With ADHD, creative ideas are often the easy part. Starting one is harder. So is the project you were sure about, set down just short of finished, and the shame that follows.

In this special episode of the ADHD Skills Lab, Skye Waterson shares a conversation from the ADHD Channel for Women, created by Understood.org. Host Cate Osborn talks with Adam Reid, an Emmy Award-winning writer, director, filmmaker, and producer, in front of a live studio audience. Adam didn't know he had ADHD until he was around 45.

Their conversation explores ADHD and creativity, and what happens between having an idea and finishing it. Adam explains how he gives himself permission to start, to be bad at something, and to let an idea become nothing. He describes getting close to the end of a first draft and losing all interest in looking at it again. He talks about putting work away to age instead of automatically calling it a failure, and how pieces of old projects have sometimes found their way back into his creative life years later.

Cate brings the harder questions. The frustration of choosing one interest while others wait. The difference between creative potential and finished work. The reality of responsibilities, and the fact that making room for creativity is easier for some people than others. Adam also talks about understanding his strengths, finding people and environments that support how he works, and learning that his worth isn't determined by what he creates.

Skye also shares how Adam's experience reminded her of stepping away from academia after her master's degree, spending a year making art and working in a bakery, before returning to complete her PhD.

No hustle.

No pressure to turn every idea into an achievement.

No need to prove your worth through what you produce.

What We Cover

• Why starting can be the hardest part, and how Adam gives himself permission to begin
• Why Adam thinks of ideas as seeds rather than children to protect
• What happens when interest fades before a project is finished
• How strengths, supportive people, and the right environments influence creativity
• Late ADHD diagnosis, masking, and separating self-worth from creative output

Want to hear more?

Listen to more episodes of the ADHD Channel for Women from Understood.org:

https://lnk.to/adhdchannelforwomenFD!theadhdskillslab

P.S. If you’re a founder who’s tired of the mad scramble of disorganized systems and stressful HR, and you want a business that feels as easy as plugging your headphones into an iPod shuffle, I’ve got something for you.

Want to grow your business? 

My Focused Balanced Growth Program has everything you need to build consistent ADHD-friendly routines and processes to grow. Click here to learn more.

Looking for a coach who's also an operator who'll turn your business into a finely-tuned profit and peace machine designed for your brain? 

I work with one company a month as a fractional consultant and COO, learning about your business and implementing systems that allow both trust & transparency with your team. Click here to book a call and discuss.

With ADHD, a quick client callback runs long, you lose track of time, and the work you meant to do is still sitting there. Dr. Jessica McCarthy stopped taking those calls.

Dr. McCarthy is a licensed clinical psychologist and clinical neuropsychologist, and the founder and clinical director of Elements Psychological Services, a two-location assessment and therapy practice in New Jersey. She has ADHD and runs the practice around it.

She walks Skye through what she handed off, what she kept, and the one test she applies to every task. She also shares the automated billing mistake that told her whole practice she had changed her name before she was ready to say why.

What We Cover

• Her test for any task: if it takes too much time, it gets handed off or it does not get done
• Why call backs were one of the first things to go
• Why digital records are harder on ADHD working memory than a stack of paper
• What went wrong when an automated system ran exactly as designed
• The part of her marketing she is still not willing to hand over

Connect With Dr. Jessica McCarthy

@dr.jessica.mccarthy

@elements_psych

Dr. McCarthy is a licensed clinical psychologist and neuropsychologist, specializing in neuropsychological and psychoeducational assessments and cognitive-behavioral therapy for children through adults. She focuses on neurodivergent populations, including ADHD, autism, and learning differences, and conducts medically-driven assessments for conditions like TBI, stroke, and dementia. Dr. McCarthy uses evidence-based behavior therapies such as ACT and CBT, and enjoys working with young adults and women of all ages navigating life transitions. Her approach emphasizes understanding the brain-behavior relationship and providing actionable recommendations for patients and families. She has worked in schools, medical settings, and private practice, offering a wide range of specialty care. Dr. McCarthy is also a recognized speaker and media contributor on topics related to neuropsychology and mental health.

P.S. If you’re a founder who’s tired of the mad scramble of disorganized systems and stressful HR, and you want a business that feels as easy as plugging your headphones into an iPod shuffle, I’ve got something for you.

Want to grow your business? 

My Focused Balanced Growth Program has everything you need to build consistent ADHD-friendly routines and processes to grow. Click here to learn more.

Looking for a coach who's also an operator who'll turn your business into a finely-tuned profit and peace machine designed for your brain? 

I work with one company a month as a fractional consultant and COO, learning about your business and implementing systems that allow both trust & transparency with your team. Click here to book a call and discuss.

You finally hire people to get some time back. Then somehow you have even more to keep track of.

What did you delegate? Is it getting done? What did you tell them was most important? Where is everyone actually spending their time?

