The 4 Types of ADHD Founders (Which One Are You?)

Click the link below to see which founder type you are!

https://www.unconventionalorganisation.com/adhd-founder-types


You keep solving the same business problems, but they keep coming back in different forms.

After reviewing more than a dozen research episodes on ADHD founder struggles, four recurring founder patterns emerged: the Last Minute Hero, the Overwhelmed Architect, the Vision Caster, and the Pivot Chaser.

These aren't random quirks. They're recurring ways ADHD can show up as a business grows. More importantly, all four point back to the same underlying challenge: there isn't an operations layer between the founder and the day-to-day business.

In this episode, Skye and Robbie break down each founder type, why it happens, how it affects your team, and the practical operational changes that can reduce the friction.

What We Cover

• Why the Last Minute Hero trains their team to expect emergencies
• What overwhelms the Overwhelmed Architect
• Why the Vision Caster struggles to turn ideas into execution through other people
• What drives the Pivot Chaser to keep changing direction
• The operational gap connecting all four founder types
• Which founder type you relate to most and what to do next

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_00 0:00

The minute I'm consuming things that I need to do next week and the week after and next month, all of a sudden you've just got like got this feeling of you're holding the entire year's worth of to-do list in your head at once.

SPEAKER_01 0:08

If you're in a position where you don't have a project manager, what you want to do is you want to separate being your own project manager from doing the task. We want you to actually sit down, and this is what I did. I went to the coffee shop, I sat down, I made a plan, and then that was the task I did. And I ticked it off and I felt good about it because I can't be the project manager and task completer at the same time because otherwise you're in overwhelm architect zone. Hello and welcome to today's episode of the ADHD Skills Lab. I'm here with my co-founder and hubby Robert Waterson, and we're gonna talk about something that we've been building to for many, many weeks now, but he hasn't doesn't know it yet. So I'm excited to share it with him and you guys at the same time. Before we get started, if you are the business owner who is growing, your operations and delivery are growing, and you're starting to feel pretty overwhelmed, like you're not getting enough time, you're struggling with consistency, and you'd really like somebody else to get it all out of your head and project manage it for you. That's what we do. We are fractional operators for your business designed for ADHD symptoms. We take it out of your head, we set it all up for you, and you just kind of watch. It's pretty, pretty fun. Click the links down below, and if you're interested, you can book a call with me. So we're gonna talk about four different types of founder, four different struggles that ADHD founders can have. And first, I want to talk about how we got here. So, this is based on the founder struggles episodes that we've been doing. So, over the last three months, we've done approximately 13 episodes that are based on different pieces of research about different struggles that ADHD founders have. And you'll see we touch on a little bit of the struggles that we discussed in today's session. But what we've done is we've taken all of that and we've sort of put it all together, had a look at it, and come to a culmination of four different founder types that really encapsulate these main struggles so that it's easy for everyone to understand and get a sense of and kind of get a get a little bit of a hook into what kind of founder they are. You can be all of them. I've noticed, you know, I've been doing this before I came to this podcast. I've talked to people in my community, I've taught there, I've taught in a couple of other places, and it's interesting, people tend to resonate more with one of these types, depending on I think the struggles they have and also the environmental issues going on at the time. So, number one is the last minute hero. This is the person who jumps when something is on fire, who is often seen doing a month's worth of work in 48 hours, and for whom their team becomes very inerd to this idea of there's no point in doing it now because it's all gonna get done at the last minute. So this is the team that gets pushed to work weekends, evenings, and is sort of left wondering why is this an emergency situation? There was no need for it to be an emergency situation, but that's the last minute hero, the time blindness hero who kind of comes in and is like, I have the dopamine now, the person who used to do that maybe in school and it's now developed into a founder type.

SPEAKER_00 3:29

Yeah, and obviously it goes without saying this is ADHD founder types.

