How to Stop Panic-Planning and Actually Lower Your ADHD Anxiety

You keep rereading the same task on your list. You know it matters. You still haven't started.

If that sounds familiar, it probably isn't a motivation problem. It may be because you're treating a project like it's a task.

In this episode, Skye and Robbie unpack why hidden complexity makes seemingly simple tasks feel impossible, why the ADHD brain mistakes importance for urgency, and how giving tasks a trusted "home" can dramatically reduce overwhelm. They also share practical strategies for breaking projects into manageable steps without falling into perfectionism or all-day hyperfocus. These ideas are grounded in the episode's central insight: urgency often comes from the fear of losing the task—not the deadline itself.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why some "tasks" are actually projects in disguise
• How hidden complexity leads to procrastination and overwhelm
• Why breaking a project down is progress—not procrastination
• The real reason everything starts to feel urgent with ADHD
• How to build a system you actually trust to hold your work
• What to do when you've stalled on a project and don't know how to restart

Whether you're running a business, managing a team, or simply trying to get through your to-do list, this episode will help you understand why certain tasks feel so much harder than they should—and what you can do about it.

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! 

1. Click here for a free copy of my 5-year-tested Focus Filter. Instant relief for work-related overwhelm.
2. Find out what’s holding you back. I’ll personally build you a simple plan to fix it. Click here to grab one.
3. Join my Focused Balanced Growth Program. If you’re tired of getting blank looks in masterminds full of neurotypical advice, this is for you. Weekly Monday Motivation sessions, plus content you can binge or dip into for strategies specific to you. Apply here.
4. Your Business Operations Built for Your ADHD Brain. Feel like you can never really delegate because you can’t explain how to do it? Struggling to hire someone who feels like a natural fit for your business? Let us handle it for you. We specialize in using our years of ADHD research and practical support to act as your fractional COO, handling the back-end operations in a way that feels light and keeps you focused. Learn more here.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

The thing that makes something feel urgent for the ADHD brain is not the deadline, it's the fear of losing that task, losing something important. If you can give it a home, it'll stop feeling urgent in that way.

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the ADHD Skills Lab. And as always, I am brought to you by my husband and co-founder Robert Waterson and special appearance by our little baby Ember. Today we're gonna get into the practical strategies of what we talked about last episode, which is basically going into why a task feels hard when it has a bunch of hidden complexity and what we can do about it. So today we're gonna talk a little bit about some of the practical things that we can do to help when tasks have hidden complexity.

SPEAKER_01 0:45

Yeah, I think that's one of the core sort of insights from these papers is the first practical move is recognizing when you're holding a project and not a task. And so like some of the symptoms of that are you're not sure where to begin or you're suddenly very interested in doing something else.

SPEAKER_00 0:58

Yeah, I loved that idea of like, well, you know what we should do? And often so the two things, and let me know and if you if this is you, the two things are I need to clean my office or some part of my house, and I have to update my website. Like those are the two things that we tend to go off and try and do instead.

SPEAKER_01 1:19

Yeah, and they're they're not procrastination symptoms, they're planning gap symptoms. So if you actually plan out and sort of reveal the complexity and turn that task into, or that project, I guess, into a um structured task list, then that impulse is going to go away.

SPEAKER_00 1:35

Exactly. So people think of them as just straight up procrastination because that's often what we talk about when it comes to ADHD, but that's quite a, I would say, basic understanding because there's a lot more to ADHD than just it's boring. It's definitely a part of it, but it's not the only thing.

SPEAKER_01 1:54

It's also quite a like negative framing. You're sort of lazily incorporating moral judgment into the diagnosis of what's going wrong when actually it's it's just the absence of a strategy for recognizing and dealing with it.

SPEAKER_00 2:07

Yeah, yeah. And it comes back to that same idea when we talk about executive functioning and things like working memory. If it's more than three steps, it's a project. So we need to stop treating it like a task and we need to work on it like a project. And we'll talk a little bit in this episode about practically what that looks like and how to do that. Let's talk about some ways you probably notice that you're in this position where you are needing to break things down. So it could be that you've reread the task, it's been on your task list, you know it's important, you've just been pushing it. When you think about it, you're not even sure how you would start it. Like which application would I even open to do this? And then, like you said, you're getting very interested in something else. When we think about this idea of breaking it down, the first thing to note is that breaking it down is the task. So if you break it down, go have a great day. You did the first step of this task because when you're doing something that has multiple steps, sometimes we want to just go, oh, actually, that's really simple, let me do it now. But often that will lead to sort of the negative side of hyper focus, where we'll find ourselves five hours deep trying to finish something super burned out, super overwhelmed. That's not gonna make you want to do it next time.

