The ADHD Skills Lab
The ADHD Skills Lab
Skye Waterson
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/
How To Turn Time Blindness Into Your Brain's Biggest Asset (Research & Strategies)
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 treating time as one skill, the research separates it into three: estimating how long something will take, reproducing a duration, and managing time day to day. One finding stands out: many ADHD struggles begin with inaccurate time estimation. If your brain can't r...
Jul 8
15 min
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 ADHD and designing her home and business around how she naturally works. In this conversation, she shares the hard lessons that came from burnout, why traditional organizing advice kept failing her, and how building systems around real habits instead of ideal ones cha...
Jul 6
41 min
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 marginal value theorem. The prediction was that ADHD traits would cause people to leave too soon. The data found the opposite. ADHD participants left patches closer to the mathematically optimal point and ended up with more total reward. Skye and Robbie break down...
Jul 1
29 min
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't working" and a feeling that just shows up the moment things get hard. He also breaks down why he became a bottleneck in his own business, what changed when he got specific about role clarity, and why he keeps his identity and worth separate from his r...
Jun 29
42 min
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 rhythm disorder. This isn't a list of sleep hygiene tips. It's a look at what's actually different in the ADHD body's clock, and why typical advice misses it. Understanding the delay changes how you plan your day, not just your bedtime. What We Cover: Why ene...
Jun 26
9 min
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 through real examples, rereading pages, checking out of meetings, losing focus on audiobooks even at double speed, and land on why none of it happens during a good movie or video game. The conversation distinguishes between attention that drifts because a task i...
Jun 24
31 min
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 90,000 coaching sessions, Chris was diagnosed with ADHD at 28 while building the company. Instead of treating her personal systems and her business systems as separate problems, she applied the same coaching frameworks, structure, automation, and strength-based deve...
Jun 22
38 min
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 use for an actual diagnosis. They score themselves against each one in real time, and they don't agree on most of them. The conversation covers why the criteria were written for children and then loosely translated for adults, why "close attention to detail"...
Jun 17
28 min
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 40,000 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...
Jun 15
34 min
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 do is meaningfully improve executive functioning. Skye and Will break down a Norwegian randomized controlled trial on goal management training, what it found, and why that gap between feeling less anxious and actually getting more done matters for how you ru...
Jun 12
11 min
Load more