SPEAKER_01 3:32

Yeah, these are all ADHD founders. Okay, so that's the first one, the last minute hero. The second one is the overwhelmed architect. This is the one who really struggles. So this is the person who is drowning in the details. They want to do something, they're a founder, they have a plan, but as soon as it gets to three steps and four steps and five steps and a substep, they just get fully lost. Kind of like me on Monday. You know, I was trying to figure things out, my list was a little bit disorganized, and then you know, you get really overwhelmed. So everything suddenly feels super important, there's things missing, they don't know what's missing, and that's kind of your overwhelmed architect type, and they tend to be get really overwhelmed. Then you have your vision caster. So this is the person, the founder, who knows what they want, they have the vision, they can share the vision, but they cannot bring the vision to life through other people. This is the founder who is probably the most likely to go, I'm going to ignore people and start trying to do it myself with AI. Because they they just can't seem to get everybody on the same page enough to see their vision through. And this is all based on the conversations we've had. So as you're as I'm talking, you're probably starting to like maybe think, oh, this is connected to this episode or or something like that.

SPEAKER_00 4:58

I definitely remember the episodes regarding that sort of timeline, this last minute team getting more and more sort of what's the point in prepping? Let's just sort of work on this instead, because that's probably going to change later.

SPEAKER_01 5:11

Exactly. And then the last one is the pivot chaser. Now you know this one because this is the one we talked about the most because we ended up doing a whole episode on defending the pivot chaser as a type. So this is the one that tends to start something and then start something else, and then start something else, and so both them and their team can get whiplash from all of the new things they're starting, and they can get they can get into a space of just shifting and shifting and shifting too much. Now, as we know, there's there's arguments against, you know, is it too much? Is it just enough? It can be both for sure.

SPEAKER_00 5:48

And last minute hero, pivot chaser, vision caster. Sorry, those two though in particular, potential concept overlap. But I think not no, the last minute hero is sort of whatever's I think we discussed, it doesn't feel urgent until it's up on the deadline, and then we're all hands on deck putting it out or getting it done, versus I think the business should go in this new direction, and you're you're sort of constantly scrapping three months of going in one direction, and now you're off after this new client avatar or whatever.

SPEAKER_01 6:20

Exactly, exactly. Which one do you think you are most like if you were to think of one of them that you resonate with the most?

SPEAKER_00 6:27

I think probably pivot and pivot chaser and overwhelmed architect, I think would be the two.

SPEAKER_01 6:33

Really? Is that the ones that you think Okay, Visioncaster?

SPEAKER_00 6:37

I don't like I'm not great at delegating, but I think that's mostly because delegating is really hard. Like delegating's hard. Healthy respect for how hard it is to delegate a job and how many times it comes back to you before you eventually like get the sort of standard operating procedure locked in, all the things that you didn't think to mention at the start. You sort of have to get it back and be like, oh yeah, I guess I didn't explain this part of that. But I understand the desire to get AI to do certain things.

SPEAKER_01 7:01

I Are you talking about the Vision Caster?

SPEAKER_00 7:03

Yes. How you've described it is trouble delegating, a little bit prone to maybe thinking they can delegate to I AI easier.

SPEAKER_01 7:11

I would say the vision caster is about I think it's that idea of wanting to pull something off and struggling to have that vision executed. It's specifically with through other people, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:27

Yeah, feeling like you can never quite communicate and so it's always coming back wrong. Yeah. I feel like you're gonna have the exact same problems with AI. I feel like I feel like AI is, I mean, once you get it dialed in, maybe it's a little bit less likely to sort of go off for human random reasons, but it's still tough. It still misses the mark.

SPEAKER_01 7:48

But you can see why maybe people might want to try it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:52

And and I think for certain things it does make sense. You know, I am still thinking that sorting emails on a daily basis or a weekly basis will be possible and easier via that method.

SPEAKER_01 8:02

But I think it's really interesting that you said pivot chaser and overwhelmed architect, because I also felt like pivot chaser and overwhelmed architect was my more pivot chaser than overwhelmed architect, where I feel like maybe you're more overwhelmed architect and less pivot chaser than me.

