Why Your ADHD Brain Has 62 Ideas and ZERO Finished Projects

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.

What We Cover:

• Why ideation becomes a loop instead of a phase
• Research showing ADHD strength in divergent thinking
• The preference for idea generation over refinement
• How reward timing affects execution
• Why finishing feels harder than starting

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

There's the late night Slack messages, the WhatsApp messages that, hey, I was just thinking, wonder if we should do this. What happens if we do that? And it becomes very clear that while you guys are having a meeting to discuss an idea, and then that idea is being ticked off and done, and you're moving on to the next thing. The entrepreneur is kind of going home and being like, but you know what would be cool. And again, it's not wrong, but what it tells you, what it tells the team is that this is not done. Hello everybody, and welcome to this 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 are jumping into one of those struggles, which is why we avoid making a decision, why we avoid coming to a conclusion. Why do we love to keep our options open even when everybody is basically begging us to have made a decision? This is a very frustrating part of being a person with ADHD, working with a person of ADHD, and running a business with somebody who has ADHD in general. So we're gonna go through it. Robbie's gonna start us off. Robbie, my wonderful co-founder and husband, is here as always. We're also joined by our baby Embo, if you hear any baby sounds. Um, and we're gonna go through um a little story, I guess, to set the scene and give you a sense of what is happening. But before we do that, we help business owners who have ADHD, who are overwhelmed, who feel like they're never gonna be able to get a sense of what their business is, they're never gonna be able to simplify. We look at the research, we help you do that. If that's something that you want, you can always click the link down below and book an operational clarity call with me to see if you're a fit for our program.

SPEAKER_01 1:46

So we've spent the last three episodes building the case for why starting earlier, briefing more precisely, and scoping more accurately matter so much. And now we're facing the next question, which is even though those systems are in place, why does the ADHD founder still resist locking in? The brief's been locked, the timeline's been set, and why does that decision still not feel like it's closed? Why am I still getting slack messages about other options that we could explore?

SPEAKER_00 2:10

I'm gonna lead you through two different scenarios and tell me if you recognize yourself or somebody else in them, and then maybe send them this episode. So the first one is the presentation moment. So the team has been head down for weeks. They've been thinking about this presentation, this process, they've been building things, checking things, having internal meetings, and the time comes to have the meeting with the CEO to see how they feel. The meeting's going well, the CEO's sitting back, everything's flowing, the you know, everything's correct, the slides, the deck, the whole thing. And then the CEO goes, Okay, I I like this. I think this is great. But what if we did, and then they give you something that is totally out of left field. Not even like you did a bad job, like you did a good job, and it was so good that it gave the entrepreneur another idea. And in that moment, you realize you're gonna have to do this other thing. And all the work that you just previously put in was merely a stepping stone in this person's thinking process, and that is very frustrating and very dehabilitating considering how much effort you've put in. The other option is more of a drift. So, in this option, there's no big presentation. You guys have learned that's not even a good idea anymore. So, so you don't do that. But you know, as you go through, as you have the meetings, as you talk it through, there's this there's the late night Slack messages, the WhatsApp messages that hey, I was just thinking, wonder if we should do this. What happens if we do that? And it becomes very clear that while you guys are having a meeting to discuss an idea, and then that idea is being ticked off and done, and you're moving on to the next thing. The entrepreneur is kind of going home and being like, But you know what would be cool, and they're going ahead and adding, you know, pieces in their head, maybe talking it through with other people. Oh, so-and-so had such a great idea. I told them what we're doing, and now they had a great idea. And again, it's not wrong, but what it tells you, what it tells the team is that this is not done. This is always gonna be a working draft, this is gonna be iterated on forever, and the deadlines probably not gonna happen, and that starts to lose the thread of the project that you're actually trying to finish. These are two very common scenarios when you're running a business with an ADHD CEO, and they are scenarios that for a lot of people, it's sort of that it will drive them nuts, but they won't be mad, if that makes sense. It's like like it's a weird one because it's cool. You know, you're working in a, you know, maybe a smaller business, there's so much energy, there's a startup vibe, there's ideas, and we love that, but it's also starting to drain you. It's starting to drain your team, and honestly, it's probably starting to frustrate the CEO as well, and they don't even know why.

