this should be part of the core discussion. So a last couple of weeks ago, we talked about this idea of actually, I think it was last week, we talked about the brief and how you should as quickly as possible bring the founder something to check against so that they can say, I'm not sure about this. This should be part of that conversation. So when we're talking about brief and like what works, we should also be talking about, okay, so you said that you in the little message that you sent that it should take about a week. We're estimating based on uh you know historical stuff, etc., that it's going to take about three, and then you can have that conversation as well.

SPEAKER_01 12:10

Yeah, I think similar to what we discussed with the brief gap, it's not the founder driving this meeting, it's the COO or the project lead driving it and the founders answering questions.

SPEAKER_00 12:22

Yeah, so I think, you know, as part of it, in the same way as we asked last time with the brief report, that the team have a sort of set set of brief questions that they're always answering. They're saying, based on the voice message we got from you or the video we got from you, or whatever it is, we think that this is what you're doing. Here's some stuff for you to react to. Do we think it's similar to this? This is kind of an outline of what this would look like. This is a similar idea. We're kind of going like, this is the time that we think it will take for these pieces. This is the overall scope that we think it will take, kind of like giving the founder something to react to again.

SPEAKER_01 13:02

Yeah, this is also a time to surface the hidden complexity that they may like, yeah, allow the brief gap. This is a structured second-person scope review. And it's yeah, it's the opportunity not just for the CEO to uncover the missing scope or the items that need to have an expanded scope, but it's also a great time to do what we discussed in the brief gap, which is uncover the hidden complexity as well, the missing tasks.

SPEAKER_00 13:26

Yeah, a hundred percent. And having this being part of that initial meeting, I think one, it kind of like it really does change the way those meetings happen. Because initially, you know, if you have been following us along along with us for the last couple of weeks, you probably would have an initial meeting where the founder would just talk a lot at a slightly stunned group of people sometimes, um, who would just kind of take it in and be like, okay, okay, okay. And then they would be expected to start. And so now that meeting is gonna feel so much better for everybody, including the CEO and the team, because they will have the the little video, you know, audio brief, and they're coming with a bunch of stuff that the CEO can react to, and ultimately everyone's leaving the meeting much more confident about what they're doing.

SPEAKER_01 14:15

But they they know because this the structures in place that these time estimates are just the founder's optimistic time estimates. They I think I think one of the things here is that the ADHD founder is almost always just estimating sort of the core tasks, and they are not naturally thinking of all of the prep, all of the cleanup, all of the sort of hidden dependencies, things being passed back and forth between people. And so that's all going to be added back in and become part of the sort of day later, week later structured second person brief where the scope is expanded and finalized.

SPEAKER_00 14:49

Exactly. Which kind of brings us to the next piece, which is you know, the next thing that you can do, which is having those predetermined and pre-agreed adjustment triggers. You know, once you've got something that's working, you've got historical estimates, you know, you've got someone on your team whose job it is to to estimate and to keep a log of how long things are taking, you have that initial meeting. Now we have a space where we can say, okay, going forward, if we're having these, you know, if we have a job and it's it's a launch of something and you're estimating it takes about three weeks. Historically, we know it takes about a month. People can expand the project sometimes without you even having to necessarily sign off on it as a CEO. Maybe not without you having to sign off on it entirely, but it's kind of more being run by the team. The scope is being run by the team based on the estimates.

SPEAKER_01 15:43

I would say it probably removes the need from the founder to push back on scope expansion because it's being based in historical realities, things that went over, a complexity that we discovered in the past that could arise here. I think otherwise there's a genuine concern. If you just expand the scope of everything, the intensity, the urgency of the team will drop and the tasks will expand to fill in the allotted time. That's potentially gonna be the ADHD founders' feeling about it. And I think if I just if I pull back to like an anecdotal thing, I remember the other day I was like, I'm just gonna go upstairs and get ready. And you said, okay, half an hour. And I think I said to you on the way up, like, no, like 15 minutes. Like, I think that you have sort of expanded this thing unreasonably. It's not. I sort of realize halfway through whatever I'm doing, like, yeah, no, probably half an hour. I I should really like stop doubting me.

SPEAKER_00 16:35

Yeah, I am the keeper of the historical evidence in this family.

SPEAKER_01 16:40

Yeah, exactly. I I shouldn't I shouldn't assume that you are expanding unnecessarily. These are like legitimate expansions, they're based on historical evidence or historical experience. It's probably a little bit easier because I I think I imagine this is kind of a two-way thing. It's probably a lot easier to predict how long your partner's gonna take to do something than how long it's gonna take you to do it.

SPEAKER_00 17:00

I think so. There's times when I've said, Oh, I just need five minutes and I'll like finish work and I'll be back down. And you're like, okay, so 45 minutes.

