The ADHD Skills Lab
Things are starting to fall through the cracks.
Not because you're not trying, but because the systems everyone recommends weren't built for a brain like yours.
The ADHD Skills Lab is for business owners with ADHD whose responsibilities have grown past simple solutions. Each week, Skye Waterson and guests share research-backed strategies and real-world systems to help you reduce the chaos, make consistent progress, and stop reinventing the wheel every time life gets complex.
No "just use a planner." No productivity hacks that last a week. Just honest, practical support from someone who has spent years researching, testing, and refining what actually works for adult ADHD.
Skye is the founder of Unconventional Organisation, a former academic diagnosed with ADHD during her PhD, and the author of over 50 articles read by more than 250,000 people worldwide. She has worked with senior leaders, business owners, academics, and professionals navigating ADHD in high-responsibility roles, and was invited to share her research with both the Australian and New Zealand Government.
🤝 In partnership with Understood.org: https://u.org/4boG8QW
🌐 https://www.unconventionalorganisation.com/
📲 https://www.instagram.com/theadhdskillslabpodcast/
Episodes
190 episodes
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 ep...
The Real Impact of ADHD on Planning, Memory, and Time Management (Mike Legett)
If planning your week, remembering the small stuff, or keeping up with admin feels harder than the actual work, you're not imagining it.This week, Skye sits down with Mike Legett, an ADHD coach and executive functioning specialist who wa...
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If You're Bad At Managing Your Time & Have ADHD Listen To This
Everyone says people with ADHD have "time blindness." But what does that actually mean?In this Research Recap, Skye Waterson and Will Curb review a decade of research (2012–2022) on time perception in adults with ADHD. Rather than treati...
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The Organising System That Actually Works for ADHD (Cas Aarssen)
You don't need another productivity hack. You need systems that still work when your brain doesn't.Cas Aarssen built the Clutterbug Method, hosted HGTV's Hot Mess House, and grew a global brand by stopping the fight against her ...
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Why Your Environment Effects Your ADHD More Than You Think
You've been told you pivot too fast. This research suggests your timing might be right.A 2024 Royal Society paper tested how long people stay in a depleting resource before moving to a new one, using a model from ecology called the margi...
The High Performance Habits Of An 8 Figure ADHD Business with James Wedmore
You get bored with the offer that's working, so you go build a new one. James Wedmore has run the same program and the same live event for ten years and says that's the entire reason it grew. He explains the difference between a real "this isn'...
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The REAL Reason ADHD Could Be Ruining Your Sleep
You're exhausted all day, then suddenly wired at 10pm. That's not random. Research suggests it's tied to a delayed circadian rhythm that's common in ADHD.In this Research Recap, Skye and Will unpack a paper examining ADHD as a circadian ...
ADHD Diagnosis Criteria Explained By People Who Actually Have It Part 2
You've reread the same paragraph three times and still couldn't tell anyone what it said.Skye and Robbie return to the DSM-5 for Part 2 of their criteria breakdown, this time on criterion B: difficulty sustaining attention. They work thr...
The Best Way To Build Your Company Around Your ADHD Brain (With Chris Wang)
You spend years building workarounds for your own brain, then realize you could build your company the same way.Chris Wang did exactly that.As co-founder and CEO of Shimmer, an ADHD coaching platform that has delivered more than 9...
ADHD Diagnosis Criteria Explained By People Who Actually Have It
You've read the ADHD criteria a dozen times and still aren't sure if you actually qualify.Skye and Robbie Waterson and sit down with the DSM-5 itself and read through the inattentive criteria line by line, the same list a clinician would us...
Psychologist With 40,000 Hours of ADHD Clients Speaks On What Productivity Advice Gets Wrong (Ari Tuckman)
Most productivity advice for ADHD is written for people who just need a nudge. If you have ADHD, you need something more honest than that.Ari Tuckman holds a PsyD and an MBA, has authored five books on ADHD, and has spent over 40,...
Why Using Anxiety To Manage Your ADHD Isn't A Good Idea
Running your business on anxiety feels like productivity. It isn't. It's a system built on urgency, and it burns out fast.Research suggests that goal-focused interventions can reduce anxiety in adults with ADHD. What they don't appear to...
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Why ADHD Makes You Chase Bad Ideas (& how to stop it)
You've launched things that seemed solid, only to watch them unravel for reasons that felt obvious afterward. That's not a judgment problem. For ADHD founders, retrospective clarity comes naturally. The pre-mortem is a tool that pulls that clar...
How ADHD Pulled This Entrepreneur Out Of $600k Debt (with Galel Fajardo)
Sitting in a parking lot after leaving the bankruptcy attorney's office, $600,000 in debt written off, home gone, Galel Fajardo told himself no one would ever hire him again.Galel Fajardo is a business coach, digital marketing consultant...
The Real Reason Structure Doesn't Stick When You Have ADHD
You've built systems before. You probably built them well. The problem wasn't creating them. The problem was maintaining them once the novelty wore off.Wednesday's episode explored why ADHD founders often struggle with operational consis...
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 ...
Why Simple Tasks Feel So Exhausting With ADHD (with Jenna Free)
You've tried the calendars, the timers, the hacks. They work for two weeks and then stop. Jenna Free says that's not a discipline problem. It's a regulation problem.Jenna is a counselor for ADHD with ADHD, author of The Simple Guide to A...
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Why 50% of People With ADHD Quit Their Medication
Why do so many people start ADHD medication... and then quietly stop within a year or two?In this Research Recap, Skye and Will unpack a systematic literature review examining why over half of all patients discontinue or significa...
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Why Progress Never Feels Permanent With ADHD (Even When You Do Everything Right) Nicole Stanley
You're generating real revenue. But every time you open your banking app, your brain shuts down and you close it again.Nicole Stanley is the founder of Arise Financial Coaching and creator of the Money Momentum Method. Late-diagnosed wit...
How Casey Neistat Nails Productivity Advice For ADHDers
You know what your most important work is. You still spend the first four hours of the day doing everything else.Casey Neistat recently posted a video called *Navigating the Matrix* showing how he organizes his workday as a creator with...
Your ADHD Productivity Might Actually Be Perfectionism (Here's How to Tell with Dani Donovan)
You built something people love. Running the business of it is a different problem entirely.Dani Donovan is the creator of The Anti-Planner, a self-published ADHD productivity workbook that generated over $1 million in its first...
Why ADHD Brains Hire People And Then Do It Themselves Anyway
Nobody agreed on what done looked like. The handover happened anyway. That is where it fell apart.This episode is the practical follow-up to Wednesday. Skye and Robbie walk through the specific hiring and handover process they use with A...
Why ADHD Entrepreneurs Struggle With Delegating
You hired someone good. The work was fine. You still sent the late-night Slack message, redirected the task, and checked in on something that had already been handled.This episode looks at what the research suggests is actually driving t...
ADHD, Parenting, and the Pressure of Entrepreneurship (With Jessica Shaw)
The school sent her daughter to a desk with her head down because she could not sit still during circle time. That was the moment Jessica stopped waiting for someone else to figure it out.Jessica Shaw is an award-winning journalist whose...
Can Pregnancy Inflammation Influence ADHD in Children? (New Study Breakdown)
Understanding why ADHD happens can feel like chasing a moving target. This study adds a biological angle most people haven't considered.We discuss a prospective study examining whether maternal inflammation during the second trimester is...