SPEAKER_01 5:07

Yeah, it's that same divergent thinking that makes the CEO or the founder exceptionally good at finding new opportunities. Also has this other side of the coin, which is incredibly frustrating when you thought the decision was locked in and you find out they've been ideating about it in the background.

SPEAKER_00 5:24

Ideating about it is like our favorite thing. And and it's frustrating for the person as well, because the CEO themselves is not necessarily aware that they're doing it, or how much the fact that they're doing it is affecting the business as a whole.

SPEAKER_01 5:40

Yeah, how much disruption and inefficiency and maybe even resentment and sort of silent frustration is being caused. So basically, what we're talking about is decision avoidance, the resistance to psychologically closing on a chosen path, even after the agreement's been reached.

SPEAKER_00 5:57

That sense of why not have options, you know? Like options are great. If you make a decision, now you have less options and there's less fun things to ideate.

SPEAKER_01 6:06

The founder's thinking, I've thought of a better idea, and the team is experiencing this as a late override mid-project.

SPEAKER_00 6:13

So let's talk about this. I've had a better idea. Because there are reasons why this is a good thing, and this is why this is such an interesting conversation to have. One of the things that we found, and actually, I found this years ago. I started this whole business by writing research articles on different parts of ADHD. And when it came to ADHD as a strength, I ended up pulling, and you can see how long ago this was, because it was a relatively recent paper at the time, Abraham's feasibility study from 2006. Basically, what they found was they looked at how adolescents were doing a particular task. In this case, they were given an example of something to do with toys, and they were asked to come up with some new ideas and some new designs. What they found was that people who were not ADHD struggled to do that because the example they'd been given kind of blocked their ability to do that. They were sort of ended up ideating around the thing. But people who had ADHD, not a problem. They almost bounced off the thing, if you could think about it. You know, if somebody else, you know, if you think of an example, for example, if somebody says, draw an animal, here's an elephant. People who are not ADHD were thinking, okay, well, elephant, ooh, rhino, that's kind of looks like an elephant. Maybe I'll do some other African animals. And people with ADHD were like, animal, elephant, ooh, you know what? What if elephants were in space? It was like kind of like this complete opposite thing that was happening. And that was kind of one of the strengths of ADHD, and one of the strengths that I've referenced time and time again is our ability to think outside of the box. And what we're talking about today is kind of the pros and the cons of that.

SPEAKER_01 7:59

So the ADHD participants were significantly better at resisting the constraining example.

SPEAKER_00 8:05

Oh, yeah. Nothing can constrain us. We're bland-free coming up with those ideas.

SPEAKER_01 8:10

They kept the possibility space open wider and longer than the controls.

SPEAKER_00 8:14

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:15

Yeah, more outside the box thinking, but also they stayed in that space of, I guess, ideation.

SPEAKER_00 8:21

So that was a feasibility study. It didn't have a lot of participants. And so Robbie actually found a more recent paper and a much more robust paper that found this idea that people with ADHD love the ideation space. They love it. You know, if you're an ADHD person, you've probably thought to yourself, oh man, I wish I could just come up with ideas for other people for a living. That would be great.

SPEAKER_01 8:47

I imagine one day one of our grandkids will open up the like archive of my cloud storage system, and they will just be like, Wow, this crazy person started thousands of projects, and as far as I can tell, he actioned zero of them.

SPEAKER_00 9:09

Hey, not zero. This podcast exists, and we're doing it right now. So this was a project we're doing.

SPEAKER_01 9:14

I think it's one of those things as well, is I still look forward to a theoretical future where I have the spare time to action. Listen, a lot of the projects, they're sort of they don't meet the filter of will this will this actually make money and help me not start becoming a so they're all sitting there like that'd be cool. That'd be cool too. And we could do it differently like this. Even when I do try to start them, I sort of run into that problem. I think the thing that most often derails them is I've started implementing it and then I backtrack to the ideation sort of direction phase and go, well, that would be cool, but it's also a lot of work. That's that's not really the killer part though, and we we'll discuss that later. But yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:57

I actually think the killer part is one of the reasons why AI can be quite dangerous with ADHD, because one of the things that people have been saying about AI, which I love by the way, and use all the time, is that it can create this world where you're just constantly making things and you're never stopping to ask if you need to make this thing or if it's gonna be helpful.

