The Hidden Burnout Nobody in Your Business Is Talking About

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 tracking, and resource allocation, drops measurably when ADHD traits are present. The mediating factor is not inability. It is role stress: the compounding weight of having more tasks than your brain can hold and no clear sense of what matters most.

This episode breaks down what the research found and what it means for ADHD founders building a team. Friday covers the practical response.

What We Cover

• Why teammates rated people with higher ADHD traits lower on operational effectiveness, including goal clarity, milestone mapping, and resource allocation
• What role stress is and why the research found it significantly mediates the relationship between ADHD and project management performance
• Why the disorganization doesn't stay at the founder level. It cascades onto the team below.
• How the creative strengths in ADHD are real, and why the research suggests they need a specific kind of support to work
• Why entrepreneurship gives ADHD founders a structural option that teachers, nurses, and academics never get

If you’re an entrepreneur with ADHD who’s tired of being asked “Why don’t you just hire/make a system/delegate?”  We’ve gotchu! 

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Transcript

0:00

If you're an entrepreneur and you get to make the rules, but you don't know how to make them in a way that works for you or for your brain, then you just end up in a worse position than you were when you were working in somebody else's business. Hello everyone, and welcome to today's episode of the ADHD Skills Lab. Before we do get started, I just wanted to let you guys know that we have a program specifically for business owners who make over $100,000 a year, who are growing, and they're starting to feel the pressure of that operational layer. If you are starting to feel that overwhelm, you could really, really benefit from having somebody in your business helping you, supporting you, actually doing things behind the scenes for you, but a COO seems like a little bit too far away, then reach out. We are fractional operations support and specifically designed for ADHD service business owners. So if you're interested in that, go ahead and click the link down below and you can chat with me for a free 90-day build-out of your business. I am joined by my wonderful husband and co-founder of this business as well as our tiny baby Amber. So if you hear any weird noises, it is her. This is a little bit of the founder's experience. And obviously, we've been talking a lot about the founder's experience, and we've been talking a little bit about the operator's experience. And today we're going to be doing no different. So from the founder's perspective, let's say the business is going well. The business is alive, things are happening, money is being made, conferences are being gone to, you know, systems are being set up and appear to be running, and it's an exciting time, you know, things are going pretty well. And honestly, maybe structure feels a little bit like the enemy at this moment, you know, especially if we talk about this exact moment. People are like, we have to move fast, we have to go fast, we have to change, we have to break things and figure things out. And so there is a sense of movement and momentum to this business. It's a business that, for all intents and purposes, is doing well. But if you turn that camera around and you look at the rest of the business, you turn it away from the founder that it's focused on, you turn it to the rest of the people, what you may find is an operational layer of people who are stressed out, frustrated, running on broken systems, and one holiday or illness away from everything coming crashing down again. Yeah, we're basically talking about the hidden cost that often lands on the next person, the next layer down, often the COO under the CEO of like an ADHD founder. And how much of the responsibility they are having to take for sort of maintaining some semblance of structure underneath that sort of creative chaos layer of the ADHD CEO or founder. Yeah. And we just want to make a note, we are in no way, and we will never say that the creative chaos layer is a bad thing. It's a good thing. It's the reason that this business exists. All that we're talking about is the idea that if it operates alone with no support or with support that isn't specifically designed to help it, or maybe wasn't expecting to help it in the same way as as it they are now, things can get a little bit hairy and a little bit wonky in the business. Yeah, the theme of this episode is basically structural avoidance. It's interesting because that's really more about it falling back onto the person. Well, it's just about how hard it is to find somebody to manage this operational layer. It's a problem because the CEO isn't the person that's supposed to be handling their role is managing the operations and the team below them. It's not also to manage upwards the ADHD founder and sort of help create a buffer for their creative chaos between the CEO and the team. Yeah, it's not necessarily the role. It might be the role that some people find themselves in, but the idea is a CEO's job is to manage the team and the forecasts and the projections and the budgets and all of that, you know, that kind of stuff. Like the HR should shouldn't call, shouldn't be coming from inside the house in terms of like you're managing the CEO specifically. Although I I'm sure sometimes that happens, but probably not what people choose to choose to do. But there is also something here that that we're we're missing a little bit, is that we're assuming that this business has the funds to hire a COO and they have the capacity and the team, etc., to hire a COO. There's also the operator, and this didn't