SPEAKER_00 8:18

Yeah, I feel like if I think about my two failure modes, starting a thousand different projects and not really being able to choose which one I should lock in on, or getting bored of them and wanting a new one, is sort of pivot chaser. That's definitely a failure mode failure mode for me. And then overwhelmed architect is kind of the I need a new project management space, I need a new project management tool because this one's broken now. Like I I overfill probably feeding back between the two. I've I've overfilled this one with things that I want to do later or that I I've created a mess with a little bit of magical thinking, or can get done today or this week. Yeah, you know, the classic sort of one. This is my really, really urgent like space.

SPEAKER_01 9:00

Yeah, yeah. I need to have really on fire and on fire burning up.

SPEAKER_00 9:04

Yeah, but um we're looking at the Tucky's elites. It wasn't a traffic light system, it was a heat elite heat, I think he called it, extending the traffic light through to like white hot, blue hot. Um, it feels like that sometimes with ADHD. We're like, I need even hotter now to like make up for the fact that I've filled red hot.

SPEAKER_01 9:24

Yeah, yeah. I feel like I'm or the pivot chaser, I'm only the overwhelmed architect when yeah, something breaks, which happens less.

SPEAKER_00 9:34

I mean, yeah, I wasn't expecting to be stuck in UTC time on the system that we switched to. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:41

Other than that, I feel like I've through years of systemization and building an entire business around it, have reduced the amount of time I feel like the overwhelmed architect, and I spend more time feeling like the pivot chaser. Yeah. Okay, do you wanna go through these different I want to go through the different types and their solutions basically, which is what we've touched on already in more depth in episodes. And also if you want the document on the pivot chaser and all of these different things, we are gonna be providing a document as well.

SPEAKER_00 10:12

This is very much a model in the spirit of kind of the disc system, disc types, it's a model in the m in the spirit of models, like personality types, any types, yeah. Yeah, I would say the it reminds me of the disc disc system in that there's four quadrants, and then when there's overlaps, you kind of go like I'm mostly blue, but I'm green too, or whatever.

SPEAKER_01 10:32

Yeah, but I feel like everyone does that. I'm mostly an ENTP, but I'm a little bit of this, or I'm an eight-wing seven, or uh, you know, everything has that. So pivot chaser. So this is the idea we talked about it. Like you have a graveyard of half-built launches, you've you love to build, you love to try things, but the consistency and the execution isn't there. If you are a pivot chaser, this is the kind of person who really benefits from having an operational build-out in their business that isn't reliant on them for consistency because they won't be consistent. They will be creative and they'll want to do lots of different things. And there's a couple of reasons for this. You know, when you look at the research, you know, we can really be novelty seekers to a point where boredom can feel physically uncomfortable. There's also some research to indicate that we are better at like foraging and going to new places than people who don't have ADHD, so it can also be a strength and it can be a competitive competitive edge, but then it can also drag the team down a really exhausting directional shift all the time. So it's really about reign giving it parameters, not removing it entirely from your vocabulary. In terms of what we can do when it comes to the pivot chaser, we've talked about this, so I'm just reviewing it uh for you as well. It was about creating a pre-mortem. So if this new idea goes wrong, what happened? Why did it go wrong? Saved me from many a bad shift, so it's a really good one. Also, having a trigger, you can't just change the business plan because you have an idea, you have to have a reason, you have to have data to back that up. There has to be certain parameters.

SPEAKER_00 12:17

Someone with permission to give you pushback.

SPEAKER_01 12:19

Yep, someone with permission to give you pushback. And also, if you are gonna make a change, you need to iterate it instead of pivot it. So not necessarily going ahead and just saying, yes, we're going to make a full business shift, but maybe saying, like, well, why don't we sell this to one or two people as a short-term thing, as a test run, see if it works, see if there's interest. Like, if you're gonna make a change, try and make it as small as humanly possible to test the theory. Yeah. Exactly, exactly. Then we have the vision caster, which is the one we talked about. So the vision caster is, you know, in terms of the research, it's really about working memory struggles a lot here and verbal ability to communicate all of the details. The vision caster is the person who says, guys, we're gonna do this, it's gonna be amazing. I'm thinking 300 people, let's go to, you know, Minnesota and Book of Thing and da-da-da. And they're giving you like high-level details very enthusiastically and getting you excited. But in reality, what it actually looks like is not what they had in their head because there's very important strategic pieces missing.