SPEAKER_01 3:27

Yeah, so you sort of lose track of the rest of your schedule.

unknown 3:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:30

Because I would say you want to subtask it and then you want to plan when you have time to do all those subtasks rather than just knee-jerk, I've started this now, I've got to finish it.

SPEAKER_00 3:40

Yeah, exactly. So sometimes what will happen, because I've worked on this for years at this point with clients, and sometimes what will happen is people will start working on a task and they'll be like, you know what, you're right. Let me get something fun, let me start breaking it down, then they'll break it down, and then there's a bit of um self-criticism almost where they go, well, now I break it down, I have to do it, and then they'll start working through the tasks, and there'll be this sense of they almost have the same problem, it's just they've planned at the beginning.

SPEAKER_01 4:12

I wonder if there's this sense of almost shame that oh, now that I've broken this down, it seems ridiculous that it's taken me six weeks to start it. And it is really urgent, I have to do it now, kind of thing.

SPEAKER_00 4:24

Exactly. You've really hit the nail on the head there. That's exactly it. And so, so that's why I say to you, first of all, is when you break it down, go and do something nice afterwards, take a break. Like that is the task itself. Because the other thing that happens a lot is people will feel a sense of shame around even having to break it down entirely. Because if you're neurotypical, you are not as likely to have to break as many things down.

SPEAKER_01 4:47

Yeah, you're better able to hold all the pieces in your head.

SPEAKER_00 4:50

Exactly. So they're going, just get started, you'll feel so much better, and da da-da-da. And now, oh, you're over here breaking it down. You haven't even started yet.

SPEAKER_01 4:58

The other thing I was wondering is if there's almost this like mistrust in the system because you haven't formalized the strategy of that's what's going on here. You almost have this sense that if you don't do it now, maybe it'll go back to being an amorphous blob. I've finally started on this task, I can't stop now because this might be my one chance to get it done this month, kind of thing.

SPEAKER_00 5:18

Exactly, exactly. And you're totally right. And that's one of the reasons why I am so passionate about sharing these strategies and this research, so that you know it. I mean, even the research a couple of weeks ago where we were like, okay, you don't have a long-term memory issue, you have an encoding issue. Even for me, that's been incredibly helpful because it means when I'm memorizing something, I'm going, no, my memory is good. You know, this is this is just an encoding issue, and I've encoded it, so we're good. You know, all of these different strategies really help like that.

SPEAKER_01 5:46

That breaking it down, write down the next five to 15 actions, not goals, but actions, identifying dependencies. So what can what has to happen before this can happen? Uh, what can happen in parallel, and then adding some scaffolding for pausing and resuming.

SPEAKER_00 6:00

Um where do the files live?

SPEAKER_01 6:03

Create a well-named folder in a logical location and then pin it.

SPEAKER_00 6:06

Um that is the hardest thing for me to do. Yeah. You know that. Yeah, that one. That one I struggle with. I usually hand it off to someone and we'll talk about that and ask them to create the folder and just send it to me because I'm not the best at figuring out where to put the folder.

SPEAKER_01 6:25

Subtasking, it's not just making a list, um, it's offloading your working memory. You're creating completion points that restore that reward loop. Yeah, you're making them to little bite-sized pieces that feel good to knock off. And you're also enabling a lot of efficiency by making sure that things get done in the right order.

SPEAKER_00 6:40

And that's one of the reasons why I say do do the planning and then schedule the next step and then consider it a task well done and walk away from it. Because that in that way, you're kind of reinforcing that idea of I've offloaded my working memory, I have created this little reward, I'm gonna have a break now, I did a good job. And it can actually lead to a situation where you look forward to planning in the future, which will stop you from procrastinating, which will ironically help you get more done than if you pushed through and was like, I have to finish this now because I've started it.

SPEAKER_01 7:14

You're reinforcing that good habit.

SPEAKER_00 7:15

Exactly, exactly, which is a lot of what this is about. It's a lot of that habit building stuff that that we talk about.