SPEAKER_01 17:06

Yes, I'll turn the computer back on.

SPEAKER_00 17:07

Yeah. And I'm like, no, I just need to send this one more email. So I think it is harder in some ways, and we're just more clear-eyed when we're talking about somebody else. We have less of that optimistic sense of of how we work. It does make me want to talk about buffers though, because I think one of the things that we were talking about was the importance of not making it a buffer. So a lot of times when people don't understand ADHD completely, they'll say, Oh, so we'll just give you a two-week buffer. So the due date is here, but we're giving you a two-week buffer. And that feels terrible. That feels like weird fake time, it doesn't make sense, it doesn't work with the project. Like if you're expanding scope, expand scope all the way to the deadline. And if you want to know how to have a good deadline without having a buffer, that kind of buffer specifically, go and listen to a previous episode where we talk about how to like set up specific endpoints for different parts of the task.

SPEAKER_01 18:06

Yeah, we're trying to avoid visible padding.

SPEAKER_00 18:09

We're trying to avoid sort of useless padding. Like you could say, okay, so the draft is done by this week, and then the final copy is done by this week, and then we're gonna sign off on the graphics by this week, and then this is due on this date. You know, that's great. That's not a buffer. A buffer is it's due on Thursday, but it's technically due next Friday. Like that doesn't really help anyone.

SPEAKER_01 18:30

Yeah, well, it also feeds back into another weakness, which is the urgency thing we uh 100%.

SPEAKER_00 18:36

Yeah, expect them not to care.

SPEAKER_01 18:38

Yeah, yeah. So those those fake deadline, because that's kind of what you're doing is you're setting a fake deadline and you're adding padding to the end of it. Now the real deadline is three days later. And so you're undercutting everyone's ability to well, at the very least, you're undercutting the ADHD founder. I imagine this applies more broadly as well, to have that sense of urgency and to start acting now.

SPEAKER_00 18:57

And it makes a lot of sense that this happens, it's very understandable. Like no one's doing anything wrong, but just don't do that in this case. Like, if that's if you're thinking, right, add a buffer. No, no, no. That's not what we're saying.

SPEAKER_01 19:09

Again, if you've kept a record, you'll know, or even just some brief notes, you're gonna know, well, the last project expanded by 30% or 50% because there was the handing off of tasks between people, or waiting to get it back from whoever, or you like you're not factoring in time zones and people aren't, you know, it's not eight, it's not until eight hours hours later that the next piece starts getting acted on.

SPEAKER_00 19:31

And you know, once you have this in place, then yes, you can have a conversation about efficiency and and and speed and you know, using AI as an exoskeleton, like all of those conversations that everyone should be having. But this is like the base that we need to work from. And the reason for that is because of some sort of yeah, there's there's certain failure modes that we can end up in if we don't do this. So I wanted to walk you through a couple of things that are likely to go wrong and what you can do to fix them as you go through this process because it it is an intimidating process. Telling your CEO that they're not doing the time estimation is, you know, neither of us have taken it well, and we've talked about it to each other.

SPEAKER_01 20:14

Each other as the CEO in the marriage, you mean.

SPEAKER_00 20:18

Exactly. Like how many times, yeah, yeah. We're co-founders, so it makes sense. Like, how many times have I said to you, like, oh, this is gonna take X amount of time, and you've been like, No, that's that's silly. That's definitely not.

SPEAKER_01 20:30

I think it's especially easy when you're not the one handling all of the details and you're just looking in from the outside, which I guess can probably be how the COO, CEO feels, relationship feels sometimes, where they are not the person responsible for all of the That is very true.

SPEAKER_00 20:48

In terms of the different failure modes that you have, so we've got the one which is okay, so let's say you're talking to the CEO or a team member or whoever who tends to underestimate how long things will take, and you say, Well, this project was, you know, historically took a week, so I think it's gonna take a week. And they go, Well, that project was really different, or oh, but we've done it, you know, that project we hadn't done before, and now we've done before. We wanna really ground it in what was previously. So we want to say something like historically, a project of this scope or a project like this takes a week. So we're gonna give it a week. As much as possible, we wanna we wanna have that. And my personal thing, and I use this with clients all the time. So if you're a client of mine, shout out, is uh I always just go, Well, let's just try it, let's just experiment with it and see. Because maybe I'm wrong about the scope and egg on my face, if so. And usually, you know, people are more open to it if you're having that kind of conversation. You make it a race, you're like, Well, let's do it faster. But this is this is the this is the end line in case we don't, you know.

SPEAKER_01 21:55

It's one of those things where it's a lot easier to expand the scope at the start or even at like a Midway checkpoints and like check in and review than it is to expand it when you're 90% with the way through the projects, you're 10% out from the deadline.