SPEAKER_01 10:16

I think we referred to it as like a rabbit hole accelerator. You're not just going down rabbit holes now, you're like speed running them.

SPEAKER_00 10:23

It almost acts ADHD itself because it's like, what if we did this and what if we did this? And have you thought about that? And have you thought about that? And you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, like my brain is divergent enough, you know. Like now you're adding to this divergence with your own brain. Like your AI is never like cool, but like let's come to a conclusion, and maybe we should, you know, maybe we should build something that actually does that, like a like a brain for that for ADHD people in terms of the AI. But I feel like often it it just wants to make more stuff and think of more stuff.

SPEAKER_01 11:00

How AI is already questioning our assumptions to a problematic level, though. Do we really want it questioning whether or not we are getting distracted?

SPEAKER_00 11:07

Before we get back to the ADHD Skills Lab, I want to share a podcast I think you're gonna love. It's called Sorry I Missed This from the team at understood.org. We know that our executive functioning challenges don't just stay at our desks, they follow us into every part of our lives, including our most intimate relationships, whether it's dating or longer-term commitments. Hosted by Kate Osborne, the show explores strategies that will actually respect how our neurodivergent minds are uniquely wired for love and connection. I listened to an episode called Oh Baby, it's an ADHD pregnancy, which I've been through three times now, and I loved what they said about sensory struggles we can have, how we remember, and all of those little differences you don't realize until it gets there. So to listen to Sorry I Miss This, search for sorry I missed this in your podcast app. That's sorry I missed this. So this paper was a really great paper to get a sense of whether people with ADHD really like ideation, which sounds obvious, but you know, that's what research is for. We want to check these things and back them up. Basically, this paper was talking about a particular kind of measure. It was called foresight thinking profile, and they were looking around different areas. So ideator, so preference for idea generation, clarifier, preference for defining and structuring the problem, and then developer, which was preference for refining and elaborating ideas towards a solution to the problem, and then an implementer as well, putting solutions into action, arguably the most important. Well, kind of, I think, I think they're all important. And so what they were looking at was they were referencing, yes, you know, the Abraham paper found that ADHD brains perform better on divergent tasks, but do they prefer to do those kind of divergent tasks? So they asked 60 undergraduate students, 30 people with ADHD, 30 people that didn't have ADHD, about 20 years old, to take some survey tests, answering a variety of different questions. And what they found was yeah, people with ADHD love ideation significantly more than people who did not have ADHD. People who didn't have ADHD tended towards wanting to be clarifiers, so those were the people who were defining and structuring the problem, and then also developers, so refining the problem and elaborating towards a solution. Great people to have if you're saying, let's like think about what we're gonna do from a bunch of ideas, and we're great for like let's think about the bunch of ideas.

SPEAKER_01 13:49

Yeah, I think in our scenario, the team are the developer, like preference for refining and elaborating the idea toward the solution, and they're coming up against a founder who doesn't want to leave the ideator preference space. Pretty much idea generation. I thought it was interesting, no significant difference between the implementer preference.

SPEAKER_00 14:10

So yeah, I thought that was interesting too, especially because implementation is that's sort of how we think of I would say that's a stereotype. Maybe it's your stereotype.

SPEAKER_01 14:19

Well, yeah, yeah. I don't know if that's true though. Like it's not like I'm failing to execute across the board. I'm just noticing that moving out of that ideation space is especially in like a cre particularly like because I'm talking about creative projects, not really work projects, yeah, and moving out of that that ideation space, doing the developer sort of refining, it's very difficult not to go into that developer space and then go back into the ideation space. I think that's a really good point. Once you're actually executing the execution, the execution can be fun.

SPEAKER_00 14:49

I think I would say that in my experience, um, a lot of people struggle with execution even more than they think they do. So if you say some to somebody, for example, hey, can you write one article a day? They're like, no, like the people like Casey Neistat, for example, made a YouTube video every day. And it was an amazing YouTube video, but also just the fact that he made it every day was a cause for like, wow, how did you do that? You know, because we're not really good regular action-taking people if you think about it in terms of pressing publish or or shipping something. I mean, funny with our conversation about AI, I think we're better at shipping things now, but whether we're shipping them in finished states, I don't know. Maybe maybe AI is more like just helping you with the refining and then the ideating. I would be curious to know.