SPEAKER_01 7:22

Okay, and now the next section is uh urgent versus important and how that can be a trap for ADHD founders.

SPEAKER_00 7:28

Yeah, so this kind of comes back to what we were talking about before, which is this idea that tasks feel urgent, even when they're just important. It's not this is the this is the Eisenhower matrix thing. So often I I teach a prioritization filter, and when I use this system, a lot of times people will say, Oh, this is just the Eisenhower matrix, and they're kind of just gonna put it in the corner. But the truth is the Eisenhower matrix, which is the idea of going, is this urgent, is this important, is this you know important but not urgent or urgent not but not important? It's the working memory required to do an Eisenhower matrix is really high. So often what people will have is they'll have a list of tasks in their head, and then they'll be given this matrix and be told, organize these tasks based on urgency or importance, et cetera, et cetera. And they'll go, okay, I barely have enough working memory to remember these tasks. So I'm just gonna put them all in important and urgent and hope that that works out.

SPEAKER_01 8:26

The reason that these tasks often feel urgent is because of this working memory problem that they kind of know it's it is really important. It's not actually urgent, but it's so important that we have to do it now because otherwise I'm running the risk of losing it and forgetting it, and I don't have that good system for having it resurfaced at the right time. So everything's now urgent.

SPEAKER_00 8:49

A surprisingly large amount of what I do when I'm helping people build their first seven-week challenge in the program is I'm calming their anxiety about this concept. Because a lot of times people will put off doing the thing they need to do because they're so worried that if they do this thing and if they're focusing on this thing, they're gonna lose all of the other things in their task list. But the truth is, if you are just focusing on trying to pretend everything is urgent, everything needs to be done right now, but you're not doing it, you're kind of just treading water. You're not getting anywhere, you're not actually getting traction. So it's it's having the opposite effect of what you want.

SPEAKER_01 9:31

It disrupts everything else. It's not the correct, it's not the most efficient order in which to do it. It's being done out of turn, and um, you're often forcing your whole team to help you sort of do this thing out of turn. It was scheduled for a place. Yeah, it's either do it now or not at all.

SPEAKER_00 9:46

But that is a really common ADHD feeling.

SPEAKER_01 9:48

So I think to sort of summarize that idea, the thing that makes something feel urgent for the ADHD brain is not the deadline, it's the fear of losing that task. Yeah, losing something important. And if you can give it a home, it'll stop feeling urgent in that way. So the fix is to find somewhere to park things that's trustworthy that you know you're gonna get it back at the right time.

SPEAKER_00 10:08

This kind of comes back to our conversation about really perfect systems versus usable systems, because often people are striving for this really perfect project management tool or system. But what the problem is, is it's really hard to park things quickly in that system. And that that's one of the things that means that you could spend $20,000 on a perfect system being installed and still never use it.

SPEAKER_01 10:34

One of the suggestions is a task inbox that you actually process regularly. I kind of raise my eye at that because I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 10:42

That just sounds like just try harder right there.

SPEAKER_01 10:45

That doesn't really sound like a practical ADHD solution. That's I don't know if I've ever had a task inbox that I actually processed regularly. I do.

SPEAKER_00 10:53

It's called the prioritization filter, and you can DM me prioritize on Instagram at unconventional organization if you want a copy.

SPEAKER_01 10:59

I think a better suggestion is an EA or team member uh who acts as your external working memory. So they're capturing, sorting, surfacing things back to you at the right time. But a big part of that is trust. If you trust the system, the urgency feeling is gonna go away. I think the reverse of that is probably if you are the EA or team around an ADHD founder, that urgency is still a problem. Then it might be worth looking at why that sense of trust isn't gonna lose things, isn't there?

SPEAKER_00 11:25

Let's say you've got a founder, right? And they are giving you tasks, but then they're still stressed and they're still micromanaging those tasks. There's a couple of issues here. One, you might forget the task more than you realize. It's really, really hard to be somebody who goes, cool, got it, and then never ever forget it, no matter what. The other one is you might not be helping them break the task down into pieces so they still feel like it's this amorphous blob they have to keep sort of digging away at or avoiding, or both. Or you could end up in a position where even if you are breaking it down, and even if you do remember it, it's not put in a place where they can find again. So they might forget. This is genuinely something that I've done, that they told you to do it, and they might forget that you broke it down.