come up so much in the first picture, where the business is running, but it's running by the skin of its teeth and the burnout of its owner, and it is one holiday away from falling apart because it's being put together like a collection of, you know, you know, have you ever seen those rocks that people put on the water and they're like stacking rocks in nature? And you look at it and you go, that's so beautiful. How could it possibly, how could it possibly survive? You know, it's gonna fall over at any minute, and it's so beautiful. And sometimes that can be what a business feels like if it doesn't have an operational layer. I mean, I am literally like right before we got on this call, I was looking at a reasonably successful business with a lot of bits and pieces and and talking backwards and forwards, trying to figure out where the gaps are, and realizing that this is a very successful business, but I highly doubt that there are SOPs for any of this process, and let alone somebody who understands them and how they work and could translate them to somebody else. So every single role is sort of stacked on top of each other, and one person falling, you know, one person leaving away from from being completely lost. So that stuff that is not necessarily the role of the COO, but also it's not necessarily like the founder might not even have a CEO yet, and they might just be trying to manage it themselves. And a lot of people are in that position. Yeah. The first paper, well, actually the only paper we're gonna look at today is on the effect that seems to have on the team, sort of the negative effect of ADHD on the team that they are managing. So I think in a smaller team without that layer, that's what that's gonna look like. I think it also looks like that when I think whenever you don't have a dedicated layer piece in there, it's falling onto. So it's either falling onto a small team or it's falling onto the COO. Or it's falling onto the founder. Like we talked at the beginning about, you know, it's going, well, things are happening, you know, who cares? But sometimes that's just the hype, the hyper focus moment of an ADHD founder. Sometimes it's a bit like up and down because there's the moment where they're like, this is amazing. I'm on cloud nine. Who cares? Sleep is for other people. And then there's like the oh my god, I can't believe I'm doing this, you know, cancel all my marketing plans. I can't believe I said that I would deliver this much stuff, and then and then up and down again, and that can happen as well. Yeah, there's I think it's one of those things where building the system can be really interesting, but then actually maintaining it isn't the ideal role for the ADHD founder. No, no, and I'll I'll I'll put my hand up and say that for myself. Like, I love building systems, it's one of my favorite things. I've been a big systems building nerd ever since I read books about routines of famous people for fun. But once I've built something and it's working, the fact that it's working is like the dopamine for me of going, okay, we're good. And then from there, like if I had to do that every day for for a year, like I then you get the feeling of like, okay, well, this feels a bit like a job. I I I went into business not to do a job, yeah, not to have routine monotony. Yeah, I'm very lucky to be able to not have to worry about that because I have an operator and I have a team so that these systems are built to run multiple times without me. And when that dopamine dries up for the maintenance portion of that task, it inevitably falls onto someone else. Or it falls into disrepair, which is also bad. Which is also bad. Like it's either it falls onto somebody else or it's a reputation risk. And unfortunately, the worst of all possible scenarios, and I know this sounds very drastic, but in the next episode we will talk about solutions, I promise. But the worst of all possible scenarios that I've seen with a lot of business owners is that they hire somebody to give them the job of doing this operational layer, and then that person is not the right fit, or they don't understand how to give it to the other person so that that person will do it regularly, and so that person is not doing it regularly enough to avoid reputation risk, and the CEO is now left paying for that person, managing that person, and also not wanting to do it themselves. We actually have an example, I don't know if you want to get into it, where you were very motivated, sort of went into a hyper focus to create this video ask, and then you'll be called out your motivation to perform any updates around like pricing changes or offering updates is zilch. Yeah, don't make your systems too complicated. Learn from my mistakes. I did that last year. Or I think build in a little bit of redundancy. So I think pre-recording some of those things so that someone else can manage it forever, and it isn't gonna require you to come back in. Yeah, part of your job is to help the founder resist the urge to do something like that. But it was very helpful because I will say, in my defense, it did help us get clients when I was on maternity leave. I think it's super effective, and I think that's why we will need to maintain it. Just know, if the video ask gets updated, I it's not my natural thing to do. But I did it for you guys. I think that we will either have someone else jump in for the ever-changing portion of the video ask, or we're gonna record a bunch of different iterations of how it could in the future need to play out. And but neither of us are operators. Like that's the truth. Roth Robbie and myself are CEOs, we have ADHD, we are creative, neither of us are operators. So when we talk about this struggle of, you know, building systems and creating systems that work for your brain, we understand it because we literally live it. You