SPEAKER_01 15:40

I mean, I would say that yeah, it's tricky. You can use AI for most of these steps. Yeah, well uh I mean the quality of the output is the sort of the thing in question.

SPEAKER_00 15:50

And you know what, it's only gonna get better. So I don't even want to say that it's bad quality right now because this is gonna age badly if I do.

SPEAKER_01 15:58

AI is such a double-edged sword. It's amazing and then just it's amazing and then so frustrating.

SPEAKER_00 16:05

Yeah. Okay, so they also had a few other tests, which I'm just gonna touch on because they are used, interesting. So they also looked at tests on verbal originality, so the ability to generate unusual, infrequent responses. We scored higher for that, which was interesting. We didn't struggle, we had there was no significant difference between ADHD and non-ADHD on figural tasks, fluency, elaboration, things like that, which is interesting. I mean, I think there's always been papers about the language difference between ADHD and non-ADHD, and you kind of see it here as well. And then, yeah, just this idea of the feedback loop. ADHD adults are better at the ideation phase, they achieve more in-world creative domains, they they achieve more in real-world creative domains. So when you looked at actually were people with ADHD in this paper, not in, you know, this isn't a meta-analysis. What they found was that people were doing better in terms of had they gotten an award, had they, you know, made something that did well, they're not gonna be a good idea.

SPEAKER_01 17:09

We're talking in creative domains, yeah, in creative domains.

SPEAKER_00 17:14

Exactly, exactly. Which I thought was really interesting because you know, obviously you can ideate, but eventually you have to ship it. And clearly, according to this paper, they were quite good at that as well when it was a creative thing.

SPEAKER_01 17:26

It explains a little bit that the preference for ideation, there's probably a feedback loop there between it's not just that you like being in that space, it's genuinely kind of your area of genius, it's it's your strength, it's where you make a lot of probably your most like well uh appreciated contributions. And so there's probably a bit of a feedback loop there in terms of that's where you want to stay, that's where you're looking for the treasure.

SPEAKER_00 17:47

Yeah, I think that's always the case, right? We always want to stay in the space where we're better and people appreciate us more.

SPEAKER_01 17:52

Yeah, and so you can imagine that being part of the reason the founder is still sort of for the week after the decision has technically been made, still ideating on like, have I really nailed this one? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:05

So there were some limitations. So obviously, this is 20-year-old college students, it might not be as generalizable to ADHD founders as you know we would want. It's also self-report. Self-report is always a bit limited. People might just think that they're good at something versus actually be good at it. And then also just medication, half of the ADHD group were medicated. They didn't see any reliable differences, but it's always kind of good to just know where medication is in the mix, basically.

SPEAKER_01 18:36

I've definitely heard anecdotal reports of people who felt like the medication impacted their creativity, but obviously that's not a finding here.

SPEAKER_00 18:45

And I've heard anecdotal reports of people saying that it really helped their creativity. So it kind of goes both ways.

SPEAKER_01 18:52

And I suppose that is the case with pharmaceuticals in general, is it's very individual to individual.

SPEAKER_00 18:58

Yeah, it's it's a journey. It's a journey, not a destination. So the next paper, once we've established, okay, that this divergent thinking is what we're talking about, people do, you know, really want to do it. So now that we have a paper that tells us kind of what we prefer when it comes to ADHD, we have another paper that tells us why we really struggled to give up that initial ideation. Like what is going on there? What is the reward that we are seeking versus the reward of getting the thing done, shipped, and out the door that we are avoiding? And this was really well described by a meta-analysis, always love those, from Jackson and McKillop in 2016. Basically, what they did was they had nearly 4,000 participants over 21 studies, and they found that there was a medium robust effect in what they called delay discounting. So I'll take you through what that means in a second, and then we'll talk about it. Delay discounting is basically the process by which future rewards are assigned progressively less value the further away they are in time. Everybody to a certain degree is more interested in$1,000 now than$2,000 in 10 years. You know, there is a level of discounting that everyone's gonna have.