SPEAKER_00 13:35

Yeah, kind of that classic delegation where you there's a bunch of assumptions baked in that you haven't thought to communicate that you don't realize LLM to be on a completely different page.

SPEAKER_01 13:47

I remember hearing about this idea that people with ADHD like to go ABCFG, and that was interesting to me because I definitely got a lot of pushback in academia from not explaining it all the way through. There was a lot of times when I was writing where they would be like, Whoa, back that up. You said this plus this equals this, but you didn't explain all of these other pieces, and you need to explain that. Trying to explain that was hell. So I really relate to this in that environment. And I think it's worth saying, you may relate more to one of these struggles because of the environment you're in. ADHD is a very environmental struggle, so it's not necessarily I am a this or I am a that, it's more the environment that I'm in right now means that my ADHD shows up in this way more often.

SPEAKER_00 14:37

Yeah, I think one of the things that surprised me about research and academia was how slow you're supposed to move, how slow and methodical.

unknown 14:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:45

Much more methodical than you realize when you start. You're like, oh my god, I have so many great ideas. This is gonna be amazing.

SPEAKER_00 14:52

Any founders who um want to share their struggles, any CEOs of ADHD founders who want to share their suffering, we can take that and mine it for new sort of for new ADHD struggles to then go look for research to match with and come up with recommendations.

SPEAKER_01 15:10

The biggest problem with the Vision Caster is that everything gets done twice because they come up with an idea, then their team goes and does it, and then they don't like it, so they try and explain it, and then their team has to do it again. This gets frustrating, and it means that the team feels a little bit like nothing they ever do is enough or is correct, and that leads to a lot of it leads to a lack of motivation or a feeling like you're being micromanaged, and then on the other side, the founder feels like they have to micromanage them because they never do it properly. And so this is one of those I would say more than anything, the Vision Caster is the type where if you struggle with this, you and your team are not gonna get along because it's one thing to understand. Yeah, yeah, if someone's doing something at the last minute, you can kind of all be like, Oh, well, I don't want this, but I guess this is how we live life.

SPEAKER_00 16:00

People will accept working in sprints, but they're not gonna accept weeks of work being rejected regularly.

SPEAKER_01 16:08

Yes, especially when they really tried to pay attention to the brief. But the good thing is there's actually a very simple solution to this problem. And we talked about this before. But this is the idea that you give somebody a top-level outline, and then before they start doing any real work, they go ahead and create a rough draft of whatever it is: a prototype, a mock-up, a mood board, whatever it is that you're looking for, and then they give it to the founder with the expectation that the founder is going to critique and add to this. So it has the purpose of surfacing all of the extra missing pieces that didn't get discussed in the original high-level brief because of working memory struggles. And so the point of it is to be like, oh, well, actually, if we have a conference, we need to think about parking and we need to think about bathrooms, and we need to think about XYZ, and so all of these extra things that may not have come out in the first conversation get surfaced in the second conversation, and then you have enough to go on and actually fulfill the brief from the founder.

SPEAKER_00 17:16

Yeah, from memory, we talked about basically trying to mine the founder for the missing brief.

SPEAKER_01 17:23

Yes, but don't don't don't send a QA like question answer.

SPEAKER_00 17:27

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was yeah, that was one of the recommendations. This was all around sort of ADHD brief gap. Like they had trouble seeing all the substeps involved. So handing out sort of projects, ignoring a lot of the cleanup, a lot of the setup, and a lot of the bits in between. And then when those bits got filled in in a way that they weren't happy with, there was this dissonance between what they were trying to produce.