know, the the struggles and the frustration of systems that other people give you that you don't do because they just weren't built for you, and not having an operational layer of a person who understands how to manage and work with you to do things around that is something that we literally have struggled with. Yeah, we both have an abandoned version of every project management software in existence. I am testing them, Robbie. That is not abandoning, that is testing, minor abandoning finding them wanting. I didn't even go back to grab the tasks from some of them to migrate them across. I just gave up. I've got boxes in the garage of previous things that were on my desk. Yeah, so the point is we understand your situation. If you're somebody being like, hey, that's all cool, but I bet you guys have like you're super organized, and somehow you have that ADHD where you don't have all of these struggles, uh, that is not true. We shouldn't be managing our to-do list. We we need a co-pilot to help us manage that. So this is the paper that explains a little bit of those struggles for ADHD. And for some of you guys, this might be like, okay, but like this is obvious, but it really does help to break it down in research, right? This isn't just my experience and Robbie's experience. This is actually something that they have found in the research, is a problem when you have ADHD. This paper is by Kutze in 2022, which was Does role stress explain the relationship between adults ADHD and the operational performance of project managers? So I will say they were looking at project managers, not founders, but if you've ever been a founder, you'll know sometimes it feels like both. So this was the Journal of Behavioral and Applied Management. And so what they did was they wanted to measure the operational effectiveness of managers as rated by their teammates, not by themselves, and then also the role stress of these same managers. So they had 120 actively employee graduate business students, so people in the business school, and they were each put in a four-person autonomous project team at the university. Each of the members had an opportunity at different times to act as the project manager for a single sub-project, a SWOT analysis for those of you who have done business back in the day. And then the other team members rated that person's operational effectiveness by the end of the semester. They were looking at observer-rated AAD. So, like some papers, this aren't people, these aren't people who were diagnosed with ADHD. These are people who completed an observer version of the attention deficit scale. It's not a self-report, but it's also not a diagnostic. But then again, a lot of you guys aren't diagnosed with ADHD, and we're here having this conversation. So and then they also wanted to look at role stress, which we'll get into. Obviously, it says they're actively employed. Presumably they they're not undergrads, they're graduates who are probably doing sort of a night course alongside their work. Yeah, so this is a different sort of group of people from your average first-year psychology students, which I think is important to note because I think everybody would struggle with project management otherwise. Then let me take you through what they found. So, what they found specifically was, like I said, they were looking at role stress, but also the operational effectiveness. So I think it's worth mentioning what operational effectiveness was, according to this. So operational effectiveness included the ability to establish clear and appropriate goals for the project, map out all the key project tasks and milestones, keep a project on track, ensure successful and timely completion of the project, identify the critical path that determines the duration of the project, effectively allocate tasks and resources, all of these kinds of pieces. And what they found was that people who were observed to have more ADHD traits were also worse at operational effectiveness according to their to their teammates. So they were not as good at project management compared to other people. Which, yeah, isn't that surprising given the last seven episodes or the last six included seven including this one? It's not that surprising, but I swear so many people that I've met who have ADHD, like let's be honest, we we've all done that. Maybe I could be a project manager spin around where you've organized, you've tried to organize yourself so many times that you're like, maybe I'm actually an expert at this. I must be really knowledgeable because I've been to so much therapy moves. Yeah, it is it is the move. And so despite that, according to this research, which is not a meta-analysis, I do want to flag that if you have ADHD, you are not necessarily the person to go to for a job that requires things like predicting and addressing the high-risk steps or monitoring progress or keeping a project on track. Yeah, what I was gonna say is not that surprising, like mapping out all the key project tasks and milestones, like we discussed this in the brief gap, keep the project on track uh and ensure a timely completion. I mean, obviously not our special specialty, but yeah, we've we've talked about this like now versus not now, time blindness. And so, you know, they also found something really interesting. They wanted to know what mediated this effect, because to be fair, they were sort of like, we probably guessed that this is gonna be the case, that people who have more DHD traits are gonna be worse at this operational effectiveness when it comes to this project. But why? Like, what is a mediating factor? And so one of the mediating factors they found was actually role stress, so it was actually the individual themselves was experiencing some stress from the role itself. So they were more likely to say things like, I have more tasks than I can