SPEAKER_01 20:22

I think the cleaner example of that is if you're just giving them$1,000 now or$1,000 in 10 years. You'd rather have the one now. That's true. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:29

Okay, that's a better example, yeah. And the marshmallow test is a classic version. For those of you who haven't heard of it, it's a test which they did with kids where they gave them, hey, you can have one marshmallow now, but if you eat that marshmallow, you won't be able to have two marshmallows in the future. Basically, people have been doing these kind of weird experiments for forever. And what they found was that for some people, they really wanted the marshmallow now over and above the two marshmallows, they couldn't wait. And that actually went on to predict a whole bunch of different things, including, and perhaps unsurprisingly, when you look at this paper, ADHD.

SPEAKER_01 21:05

I would say, in defense of the one marshmallow, which I know is associated with like a lot of negative outcomes. But for those of us, everyone living through inflation currently, yeah, I think there's a genuine chance that the$2,000 later might be worth less than the thousand dollars now.

SPEAKER_00 21:23

Exactly, exactly. You don't know, you don't know what they did to that marshmallow. Maybe those other marshmallows are mini marshmallows, gotta be careful.

SPEAKER_01 21:31

Just like them.

SPEAKER_00 21:32

So basically, you know, what they did with this study was, or this meta-analysis of studies, is they looked at a whole bunch of different comparisons of whether people with ADHD were more likely to discount the rewards in the future. So the idea is, you know, if you had somebody who had ADHD and you said to them, like, hey, theoretically, if I could give you a thousand dollars now. Versus$2,000 six months from now, would you take the thousand dollars now? People with ADHD were more likely to say$1,000 now, please, than people who didn't have ADHD. Essentially, what they were looking at, obviously, this was a meta-analysis study. So some of the papers were using an ADHD positive group and a control group. So they were able to compare it. It was only available for 21 of the 422 total articles, though, so not all of them. And what they found was the average age of people ranged from seven to 36. So it was quite a large range. Median study age of 16. And the delay reward for various discounting tasks were primarily hypothetical. They weren't handing people thousands of dollars. And it was a big range. So it ranged from 10 cents to$5,000. So it was a big, big range. But it was all the same kind of test. Do you want a smaller amount of money now or a larger amount of money later? That was all the same kind of test. They were trying to figure out if there was a difference between people who had ADHD and people who didn't on this on this comparison. They also noted, just as a side note, that the majority of studies had participants who had not taken medication for at least 48 hours or they'd never had medication, and then some didn't discuss medication status. But there was a lot of like not being medicated. So overall, across all of these studies, they found that there was very strong evidence of significantly higher discounting of future rewards in people who had ADHD. It was really high. Which basically means that when you ask somebody who has ADHD if they would rather take a small reward now versus a large reward in the future, almost always across the board, almost regardless of what kind of reward it is, they say, I would take the smaller reward now, please.

SPEAKER_01 24:10

I think there'll be more nuance than that. I think that you could definitely say relative to a neurotypical, they would be more likely to.

SPEAKER_00 24:19

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 24:19

I don't know if they discuss it. It's probably a harder question to answer is exactly what the formula is, or like where that threshold is where they switch into like what's the it would it would depend on the difference, like the delay, and the difference in the reward size, I imagine.

SPEAKER_00 24:36

So it's probably it does, but they did say overall that there was this these results provide very strong evidence of significantly higher discounting of future rewards in ADHD individuals across all of these papers.

SPEAKER_01 24:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:53

And these papers measured between like a thousand dollars and ten cents.

SPEAKER_01 24:58

So yeah, so we definitely have a preference for reward now over reward later. Big preference. I think obviously you could take that to the absurd extreme though, and you're not saying ADHD people are like ludicrously. No like they're not gonna take a dollar over a thousand dollars in two minutes, you know.

SPEAKER_00 25:15

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. But you know, and obviously those things would be that's an absurd exaggeration.

SPEAKER_01 25:22

But that's my point.

SPEAKER_00 25:23

But it it is uh strong enough for us to say that we definitely have a bias.