SPEAKER_01 17:50

Yeah, this is the idea of you need to create a rough draft, basically.

SPEAKER_00 17:55

Yeah, the solution was giving them something concrete to react to because that reaction allowed them to see all the bits that they hadn't explained yet. And so yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:05

I would say the vision caster is one of those, one of them that when done properly has one of the easiest solutions to the problem, the most concrete solution.

SPEAKER_00 18:14

Yeah, you kind of need a team who's gonna design three different options, show them to you, and then know that that's when they're gonna get the additional information they need. But yeah, I think one of the big recommendations was give them something, prototype the minimum required to have another meeting and get more of their vision out of their head.

SPEAKER_01 18:33

Yeah, this is you know, again, minimum viable comes up in this one as well. So the third one is the one that you said was that you resonated with, which was the overwhelmed architect. So this really comes down to executive functioning in general. So working memory as well, but also time blindness, essentially the idea that we do not have the capacity to hold a lot of information in our brains. We get overwhelmed with these sort of short-term steps, and so we can get overwhelmed, we can get avoidant, and if we don't have a good system, and a lot of people don't, I work with a ton of people who keep things in pieces of paper lying everywhere, or tasks that get ignored, things like that, or just in their head, it means that as soon as something becomes a project, it gets lost for this person, and that leads to a lot of reactivity, a lot of overwhelm, a lot of remembering that you've forgotten something but not remembering what it was.

SPEAKER_00 19:31

This was due to that now versus not now, sort of time blindness, but also It's kind of everything like working memory and time blindness. Yeah, working memory, time blindness, and I think it was sort of the salience of now being feeling much more real than things that are sort of, oh yeah, that's next week.

SPEAKER_01 19:49

That's kind of, yeah, but I but I think of this more, I think of that more as the last minute hero. This is more about the executive functioning than the impulsivity. This is the the overwhelmed architect is really somebody who says, right, today I have to get a new rug, I've got to update my software, I've got to do work, and very quickly just gets overwhelmed and goes, you know what, maybe I'll just check my emails again and press respond to one of them. I can't I can't figure out what to do first and what to do next. I guess that's where you're talking about the time blindness. Yeah, so this is the Tucky type. Remember, Tucky said if something is more than three steps, it's just too much. And so he likes his team to print out. He just wants to know what he's doing today. Yeah, what am I doing today?

SPEAKER_00 20:41

I relate to that, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:43

So the overwhelmed architect is the type who's brilliant.

SPEAKER_00 20:46

Yeah, if I have to read my whole to-do list, I'm gonna just shut it down and go to something else.

SPEAKER_01 20:53

When I see this kind of founder in our business, this is the kind of founder where having somebody, and in this case it's us, to project manage their systems and their system development is really helpful because they just want to be told, hey, can you do this? Can you do that? They don't want to have the project management system on their shoulders because it's just it's too much. It's often it's like a very creative person, I think, will struggle with this because they want to be doing the thing that that they are good at, that you know, that they can hyper focus on, and when you hand them a project, there's a sense of like what how many pieces? Oh, I don't know. And this is the type as well that can put things off for a very, very long time. So an overwhelmed architect is the kind of uh founder who can not have paid their taxes, for example.

SPEAKER_00 21:47

Yeah, I wonder why it is so overwhelming to like what's going on there because it's I know the feeling the minute I'm consuming things that I need to do next week and the week after and next month, and the minute I'm now thinking about like, oh yeah, and I really have to get back to like security or IT or this other issue. All of a sudden you've just got like, yeah, you've just got this feeling of you're holding the entire year's worth of to-do list in your head at once, and it it is just sort of overwhelming to the point where you're the point where you you lose track of what you're supposed to be doing next.

SPEAKER_01 22:18

Yeah. Well, that's like on Monday, remember? And I was like, I have to go out, I have to go to a coffee shop, I have to like think about this because I feel super overwhelmed with all the different steps that were involved.