SPEAKER_01 12:14

I think to be fair as well, it's potentially will take time. I'm sure there's plenty of founders with trust issues for one thing. Um, but it also might take time for that trust to build. It can be a reflection on the EA, the team that's supporting the founder, or the systems that are in place. So it's probably good to have a look at those three places and figure out is, I think, like you said, everyone on the right seat on the bus. It might just be that there needs to be better, like the team or the EA or both need to have better systems in place. The core thing is there are no balls getting dropped. That trust that was put in them to resurface this at the right time so that I don't have to treat it like it's a hop, like it's urgent right now.

SPEAKER_00 12:54

It's the resurfacing at the right time that's really important because sometimes I think what can happen if you're working with a team is the team might have dropped the ball or they might fully have the ball. It's locked in, it's going, but the the founder forgets that they've got the ball and where at that point it is, and they don't have easy access to that database because they asked not to have access to that database. And so now they're renegotiating the plan because they don't have the plan.

SPEAKER_01 13:26

Yeah, it might actually just be insufficient pushback. So sometimes the team of the EA has to push back on the founder and actually say, No, look, this is when this is we've got this in the plan. It's happening on this date. This is the day set aside, you can see it in your calendar. You don't need to worry about this right now. Focus on what you've got for today.

SPEAKER_00 13:42

Insufficient pushback, but I would also argue it's insufficient clarity. Like, so it it's worth, and again, we kind of come to that dashboard idea. It's worth having a space where the founder can see what's happening, even if all the complexity is hidden, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 14:00

Yeah, you don't want to expose all the complexity though.

SPEAKER_00 14:03

Yeah, well, it's a tricky one. So it kind of comes back to our concept. You want to externalized, but you Yeah, you want to have it externalized, but you still want them to be able to find it. Because let's just say this I am a founder. Sometimes at 11 o'clock at night, I will be like, I wonder what that thing is and how it's going to make sense. Because I've forgotten, because I I gave it to somebody else. I want to be able to find it and go look at it and re-integrate it into my brain when I'm coming up with a new idea.

SPEAKER_01 14:30

I think what would be better at that point, though, is send a voice message to an EA you trust and have them either confirm for you that it's happening, that it's already scheduled, that's already taken care of. Because it might have been, it might have been a thought that you like if you didn't give it to your EA in the first place and you wake up at 12 at at midnight or whatever, and you have this cold feeling of like, did I wait, is this is this a this is a thing I've dropped and it's gonna go missing and egg on my face? You want to be able to double check that. But I don't think you going into the complex system and trying to uncover and understand the complexity of it is the move.

SPEAKER_00 15:02

Well, I don't know. This is why I like the um visibility pipeline that we have, the business pipeline, because you can quite quickly go in and say, because uh for as a founder, you're coming in and you're going, Well, I want to update the sales section, or I want to update the lead flow or how we acquire customers, and so I can go into there and see what we're doing. Yeah, um, because I I don't want to mess with the team's systems too much. Otherwise, it's like we're working off completely different pages, and I don't know what complexity is involved in their plans because I wasn't part of it.

SPEAKER_01 15:39

The SOP systems and processes chart. I mean, I agree that that should be very clear and easy to understand and exposed. And then if you have a thought about changing it, that's a great place to go and look and go, like, oh, actually, this should look like this instead. But I don't think that is the same scenario as we're not talking about editing our overall systems and processes. That's sort of more of a concrete We're not talking about that.

SPEAKER_00 16:02

I'm the CEO. I'm always talking about that.

SPEAKER_01 16:05

Okay, but we're talking about losing important pieces of that thing. But it's it's a temporary project. It's like this sponsorship thing needs to be done right, and it needs to it needs to be done right first time, and we can't drop any of the pieces. If it's the first time, there's probably some changes to your SOP that need to be put in there. But mostly what we're talking about is that trust that if you hand something off, it's going to come back to you at the right time so that you don't have to treat it like it's this very urgent thing that needs to be done now and which disrupts everything's everything else.

SPEAKER_00 16:33

And I think, okay, so if we are just kind of focusing on that, I do think it's important to have some really clear, you know, if you're if you're building an external functioning system, it needs to the the things that you've broken down with an assistant, for example, need to resurface earlier than when they're needed. You need to do it a little bit earlier than you think.