effectively manage, I'm not able to complete all the tasks that I need to have done, I'm constantly worried about coping, I'm constantly overwhelmed, I don't have a clear understanding of the important tasks in my life. And for some of you, this is probably gonna start to sound incredibly relatable because this is tends to be the feeling that those of us who struggle with ADHD symptoms have when we try and grow a business without an operational layer. So when we're saying that it is a significant relationship, so the way that they did this is that there's a mediating influence of the role stress on the relationship between adult ADHD and project manager effectiveness. So when you're looking at it, when you're looking at the picture, you're seeing okay, adult ADHD and project manager effectiveness are significantly related to each other, but the role stress is actually significantly connected to both of them. Yeah, and that's obviously explaining part of the that's what they're proposing, yeah. Like, of course, that's going to be part of what's breaking down, like not only being bad at it, but then being flustered that you're bad at it almost. I imagine, I think if I can track down the some of the measures that they were sort of ranked on by the teammates, I think part of it was also like the interactions with each other. So I'm yeah, there was some of that too. That's part of your sort of performance. It's not just that you're bad at the job, you're also stressing everyone out, is kind of what they're saying. Yeah. Well, no, I think the role stress is the individual's stress, like they experienced role stress. I think in short, it's sort of unsurprising that because it's not just that we're getting stressed out, like we're bad at the thing, that's stressing us out. The stress means that we're not doing as good a job with sort of the cohesion of the of the team that we're managing. It's also probably creating a feedback loop where we're more flustered when we're trying to. Procrastinating on sending up updates. And I see this all the time with clients. They procrastinate on sending updates, and then they don't do the thing, and then it it gets behind, and it yeah, it creates a lot of friction. That kind of um all of that sort of negative emotion avoidance behavior. Yeah. Everything that we talked about as well. Like where they said they would do it in two days, it took them a week, it was always gonna take a week, and now they feel bad and they're not responding, all of that kind of stuff comes in here. It's basically designed to be frustrating for this kind of person, 100%. So that was what they found. It is worth also saying that Coates talks about benefits of ADHD as well. This is um one of the papers that talks about the creativity side of ADHD. So there are I think they actually cite um White and Sahel. Which is cool 2011, which we've looked at. We've already talked about them. Yeah. So they do reference that like there are strengths to ADHD in terms of creativity and and and open-mindedness and thinking about things from different perspectives, things like that. But this is not one of them. This is not one of the strengths. Yeah, this was saying those same brains also now experience disruption with these sort of And it's kind of like asking, you know, asking somebody who's the kind of person who can pull a mental rabbit out of a hat to solve a complicated problem that needed an original solution, to also be the person who can tick off every task in a routine manner and make sure that everything is set up is kind of like asking for somebody who's super introverted but also wonderfully spontaneous when you want them to be in a partner. Like though that's it it's just not likely to exist in the same person. Yeah, I would say introverted versus outgoing or versus um like very enthusiastic. Because the spontaneity can go with introversion. You know what? You're right. You're very spontaneous and very introverted. Yeah, the spontaneity would be the inverse of sort of very scheduled. Yes. Yeah. It's like asking somebody to be really good at organizing and remembering everything for you and then really spontaneous at the same time. And the thing about ADHD, the same thing about anything, is that we're really good at ticking some of the boxes and really bad at ticking other boxes, which is why to come to the next section, it is very helpful, and it was even described and discussed in Coates' article that we pair somebody who is more creative and has that ADHD quality to them with somebody who is better at this operational administrative layer. Yeah, so they actually did have a quote here from the Kotzer paper where they talked about the use of peer coaching systems that pair people who are more creative project managers but may struggle with the organizational side with less creative participants who have more strong administrative skills, is quite an effective way of distributing the benefits of ADHD while mitigating some of the deficits. So they are sort of arguing for the thing that we're going to be talking about today. Could I just check? Did you say they did this or they recommended it? No, they recommended it. They sort of, it was in an implications for organizations section. So it was like right at the end where they're like throwing extra things in and saying, like, oh, this would be cool. They also said that if organizations and project managers wish to keep the benefits of ADHD struggles, they might need to provide that additional support for executing key operational tasks and managing stress. And that's really important because a lot of times the person who is this sort of creative thinker is often quite high up in the business. And that's something that we don't talk about enough. Is a lot of times now when we talk about ADHD, people are very willing to talk about ADHD as something