SPEAKER_00 22:30

I mean that kind of makes sense. Yeah. I suppose that's one of those things when you you know you have to do something, but you want to think it through and talk it through, chunk it out, and then kind of be like, right, so like the the most important thing for us to do next is this. The minimum thing we can do that's gonna get a concrete improvement is gonna be this piece over here. This is where we should start. That stuff we can think about later. Whereas when you're trying to hold the whole thing at once, you sort of don't know where to start biting.

SPEAKER_01 22:54

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's like this idea of you know, working memory, we just don't have that much capacity to understand things and to hold it in our head and to manipulate it in our head, which is why the Eisenhower matrix for an ADHD person, if you look at like what's urgent versus important versus unimportant versus this, and we just all go, it's urgent. Because the idea of doing that, it's like it's too many things, like we're gonna lose pieces. And so this type more than any other type needs a system. If somebody comes to me and they feel like the overwhelmed architect, this is the type that needs a system built that can feed them this is your task for today. Just do this, just do this piece. If you can do that, then you're you've got a good situation. But one of the things that can happen with an ADHD founder is that they are usually really good in their zone of genius, but outside of that, they become the overwhelmed architect. And so they need the systems in the extra stuff that isn't just doing the job to be able to keep doing the job and do it successfully.

SPEAKER_00 24:01

It's the type that would most likely benefit from a good project manager who's just gonna hand them here's your three most urgent things. Actually, here's what's on fire today, even though you would think it's only due three weeks from now, it needs to be done because it's a deadline, because there's all of this runway that's required.

SPEAKER_01 24:19

Yes, exactly, exactly. Although I would say the next one we're gonna talk about also benefits from that a lot. You want somebody else to be able to see the whole thing. I think this is the difference.

SPEAKER_00 24:27

You want to make sure that you're not starting every day by looking at the entire month or quarters project. You just want to be looking at like what's today, okay, I got that done. What's next?

SPEAKER_01 24:38

And so if you're in a position where you don't have a project manager, what you want to do is you want to separate being your own project manager from doing the task. So you want to make, and this is the the recommendation we had, we want you to actually sit down, and this is what I did. I went to the coffee shop, I sat down, I made a plan, and then that was the task I did, and I ticked it off and I felt good about it because I can't be the project manager and the task completer at the same time because otherwise you're in overwhelm architect zone.

SPEAKER_00 25:10

If you're having a switch back and forth between them, you're just gonna spin off in some other direction, you're gonna be subtasking three weeks from now. I think what you do to get around that is you sort of do planning on Sundays, plan the whole week out, and then execute all week.

SPEAKER_01 25:24

I like to just sometimes, especially when I was younger and I was in uni, I would just pretend like my boss had made me do this. And I was like, bosses, you know, because like Sunday with me was like the boss, and then the rest of the week I was just executing the plan. Don't think about it too deeply. Sunday me will think about it, be like, was that the right move? Because at the end of the day, like just moving and getting things done was the best thing to do.

SPEAKER_00 25:47

Yeah, there's something about those two modes being in project management mode. Now you're entering into this sort of, well, we could go in this direction instead. Well, actually, maybe if we did it this way instead, this piece over here, gosh, there's actually a lot of complexity hidden underneath this. I should really like subtask it all out. And if you're constantly switching back and forth during the week, you're just gonna yeah, there's something overwhelming about being in that space and then trying to execute and then trying to go back into that space for the next task. And you really just want to have your workload for the week planned out.

SPEAKER_01 26:17

In some ways, I feel like this is a conversation we've had recently where you've been like, but what if we improve this and what if we improve that? And I've been like, that's a Friday thing. We do improvements on Fridays and the weekend, like, and Mondays a little bit as well, because Monday technically counts for us. And then we do during the week, we're just like, yep, no, that could be improved, but that's not what we're doing now because we're executing on the tasks that we have to do.