SPEAKER_01 25:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:27

If we like ideation and we also have a bias for the reward now versus the reward in the future, you can start to see why people who have ADHD struggle to let go of the ideation stage. Because the reward for not doing that is that you get to stay in your zone of genius, you get to stay doing the thing that you like versus the long-term reward, which is you finish the task, you get through the less fun bit, you now have the reward of the actual item itself.

SPEAKER_01 26:01

Yeah, and not just you've got to move, not just in terms of the reward of like the project finishing, but also you've got to go through that period of what did they call it, like uh refining the the phases that the non-ADHD participants actually had a like significantly higher preference for.

SPEAKER_00 26:18

So to kind of bring everything to a conclusion, we've looked at three papers today. We've had the Abraham paper, which has talked about, you know, how we are more creative, and then early papers showing that as a strength. We've had the White and Shah paper, which has looked at ADHD in adults and the way that we prefer the ideation phase of you know a job over other phases of it. This was really great because it not only showed the real world results, but also linked it to creative achievement, all that kind of stuff. It was a very cool, like real life paper. And then we have a sense of okay, well, if we know ideation is this the big thing for ADHD, you know, why are we struggling to let it go once it's even pointed out? And that's where you see the discounting. You know, we we love the present reward, and we do struggle a little bit more with that future reward.

SPEAKER_01 27:15

We probably could have made the point with just the white and sar paper, I think. But I think this one adds a little bit of supporting evidence in terms of also just reminding us of that now versus not now sort of preference in terms of rewards, in terms of I think there is an application for it here in terms of we have this present preference for ideation, we want to stay in it, and even though we should let the process continue and lock in that decision, it's there's a temptation to stay there and to keep optimizing.

SPEAKER_00 27:44

Yeah, 100%. And like we said, you know, that initial paper kind of provides the start of hey, we have a strength of ideation. The second paper says, Well, we really like you know the ideation phase, and and actually we're quite good at it. It it's related to creative results and you know achievements in the creative space. But this paper, this last one, really brings home the idea of yes, but if we stay in that space too long, we risk those long-term rewards, just in the same way as you would with you know, the choosing to forgo the short-term joy of iterating on your landing page for actually shipping it, sending it out, making it happen, and having to deal with the reality of you know, it not being perfect, but now it's done.

SPEAKER_01 28:32

Sometimes the right move is to ship a good enough product or version.

SPEAKER_00 28:38

More often than you'd expect.

SPEAKER_01 28:40

Yeah, it's a good rule of thumb, actually. I think with notable exceptions of like a few industries, I think like luxury goods, and there's a few other industries where writing a book, yeah. Yeah, anything where like safety is concerned, then perfectionism becomes a lot more useful with huge consequences. But generally speaking, delivering good enough consistently is a lot better than perfect inconsistently and infrequently.

SPEAKER_00 29:05

And it's that thing we've been talking about, that consistency. You know, one of my mentors says quantity has a quality all of its own, like being able to do something okay consistently, it does accumulate, you do make very cool things, there is something to be said for it, but it's just hard for us to do because it it means we're leaving our zone of genius, and I think it's that fear almost of leaving your zone of genius that is that is such a a pull away from just saying, Yeah, that looks good. It's not perfect, but it it looks good.

SPEAKER_01 29:38

The ADHD founder has this like zone of genius for generating new ideas, they're better than most people, it's what they find the most rewarding, and their brain's also discounting the sort of delayed reward or the delayed costs of like missing that deadline, having the team waiting more than more than they should. Yeah, I think I think a way of reframing it is the the like actually I've been thinking about moment conversation is their brain doing exactly what it should be doing, but it's doing it past the point where it's needed. Making space for that at the start of the project is a good idea, but then we don't want it mid-project, we definitely don't want it near the end of the project. Yeah, and we don't want it undermining the team's motivation or or their decisions or even undermining their enjoyment working in the company.

SPEAKER_00 30:23

Yeah, and I know that everybody listening to this, because I even do it myself, is probably going, yes, but there was that one time, and it was the best thing that we ever did. But the truth is, over time, over most things, it's better to now be ideating on something else.

SPEAKER_01 30:39

Yeah, um, and I think in the practical applications, we'll talk about there it is appropriate to pivot sometimes, but there should be a formal like threshold for it.

SPEAKER_00 30:49

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 it sound good, look good, couldn't do it without you.