SPEAKER_00 22:08

Because then also that feels like you're moving the deadline. At that point, it it doesn't feel good to anybody when you're like, I guess we're gonna push it. Like either it's a real deadline and there's consequences. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:22

So I was gonna say there's there's more there's more likelihood of people who are actually counting on it now because they've already taken the first steps. They might have started the public launch, and now that thing actually has to arrive on that day because it's been, you know, whereas halfway through you could have reassessed, you could have said, actually, it sucks, but we are gonna have to push this. You could tell the other companies involved, they could all begrudgently agree. And before the public sees, you know, in five days or on this date.

SPEAKER_00 22:50

Exactly. Yeah. And and I I really love the using the we can always do it faster idea. Because, you know, with if you get a pushback on a timeline, you can say, Well, we can always do it faster. Like, let's, you know, try uh to do it faster. And and then when it doesn't get done faster, it's it's it's not as much of a negativity.

SPEAKER_01 23:10

Yeah, that's kind of the reverse of so I think what we were just talking about is pre-adjusted, pre-agreed adjustment triggers. So a point at which we know check in now because this is our last chance to expand the scope before something goes public or something gets set in motion. You could also, I guess, do the reverse of that, where you have pre-agreed expansion contractions to get the CEO to buy into this process.

SPEAKER_00 23:34

For the buy-in process, I've never had a situation where somebody has actually been able to reduce scope, to be completely honest, but it gives you that option. You're like, well, at this point, we'll talk about the timeline and we can adjust it backwards or forwards depending on what makes sense. So then it kind of feels like you know, it also helps with urgency, right? Because then there's a sense of like, well, if I'm annoyed that this isn't getting done as fast as possible, then I need to work on it, you know what I mean? Because that's what's gonna help it. So it it kind of like just r puts responsibility back on the people involved rather than having them say, Oh no, I think we can do it in two weeks, and I don't want to move on that. You're like, well, maybe we can, but let's pretend let's like estimate for three weeks.

SPEAKER_01 24:17

Let's let's expand that scope by 50% based on historical precedent, and we can do a check-in at the two-week mark. We can even let the team know. We're hoping to contract that like that last week. I am not quite sure how that isn't a buffer period.

SPEAKER_00 24:33

Yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't let the team know. I wouldn't make it too much of a thing. I I wouldn't even really plan for it, but just having it in the back of your mind. Let's say you do a launch and then you do another one and then you do another one, and eventually you're doing a launch, and every launch takes a month. And your CEO is going, I know historically, based on historical precedent, this takes a month, but I feel like our team has got it now, and we've made a few adjustments and we've hired a new person. I really think it's gonna take less time this time. And so instead of just automatically reducing scope, you say, Okay, well, let's keep scope as is, let's keep the timeline as is. If historically now this takes less time, we'll use that to adjust the scope timeline going forward. So that's what I'm talking about.

SPEAKER_01 25:19

Yeah, so do those adjustments retrospectively. We don't want to be proactively reducing scope. No, we want to be doing it based on historical precedents.

SPEAKER_00 25:26

Exactly. But giving that ability to reduce it based on historical precedence if it happens.

SPEAKER_01 25:32

There's also ways of encouraging the team to try and accomplish a goal faster without condensing the scope. I think that's probably the argument here is that leave the scope realistic, use a different motivational tool to try and beat the projected time estimate.

SPEAKER_00 25:49

And I'm sure we'll talk about what that means, you know, what that looks like in a minute.

SPEAKER_01 25:53

I think just to jump back to structured second-person scope review, what was that software that you used to use? Like goblin tools?

SPEAKER_00 26:01

Yeah, it was. I don't think we've used it in a while, but that was back in the day, that was how you It was like the first AI that I ever had access to was Goblin Tools.

SPEAKER_01 26:09

Yeah, and it's it was shout-out, I assume they still exist. It was sort of it was AI, wasn't it? It was a project uh time estimation tool.

SPEAKER_00 26:17

Yeah, it was really cool. You'd put a project in and then it would give you a time estimate. I don't know if it's still around.

SPEAKER_01 26:22

I think it also kind of revealed hidden complexity. Like it gave you a task list as well, I believe. That was part of what it was doing. So it's sort of a if you are a small team or a one-person founder currently, Goblin Tools is useful for creating more reasonable timelines, yeah, estimates, and like complexity, sort of fully scoping subtasking, not forgetting about all the like prep or cleanup. Not a sponsor.

SPEAKER_00 26:50

No, although shout out.

SPEAKER_01 26:51

Yeah, reach out if you're interested.