SPEAKER_00 26:41

It's also one of those things I think you're you're giving the existing existing system a good shake before you go back to the drawing board and make those improvements as well. Yeah, I think there's this impulse to go, oh, you know what we could add to this that would make it even better? Oh, you know what connection here or relationship here between two databases would improve the system. And so if you just do that every day, one, you're getting distracted from what you're supposed to be executing on, but two, you're probably rushing into those decisions a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 27:07

You're being a bit of the pivot chaser to avoid the overwhelmed.

SPEAKER_00 27:10

You're being a little bit impulsive.

SPEAKER_01 27:12

Yeah. Yeah, no, totally. And so, yeah, that was the biggest thing. The other one is have a single capture point, like have one place where you just dump things, don't necessarily wait for it to be organized in order to dump it because you'll find yourself being overwhelmed and then you won't write it down or put it somewhere.

SPEAKER_00 27:30

When you have those ideas, just put them in a big box, and then again, you'll switch into project management mode at the end of the week. You can pull it, pull everything out of that box, throw half of it away, put the other half where it needs to be.

SPEAKER_01 27:43

That's why when I do this, uh what this is often um the thing I talk about in the prioritization filter is like having that uncategorized step. And then having a three-step rule. If anything is over three steps, that thing is a project and needs to be project managed.

SPEAKER_00 27:58

The definition of done really helps with that. If you have added th more than three checkpoints to a task, it's probably shouldn't be one task.

SPEAKER_01 28:06

Yeah, no, I think that is a good point.

SPEAKER_00 28:08

And also, if you've handed me a task and you haven't given me what you want from this task, it's gonna be very hard for me to complete it. So this field should be like I reserve the right to throw it back to you and be like, there's no definition of done. It's not clear from the information you've given me.

SPEAKER_01 28:22

What you're doing. Yeah. Okay, let's talk about the last one. This is the last minute hero. This is the person who jumps in to the burning building and gets it all done, but it's all done at the last minute. This is the person who probably did all of their homework the night before when they were at school or at university or college. And so now they're a founder and they adopt the same system. They're very much like, I do everything the night before, I do everything the day before. And sometimes they like it like that. But the problem is if they start working with a team, the team isn't necessarily as excited about doing everything at the last minute. And if they have a family, the family isn't necessarily that excited about it either.

SPEAKER_00 29:10

And this is the one that was often downstream of that now versus not now distinction, where they actually more so.

SPEAKER_01 29:17

Yeah. Yeah, the biggest struggle that they have is time perception. A little bit of dopamine as well, like obviously you get more dopamine.

SPEAKER_00 29:25

We looked at the study where they were worse, where we were worse at estimating time intervals.

SPEAKER_01 29:30

Yes, exactly. So we think about time really as now or not now. We're not massively great at thinking about like this is two weeks from now, so I should get started now, unless we are forced to, and we'll talk about that in a minute. But we often find ourselves being like, oh my gosh, that's tomorrow, you know, or oh my gosh, yeah, that's in a few hours. And and we can get into the zone of doing everything at the last minute. If you've ever been in that zone, you'll know it's a bit like it it tends to pile up, you know, so many things are at the last minute that by the time you've done the one thing that's at the last minute, the next thing that's at the last minute is now due.

SPEAKER_00 30:07

And which is perfect because your motivation's right up here.

SPEAKER_01 30:10

Yeah, your motivation's right up there. You're go, go, go, you're like, this is actually amazing. But it can be stressed. And it can be a real big recipe for burnout. People who come to me who are this type often come because of health problems. They're like, I need more sleep than I'm getting.

SPEAKER_00 30:27

Yeah, and I think more than not, I don't think it's that they didn't see the task coming. I think it's that they couldn't motivate themselves to do it the week earlier.

SPEAKER_01 30:35

Yes. Yeah, well, it's it's both. It it's actually genuinely both. So when we look at what they can do to support it, what we want to do is we want to resurface things just in time. So just in time feels like the day before, but if you understand the steps involved, just in time isn't. So when I've worked with clients, for example, who have this problem, we tend to start by going, okay, so the project is due tomorrow, or the project is due in a week. What are all the steps of the project? You wanna you'd like to study for it, you'd like to make things, you'd like to set things up, you'd like to whatever it is. You know, if it's a conference, I have a lot of people do this for a conference, you want to make the slides, you want to find the pictures, you want to practice, you want to write this write your speech.

