The ADHD Skills Lab

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 40,000 hours in clinical work with adults. He co-chairs the largest ADHD conference in the US and has been quoted in the New York Times, CNN, and the Washington Post. In this conversation, Ari breaks down what productivity actually means for ADHD brains, why "don't get...

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 clarity forward, to the start of a project, when fixing problems is still cheap. Skye and Robbie break down the pre-mortem method, developed by cognitive psychologist Gary Klein and later popularized by Daniel Kahneman, and explain why it fits ADHD-wired br...

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 consistency. This episode covers the structural solution. The systems integrator role sits between the ADHD founder and the rest of the business. It captures ideas, filters priorities, protects the team from constant pivots, and builds the documentation that turns ...

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 ADHD Regulation, and has worked in-depth with over 1,000 people through her ADHD Regulation Method. Her position is direct: dysregulation is not a fixed trait of the ADHD brain. It is a learned response to a lifetime of friction. And it is the reason every oth...

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 with ADHD at 30, scoring in the 99th percentile for severity, she built a financial method that turned out to be designed for ADHD brains before she knew she had one. She crossed $250,000 in revenue last year and has helped clients save an average of $40,000 ann...

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 year and has now sold more than 115,000 copies with a 4.9-star rating. She built it without a business plan, without onboarding documents, and without a team that had done any of this before. In this conversation, Dani explains how a single ADHD comic from 2018 nearl...

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 that pattern. Not trust issues. Not a bad hire. A specific kind of perfectionism that shows up differently in people with ADHD. Two studies help explain it. A 2016 study found perfectionism was the most common cognitive distortion in adults formally diagnosed ...

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 associated with ADHD symptoms in children later in life. Researchers measured cytokine levels in 62 pregnant women and followed up on ADHD symptoms in 68 children using teacher and parent reports. The study suggests there is an association between those infl...

Presented by Understood.org You keep switching direction mid-project, and now nothing in your business is fully built. In this episode, we break down ADHD novelty bias and why new ideas don’t just feel exciting. They feel urgent, important, and hard to ignore. You’ll hear how this shows up in real businesses. The team is aligned, work has started, and then a new idea comes in. It sounds better, feels right, and within days everything shifts. Six months later, you’ve got multiple half-built pr...

Presented by Understood.org Bad environments can train ADHD entrepreneurs to second-guess themselves long after they leave those environments behind. Brandon Smith shares how years of struggling in school, standardized testing, and constant negative feedback shaped the way he saw himself, and why finding practical work completely changed how he viewed his ADHD brain. In this conversation, Brandon breaks down how environment affects confidence, self-trust, business growth, and leadership. He a...

Presented by Understood.org You build a new system, follow it for a few days, then quietly stop using it. Craig Ballantyne has coached high performers across multiple industries and his approach focuses on building systems that survive real life, not perfect conditions. This conversation looks at why most systems fail for ADHD brains. Craig explains how self-awareness, environment control, and honest constraints matter more than motivation. You will leave with a different way to think abo...

Presented by Understood.org You spend weeks building something before anyone ever sees it. Not because it needs to be that big. Because once you start, it keeps expanding until it feels impossible to finish. This is where minimum viable product actually matters. Not as a business concept, but as a way to stop overbuilding everything and start testing things earlier. ADHD makes it easy to over-scope, get pulled into the wrong details, and delay real feedback. So instead of finding out what wor...

You keep being told ADHD is genetic, but part of you suspects something in your environment is making it worse. In this next episode of the Research Recap Series Skye and Will (Hacking Your ADHD) discuss research on environmental exposure and ADHD-related behaviors. Together they explore what the science suggests about how certain chemicals may influence attention, impulsivity, and neurodevelopment. The focus stays on association, not certainty, and what that means in practice. The conversati...