SPEAKER_01 16:59

I would say the I would say the EA needs to be able to throw back to the founder. When the founder tries to increase that task's urgency again, he's probably forgotten what he did with it. They've probably forgotten what they did with it. They've got they've got the sense of urgency, right? They've got the sense of like, shoot, we can't drop that one. And if you can say back to them, no, no, no, it's scheduled, I've got a reminder on my phone. I've got if you can assure them no, because it's gonna go here, and and so yeah, maybe maybe resurfacing it again the following week, just a reminder, these things are all being taken care of, they're happening on these dates. Yeah, maybe reiterating it is a good approach.

SPEAKER_00 17:31

I think that's quite good. Like, assume that your founder, if especially if they have ADHD, has forgotten. So resurfacing it not just because it's due now, but also just a little like so. Just a reminder, this is the layer of the land for the following week. Just so that they know, because if you don't do that, the following week looks pretty empty, and we might do some stuff with that. We might make some things urgent now.

SPEAKER_01 17:57

Might be one of those things where here's the tasks I need you to focus on this week. Here are the tasks that I know are important, they're gonna be happening on following weeks. You don't have to like you don't have to think about those right now, kind of thing.

SPEAKER_00 18:08

Well, that's one of the reasons why when we do the seven-week challenge, we are giving you something to do every week.

SPEAKER_01 18:16

Yeah, you're breaking down the tasks at the start and then you're assigning them where they actually make sense. And so you guys resurface for the members what their tasks are for each week. So those tasks are getting getting resurfaced in week four or week five, and that way they're not they don't have to be the most urgent thing you're doing in week two.

SPEAKER_00 18:33

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So once you have that sense, you can say, okay, what I'm doing in week seven isn't important because we're in week two right now.

SPEAKER_01 18:42

And it's got that place, it's living over there. I can see it over there.

SPEAKER_00 18:45

I don't have to exactly it's got a home. Yeah. So the next thing we want to talk about then is okay, how do we actually build the external executive functioning system? If we have these, you know, we have the system, like, okay, we have the seven-week challenge that we run in the program, but what do you do if you don't have that? If you're just an you know an entrepreneur in the wild, basically, who's coming to this for the first time? And there are three three things you need. You need tools, you need support if you can, and you need to consider having kind of a project manager if that's an option for you, if it's a bigger task. So the tools are pretty simple. I don't want to go into it too much because I feel like we covered tools quite a lot in the last couple of episodes about what makes a good tool, about object recognition, memory.

SPEAKER_01 19:35

The main point is that the tool matters less than the habit of actually externalizing things.

SPEAKER_00 19:39

Exactly, which is exactly why the most important thing is that you'll use it. And so that's probably why this tool is a lot simpler than you think it is.

SPEAKER_01 19:47

It's also one of those things, rather than so project management software, click up notion, etc. Stop thinking that the system is the issue. The issue is probably more again that you're currently assigning yourself the role of being the project manager and the the manager of that system, and probably that's the thing you need to fix.

SPEAKER_00 20:05

Yeah, 100%. But the next thing you want, if you can, is having some kind of support, like an EA. But it has to be an EA who understands and you understand what their role is, because it's not necessarily going to be your classic neurotypical EA. Like we're not writing emails to this person with a list of tasks.

SPEAKER_01 20:26

Yeah. The ADHD founder needs from the AEA. Proactive capture. So they're surfacing things to you, not the other way around. They can translate your brain dump into a task list.

SPEAKER_00 20:36

Yeah, and it might be an audio brain dump for a lot of you, it will be.

SPEAKER_01 20:39

And actually, just to switch back to tools for a moment, that's one of the main things is a single capture point. So voice memo, brain dump, tasks as they appear, and then they're processed into the system at the end of the day by someone else.

SPEAKER_00 20:50

And the reason for this is the working memory thing. So if you don't feel like you can immediately brain dump all of your tasks somewhere and ideally give it to an EA or somebody who can then handle it for you in terms of where to put it and how to resurface it, you're gonna get quite overwhelmed with the amount of small tasks you have to do.

SPEAKER_01 21:11

They need to act as a reliable external working memory for you. So they're gonna manage the complexity and you can just receive the next action.

SPEAKER_00 21:18

The coolest version of this was Taki talking about his system that's the ticket system from the restaurants, where if he gets a task from his team, it gets printed as a ticket, he puts it on the docket, and then once it's done, he like stabs it. So it's done.