SPEAKER_00 31:21

And once you've fully subtasked it out, all of a sudden it's feeling very urgent because the workload is more than a week's work.

SPEAKER_01 31:27

Because it's not just about when it's due, it's also about how long it's gonna take. We are bad at time estimation, but we're also bad at time reproduction. That's the key. We think that writing a speech, making slides, editing slides, practicing the speech, memorizing the speech could all be done in a day. But when we break it down and estimate without our magical estimating going on, but actually using something, even if it's just AI, to estimate it, we go, okay, this is gonna take three days, realistically.

SPEAKER_00 31:59

Yeah, so the overwhelm benefits from a project manager because they don't have to keep the rest of the project in their head. They don't have to subtask everything, they can just get handed what's next. This is benefiting from a project manager because they are fully subtasking everything out, giving it a more realistic time estimate based on yeah, and from memory our recommendation was keeping a record, a history of past projects that are similar, past tasks, etc. And then having the estimates, I mean, depending on the scale of the task, project managers might just have an intuition for how long everything's gonna take rather than pulling from historic records by.

SPEAKER_01 32:35

No harm in writing it too.

SPEAKER_00 32:37

Having the historic record is a great way to sort of back that up. And really, if the founder comes in and starts saying, Oh, we could knock that out in a half day, okay. Well, the last three projects we didn't. It took yeah, and so we're gonna leave this as a the as a we're gonna leave this as a week, or we're gonna leave this as a two-day task. Yeah, and and then the founder is looking at this project that he might have left a final leak for and thinking, shoot, okay, so we better get started on this a month early.

SPEAKER_01 33:04

Yeah, exactly. And you know, it does have to do with this idea of surfacing things on time as well. You know, are things being surfaced on time? And so having someone around who can say, Hey, based on the time estimation for that project, you we need to get started now. Like this needs to be done by the end of the day. And then you can kind of get your last minute hero time urgency back. Because you're gonna have someone who says, We have to have a draft by the end of today, because this is how long everything's gonna take. As long as it's not a fake deadline, because we can tell what a fake deadline is. We're so good at that.

SPEAKER_00 33:41

So don't fake the deadline, but it is legitimate if you're like, you need to get this done today because tomorrow you're working on this instead. So if it's not done, that's the state it's gonna be in.

SPEAKER_01 33:48

Exactly. That that kind of thing can really help, um, especially if you have a time buffer for that person as well, which is a bonus. Time block is probably a better way of putting it. So if you said to somebody, I have blocked two hours for you to do it today because you don't have any time to do it tomorrow because you've got meetings all day and then the next day it's due, that's helpful. That's a time block. If you have AHD, think back to the last time someone gave you a fake deadline or a buffer. And as soon as you know it exists, you start using that. You're like, well, technically, how many times have you done like maybe this happens less now, but back when clocks were more manual, I guess it was like, Well, my this clock is five minutes fast, so I actually still have five minutes.

SPEAKER_00 34:29

I think also just wives of ADHD husbands and vice versa will know that they very quickly, very quickly adapt to well, she's saying hurry, but like there's probably a half hour buffer, I can probably finish what I'm doing.

SPEAKER_01 34:44

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So we don't do good with fake, but if you can break it down and show the real deadline is longer, then it's easier as well. And basically, the reason that we talked about all of these different systems, so you know, to recap the overwhelmed architect, the last minute hero, the vision caster, the pivot chaser, is because they all have something in common, which is that with ADHD and being a business owner, it's about building that operations layer between the founder and the business, essentially. So having that additional support, whether it's systems, whether it's an assistant, whether it's AI in the right circumstances. Um, and so yeah, that's what we do and that's what we did research on to figure out.

SPEAKER_02 35:27

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.