SPEAKER_00 26:53

Who is looking for sponsors? So I want to get into a couple more of these failure modes just to close it out today. So basically, you know, the other one is the idea that a scope review becomes a confrontation. So the idea that this is something that you do as a escalation method. Like, do not scope review as an escalation method. You want to go ahead and scope review as a general protocol. We always look at the time, we always do these estimations of time. This isn't something we're doing now in this particular project because last time you messed it up. Like we don't want to do that.

SPEAKER_01 27:30

This is not something that we are doing temporarily or that we are doing until you get your act together. This is kind of this is no, this is the new process. Like we're acknowledging, ideally, we're acknowledging that you are optimistic with your time estimates. Yeah. And that's unlikely to change. And we can totally use them as a starting point, but they probably need a 30%, 50% expansion. And we are going to come back, you know, day later, week later, have a structured meeting where we explain why that expansion is taking place. Here's the hidden complexity, here is the historical precedent for how long these things actually take. If there's still pushback at that point, that's a separate conversation. It's it doesn't, it shouldn't be factoring into the project scoping. It should be factoring into finding efficiency with your systems and processes. Whatever you think is taking too long, well, then we should go and review that system. But for now, the last three projects, they all took this long. That's how long that piece of it took.

SPEAKER_00 28:26

Yeah, I agree. I agree.

SPEAKER_01 28:28

And the cost of being wrong about the time estimates is significant enough that we are going to prioritize having expanded, accurate time estimates now over, I guess what's what is the alternative like motivation of the founder here? If if the if the founder is pushing back at that point, it's presumably because they just don't want to believe that's how long it's gonna take. Yeah, I think the team could do it faster.

SPEAKER_00 28:52

I think it's usually gonna be one of those two things. And so you will, as always, have to, you know, be on board yourself or or get your CEO on board. But ultimately, I think what you risk here if you don't do this is the same thing as you risked on those other episodes that we've talked about. A strained team, a frustrated team, people that don't trust you, you don't trust them, micromanaging, and ultimately losing really amazing people who are gonna do a good job for you. And losing your own reputation with deadlines that keep getting missed.

SPEAKER_01 29:21

Yeah, there's definitely some iconic, there's definitely some iconic, perpetually late deliveries.

SPEAKER_00 29:26

So, okay, so if we were to kind of go with a takeaway here, the estimation is neurological. Like we know that this is happening in an ADHD person's brain. This is not a one-off thing we can fix. This is not something we can train. There is likely, unless we use historical estimation or some other external support, always gonna be an underestimating of how long things take. And that's okay. That's just not a strength. We're not gonna expect it to be a strength, but we're not gonna let it slide every time either, because it becomes very difficult for the team and for the person themselves.

SPEAKER_01 30:00

It's basically the same problem. All of these inaccuracies introduce inefficiencies. I think the the simplest example of like a business to think about in terms of this would probably be developing like property development, where the contractors need to come in in a sequence. And if you're wrong about how long this one's gonna take or you you haven't adequately expanded this one to allow for inevitable bad weather, then the next person's gonna be turning up and not being able to move forward, and then you're gonna have you'll be introducing potentially even more delays because you now have to reschedule that person, they might not be available, all sorts of things.

SPEAKER_00 30:34

I have clients who struggle with this exact problem. So, in terms of what you can do about this, we've covered it, but you know, historical data. Anything historical is gonna be the most valuable thing you can do, the most valuable thing you can find, because it's really hard to argue with what has actually happened in the past. That's really important, and then making this part of every conversation. So it's not just for one project. If you are lucky enough to have a team around you, this is part of the process of how we run the team now. This is not just a one-off.

SPEAKER_01 31:05

Yeah, the brief isn't the CEO descending and delivering, it's a it's a feedback loop. It's a that's the initial brief, then we have the structured review. Yeah, so we've got historical anchors, we've got project logs, even just post-project reviews. Then we have the structured second-person review.

SPEAKER_00 31:22

You are now operating in a totally different world. Like you are now operating in a world where you get those initial audio briefs, which you then fill in information, you bring that to the meeting, you're having those initial scoping reviews, and then you are, you know, setting up deadlines for things to be signed off on or estimations to be adjusted. You are now, if you've been following along for the last couple of weeks, working hopefully in a completely different way that feels like a little adjustment, but is creating so much more ease and so much more positive communication amongst your team. Because ultimately that's what we want. Because the whole point of this is to help you get things done and get things done in a way that works well and feels good to everybody. And sometimes it feels like that's not possible, but it really, really is, especially when you look at the research like this. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the ADHD Skills Lab. If you liked it, leave us a five star review. It helps other people learn more about us. And thank you so much to our wonderful team for making us sound good, look good. We couldn't do it without you.