SPEAKER_01 21:35

That's very cool. And I think you were saying he had a QR code. So like it took a little while to set the system up.

SPEAKER_00 21:40

Yeah, yeah. I'm so jealous of this system.

SPEAKER_01 21:42

It has a QR code on it as well, so that he can just scan that and get the documents that are relevant.

SPEAKER_00 21:46

Yeah, yeah. He has one in yeah, where where he the two places that he lives. So that that was super cool and a really good example of having a system that allows you to just be in task mode. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:00

One of the notes here is that like this isn't this isn't sort of what the standard EA does necessarily. Sort of a little bit more ADHD founder specific. It's really having someone be your second brain.

SPEAKER_00 22:11

Yeah. There's a lot of, you know, there's a conversation that comes up in the space, which is called managing up. And so you could consider working with an EA founder as like a very extreme level of managing up because you're holding on to a lot of the executive functioning stuff that they're doing. And there's always a conversation about that because I think we assume that when somebody is very successful, then they have a lot of people who help them manage everything. Because how could they possibly remember like what to wear and what's who who this person is and all that kind of stuff? You see it in movies. It actually is useful to an extent even when you're a smaller business owner. And a lot of times people feel a bit awkward about that because they're like, Oh, I only saw this in movies when someone was like the president, but it's it's useful here, and and this is why.

SPEAKER_01 23:04

Yeah, I think a useful starting point is even just five to ten hours with a VA, yeah, like a virtual assistant, that is, um, can still make a significant difference.

SPEAKER_00 23:12

Oh my god, like Robin, when we started with this business, I hired Robin, who's still here. Shout out to Robin, amazing. And it was only five hours a week. It was like just me, her, a dream, and an email inbox. That was kind of it. And she is amazing. She built everything out. So, what about the project manager? Because that's the EA.

SPEAKER_01 23:36

Yeah, well, this is sort of saying as the business, as the business grows, the EA's job becomes ensuring that the founder is never holding the project.

SPEAKER_00 23:43

Yeah, yeah. And that's where you get those COO positions, those bigger ops positions by somebody who is very good at holding all of the pieces of the project.

SPEAKER_01 23:56

And that's what Tucky's built. I believe that's what you guys were talking about in this week's episode.

SPEAKER_00 24:01

Yeah, yeah, 100%. I mean, we were talking about Tony, who is incredibly helpful and and really uh like a co-visionary in terms of building out the systems. And I think, yeah, I think you can tell when someone has a good COO project manager position because they cannot stop talking about them. Because they are incredibly, incredibly valuable because they are the people who on some level, and it's a great, it's a great position. Like whoever, you know, shout out to those people who do it. You know, you are somebody who has decided that you have the capacity to run an entire business, but you're gonna do it for somebody else. It's often to do with vision. You want to attach yourself to someone who has a big vision.

SPEAKER_01 24:45

You're not wrong. Like, we've made that comment before with like the chief sort of the general manager or the COO. Is that like they've got all the stress of running the business almost? They've built this, you know, them and the founder have built this structure where almost the founder's turning up as the talent. All the projects are getting broken down and the just task lists are being handed to the founder on like a daily or weekly basis.

SPEAKER_00 25:04

I'm not an operator, right? I'm a I'm a founder. So I'm I'm looking at what they do and I'm going, oh my God, it's so amazing. And what I do is, you know, you know, we always assume what we do is easy, but you know, I imagine that there's probably a level of complexity to being a maker that is not easy to replicate, especially if they have a big vision. Do you want to talk about the graveyard of half-finished projects, Robbie? I feel like that one is quite close to your heart.

SPEAKER_01 25:27

Optimistic start, unplanned dependencies appear, pauses happen, context evaporates, project becomes a source of shame.

SPEAKER_00 25:36

This is what life is like when you don't have the systems, when you don't have the EA or the or the project. I would say it's mostly when you don't have somebody who's somebody or something that's helping you stay ticking along, ticking off tasks that are connected to bigger projects.

SPEAKER_01 25:52

Yeah, a big part of this is being able to hand off and delegate the parts of it that aren't just for you to be doing, and then and letting someone else manage the overall project. A lot of the timing and stuff, a lot of time is going into sort of trying to put things in the correct place with Observice Later, make sure they're in with all of the other like tasks.