that a a person in the business has, but still there's a little bit of resistance around the idea that the the CEO or the director of a whole section of a company could be the person who needs this support. Yeah, I think correct me if I'm wrong, but I think sometimes at those higher levels. There's almost politics that has to be played. There's always politics. And giving media. Well, sure. No, I mean at those higher levels, there's always politics. Yeah, I mean, I have definitely like one of the interesting things about my job is that I'm often working with people who don't want to share that they have ADHD because of the politics involved. So shout out to those people who do. And I understand and respect why people don't, but I really appreciate the people who do. Yeah, it's probably a bit easier at the founder layer or founder level, but even then I think once there's a board involved, again, you're probably dealing with a lot of politics. Yeah, and sometimes there's also complications around co-founders. People might be one of a couple of founders and they don't necessarily want to share their ADHD diagnosis. So yeah, it's it gets complicated. And this is one of the reasons why I want to talk about this because I think it's so important. We talk about this idea, and you found these um these papers I thought they were really interesting, about the way that entrepreneurship is such a unique thing because it's one of the only places where you could own your environment a lot more and get support for the operational layer, which is something that not just people who struggle with ADHD, but a lot of people struggle with in different businesses now as operations and administration becomes more and more part of the job. Yeah, I think there's almost, for some reason, this natural inclination to put administrative burden onto the role, onto all these roles. Like a lot of roles, I think teaching is one of the classics where you you know they're obviously dealing with a lot of administrative burden, and you think about like your favorite teacher growing up, and often there were these sort of spontaneous, fun people who really were really, really talented at like forming that connection with the students, but the administration side of it probably was not their strong suit. Yeah, yeah, 100%. Yeah, according to a 2025 University of Missouri study with 500 teachers, 78% have considered quitting. And the top reasons were sort of excessive workload and lack of administration support. Yeah, 100%. I thought it was really interesting as well. You mentioned doctors and GPs, paperwork that leads to burnout. And I can attest, you know who you are. I've had quite a few clients in that field or in like the services, that kind of services field, who have considered quitting because of paperwork. So definitely um crazy. Like 31% cited paperwork, which was more than twice the second leading cause, which was just poor work-life balance. Which is which is intense. Like that is very huge lead. Yeah. Yeah. And then scientists and researchers, they found nearly half their funding time is spent on the administrative side, which is one of the things I found in academia, which is one of the things that contributed to me not continuing with academia, was because one, I had the opportunity to run this business, and clearly that was the right, the right call, but also I knew that I was gonna be up against an administrative layer that I had no control over right up when I started my PhD and I had to go through ethics and transcription and everything, and like getting assistance for that was like pulling teeth. Like the the assumption was you should be able to do all of it by yourself, which is true, but not well. It's like I could spend my life doing that, but it was not the best use of my time because it was not my strength. You end up creating this filter where you lose, you know, for instance, your most passionate teachers because they can't handle the admin, and you end up with them sort of slowly being replaced or kind of a survival of the fittest of just the best administrators, the people who are most able to handle the administrative burden, but weren't necessarily good at the core role that you like actually want people in that job to be good at. 100%, exactly. And they also included their nurses, social workers, chefs, academics we mentioned, but there is an exception with entrepreneurs, which is one of the reasons why people who struggle with ADHD often become entrepreneurs because they can build their own life. However, if you don't know how to do it, then you just end up in a position where you're just like everyone else, except you're not being paid as well. Like you're still doing the admin layer, you're still doing the organizational layer, you're just doing it badly, and as a result, you're not getting paid as much as you could be paid. Yeah, I think you were sort of saying in the researcher sort of academic layer, obviously you don't have a lot of control over your ability to hire admin stuff. And that's kind of true for all of these jobs. Like it's not really their choice, it's kind of upper management, it's defined by the institution. It's interesting with the teacher thing, because I think one of the problems I've heard talked about in terms of schooling is this sort of administrative bloat at the top level, but obviously that's not coming down and helping the teachers with their actual day-to-day administration level, like uh problems. I think sometimes you have to have administrators to manage the administration of the people who are, you know. There is a famous quote to that effect. I think the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the ever-expanding bureaucracy. Yeah, so that might be your answer. Probably also has the effect of actually adding additional forms and bureaucracy and like admin work down at the lower levels. Never known it to add less. Yeah. Just thinking of my own experiences with sort of the play center early childhood in New Zealand, where the parents are like sort of a parent-run one. We had forms for so many things, including check your baby's asleep in the other room. You have to fill out a form saying that you checked on them every 10 minutes. I think it was. Like, I understand why that's necessary in a daycare environment. I mean, I think it's probably still there, there must be a crazy admin burden on daycare workers. But when you're the parent in the room, you're like, I don't fill out a form for my baby napping at home. Why do I need to do it? Like, what are we doing? Because we have to make sure it's all above board, it's all safe. But yeah, essentially what this means is unlike every single other area in society, basically, all jobs, including play center, um, is you have to follow the rules. And you don't get to make the rules. But when you're an entrepreneur, you get to make the rules. But if you're an entrepreneur and you get to make the rules, but you don't know how to make them in a way that works for you or for your brain, then you just end up in a worse position than you were when you were working in somebody else's business, which is super, super, super frustrating. Because the whole point of working for yourself, besides making money and all that kind of stuff, but often for an for an ADHD entrepreneur is that you get to control your time and your energy and what you want to do. You get to shape the role. Yeah. Yes, exactly. But as soon as you start doing it and it's working and you get to shape the role, you hit that operational layer and you don't know what to do. And sometimes you hire a COO and it's too early for that. And that's what we're going to be talking about next episode is you know, why this is a struggle for ADHD founders and what we can do if you are somebody who, like the others in the, you know, in the paper that we just talked about, struggle with this. So to wrap everything up from what we've been taking saying today, basically, the founders' experience is real. You know, creative chaos does produce good work. We're not saying it doesn't. I've seen amazing things happen because of the idea that you had at 3 p.m., you know, or 3 a.m. last night. In fact, one of my clients had an amazing idea last week just because of this. So we know that this is really important. This is very, very valuable. We are not trying to remove that at all. But unfortunately, it also provides a bit of an issue when people don't want to take into account the structure, when this is not a natural space for them, when the project management that is your business is something that people are going to struggle with. That is a big issue. So, you know, what we need to focus on then is okay, what are the patterns underneath everything? The time blindness, the brief gap, the estimation failure, the decision avoidance, the attention gravity, the delegation, the perfectionism, everything that we've been talking about it, you know, these are all part of the struggle of not having an operator. That's really what we're gonna go into in more detail in the next episode is okay, I acknowledge that I'm a founder and I am not the best at organizational systems. I need help with that. What do I do? Especially if you're not you don't have the resources to just throw money at the problem until you solve it. And even if you do, and you might have done that before, you're not like you said, Robbie, hiring the wrong person is gonna be even more of an issue. Yeah, you can be cleaning up that mess for months, potentially. Exactly. Exactly. And you could be in a bigger problem than you were to start with. Yeah, it's not just the money involved, it's it's the training and the onboarding, and you're handing things off. And then personally, I don't know if we could potentially do an ADHD episode on whether or not this is like an ADHD thing, but like once I've taken something out of my brain and given it to someone, it's kind of gone from my brain. I like it's yeah, common frustration I have with the dictation to AI is if that dictation fails, like early Chat GPT and all those thoughts, you're like, Oh, I don't know if I can do that again. Yeah, yeah. Robbie's literally been like, right, this is it, this is how we're gonna do it, X, Y, Z, and then early Chat GPT would just be like, I think we lost that world. Yeah, you went on for too long. Robbie was just like, well, whatever that was, who knows? Who knows if it's ever gonna be a thing again. But yeah, this is and this is a this is a broader pattern. This is actually not just an ADHD pattern. We do see this in other areas. Creatives need an operator, and so if you are a creative and being an ADHD founder is very creative, you need that operator support, but you need it in a way that's gonna work for you. And that's where the tricky part comes in. Yeah, it's not really optional if you don't create this layer or this like sort of buffer, yeah, this person whose actual role it is to catch all of your crazy catch all of your creativity, it's gonna fall onto someone or the rest of the team and cause all the disruption that we've talked about at the end of the last six weeks of episodes. 100%. 100%. So, yeah, just to be clear, this is not a case against ADHD founders. We are ADHD founders, we love ADHD founders, we understand their strengths. And it's not about you guys being difficult. Like, don't feel bad about this. This is just how you work. They're not character flaws. They're not character flaws. This is just uh this is just how we work, and it feels embarrassing to say, even I feel embarrassed sharing this stuff sometimes, but it's true. It's better if we all just say it. 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.