SPEAKER_00 26:13

Exactly. And that is a real skill, I will say. It's something that you know we'll definitely talk about in a in a future episode because delegation is not it's not as easy as it sounds. You know, it's it's it's a thing that you have to learn, it has its own systems, and and so one of the things that people struggle with with the scaling is they're like, I don't know how to hire and get somebody in the right seat. And even if I did, I don't know how to delegate to them and da da da. So we'll definitely talk about that as well. Because these half-finished projects, they're not a lack of ambition, they're not a character flaw. And I know we say this all the time, but it's so it's worth reminding ourselves. Yeah. And everyone else. They, you know, they're working memory loss a lot of time, realizing, you know, that you no longer have the the stimulation, the dopamine energy for this. You it was a little bit too confusing. It was like that essay you talked about in the last episode, you know, you're doing it kind of backwards and and labeling it at the end, and it doesn't not everything works out like that. And so you end up with those half-finished projects.

SPEAKER_01 27:16

You needed the structure before the momentum.

SPEAKER_00 27:19

Exactly. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 27:20

If you do have those half-finished projects that you need to recover, it's not just a matter of picking them back up and trying to white knuckle it again to the finish line. Yeah, it's about coming in and doing the planning and the structure that wasn't there in the first place. Yeah. Um, and possibly also, you know, getting an EA or someone to help you involved.

SPEAKER_00 27:40

Sometimes when people have those half-finished projects, they come to me quite stressed out because they're like, I can't do anything because I haven't done my half-finished projects. And a lot of times I'm like, do the thing, especially in business, that gives you cash flow, that gives you access to more support from other people, and then those other people can help you finish those projects. And that's often what happens. So it's kind of like that um that tower task. You know, sometimes you look like you're going backwards when you're actually going forwards because you have that strategic planning of saying, okay, let me do the high cash flow task first and leave this on the back burner because I will come back to it.

SPEAKER_01 28:19

That's true. Some of those things feel really important, like they are important, but it's also if you can handle those high return tasks first, you are gonna potentially be able to afford the help that you need to actually tackle. Uh it's one of those things you're never gonna get. I think there's this feeling, you're never gonna get ahead. There's this feeling of like one day I'm gonna have time to like do all these things. And I think the answer is like, no, you need more resources, you need more assistance to help accomplish those things. Stop trying to do all of that sort of admin stuff and just trust that it's in there and it's it like it's in your project management software, but you're not, or it's I don't know, it's written down somewhere that you won't forget it, but it's written down somewhere where you're gonna hand it off to someone else to do because you're never gonna have the time to do that.

SPEAKER_00 29:01

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And when you can do that and you can actually start working on the thing that will give you momentum for everything else, that's often the real shift. Practical takeaways from this week. Yes, we're gonna give you stuff to do. You don't have to do it. Identify a thing on your task list that is secretly a project. What is in your task list that you have been putting off because it has hidden complexity? You know, what like think about breaking that down.

SPEAKER_01 29:28

Find something yeah, convert that task into break this task down and then break it down and then mark it as complete and don't do the rest of it.

SPEAKER_00 29:35

And then give yourself a reward. And then, you know, if you want to do the rest of it, you can reward yourself first. Reward yourself first. Haha, yes. Even I get that one. Forget it sometimes. And then find one thing you've been treating as urgent because you're afraid to lose it. Like, what is the thing that you've kept in your urgent pile, even though it's not urgent? Because you're like, what if I forget? Like, put that in a trusted home, give it to somebody.

SPEAKER_01 29:58

The next part of that though is like, what is a trusted home?

SPEAKER_00 30:00

Because I don't sometimes we give it to each other, and then the other person's like, Don't give it to me. Don't give it to me. One of us is like, hey, can you just remind me? And we're like, Nope.

SPEAKER_01 30:12

It's tricky, right? Because for me at the moment, my trusted home is my to-do list, but I can feel it growing.

SPEAKER_00 30:17

Tell us how your task lists feel right now. Are they looming? Are they hidden? Are they lost?

SPEAKER_01 30:25

I can feel that like it's time for a new project management system. Like, it's not here yet, but like you can sort of see the early signs of it after you've switched six times. And then if you don't have an EA or a system that does planning and context storage for you, then yeah, start small, even just a shared document where someone else manages the task list as a starting point. Probably not a new project system.

SPEAKER_00 30:45

No, never. Never a new project system. 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.