For ADHD business owners, growing a team can make it feel like the systems you spent years building for yourself suddenly stop working.

Skye Waterson and Robert Waterson look at why. Working memory was already carrying too much when you were managing your own tasks. Now you're trying to keep track of other people's work too, and hiring one highly organized person or adding more AI doesn't necessarily solve the problem.

This episode is about why getting tasks out of your head becomes even more important once you're leading a team, and why your personal productivity system eventually needs to become a shared one.

Next episode, Skye and Robert get into exactly how to build that shared system.

What We Cover:

• Why the systems that worked when it was just you can break down once you have a team
• Why ADHD leaders can lose track of tasks after they've delegated them
• How hiring an organized person can help without solving the underlying problem
• Why AI and automation can become more things you have to remember and monitor
• Why one shared system lets you see priorities without constantly chasing your team

P.S. If you’re a founder who’s tired of the mad scramble of disorganized systems and stressful HR, and you want a business that feels as easy as plugging your headphones into an iPod shuffle, I’ve got something for you.

Want to grow your business? 

My Focused Balanced Growth Program has everything you need to build consistent ADHD-friendly routines and processes to grow. Click here to learn more.

Looking for a coach who's also an operator who'll turn your business into a finely-tuned profit and peace machine designed for your brain? 

I work with one company a month as a fractional consultant and COO, learning about your business and implementing systems that allow both trust & transparency with your team. Click here to book a call and discuss.

You are working every spare minute, and the business still is not growing the way it should.

Amy Marie Hann spent 10 years hustling in a sales business that never really scaled. She worked constantly, burned out, and eventually realized that more effort was not going to fix the way the business was built.

Amy is the creator of Master the Mundane, a book and membership community for mothers with ADHD. In this conversation, she explains why people with ADHD can stay with the wrong thing for too long, how slowing down brought back her clarity, and why she built her next business around the life she actually wanted to live.

She also shares why she grew her team and then deliberately made it smaller, how she uses numbers to keep new ideas and emotions from driving business decisions, and where AI genuinely helps her without replacing her own thinking.

You will hear what changed when Amy stopped measuring progress by how hard she was working and started building a business she could actually sustain.

What We Cover

• Why ADHD hustle can create a lot of activity without creating growth
• Why sticking with the wrong thing too long can be a bigger problem than quitting too soon
• How slowing down gave Amy more clarity and creativity
• Why Amy grew her team, then deliberately went lean again
• How tracking numbers helps separate good decisions from rejection sensitivity and new ideas

Connect With Amy Marie Hann

Website: https://www.amymariehann.com/

Instagram: @amymariehann

P.S. If you’re a founder who’s tired of the mad scramble of disorganized systems and stressful HR, and you want a business that feels as easy as plugging your headphones into an iPod shuffle, I’ve got something for you.

Want to grow your business? 

My Focused Balanced Growth Program has everything you need to build consistent ADHD-friendly routines and processes to grow. Click here to learn more.

Looking for a coach who's also an operator who'll turn your business into a finely-tuned profit and peace machine designed for your brain? 

I work with one company a month as a fractional consultant and COO, learning about your business and implementing systems that allow both trust & transparency with your team. Click here to book a call and discuss.

You start an email, remember a purchase, open another tab, and suddenly five tasks are each 20 percent done. For adults with ADHD, working memory problems don't necessarily disappear with age.

Skye Waterson and Robert Waterson unpack a 2013 meta-analysis of 38 studies on working memory in adults with ADHD. The researchers expected older adults to perform better. Instead, the review found adults with ADHD performed moderately worse on both verbal and visual working memory tasks, with age not changing the overall picture.

Then Skye and Robert get practical: how to stop relying on your head to hold everything. They cover one central place for tasks, low-friction capture, redundant reminders, recording tools, and physical cues you can't ignore.

The goal isn't to remember harder. It's to build a system that means you don't have to.

Want Skye's prioritization filter? DM me “prioritize” and she'll send it to you for free.

What We Cover:

• What 38 studies reveal about working memory in adults with ADHD, and why age didn't change the picture
• Why every task needs one central, ranked location instead of scattered notes
• How redundant reminders and physical cues help when working memory fails
• Why a five-minute post-meeting dictation can catch what AI summaries miss

P.S. If you’re a founder who’s tired of the mad scramble of disorganized systems and stressful HR, and you want a business that feels as easy as plugging your headphones into an iPod shuffle, I’ve got something for you.

Want to grow your business? 

My Focused Balanced Growth Program has everything you need to build consistent ADHD-friendly routines and processes to grow. Click here to learn more.

Looking for a coach who's also an operator who'll turn your business into a finely-tuned profit and peace machine designed for your brain? 

I work with one company a month as a fractional consultant and COO, learning about your business and implementing systems that allow both trust & transparency with your team. Click here to book a call and discuss.

Rejection sensitive dysphoria gets talked about constantly in ADHD spaces, but there isn't much research behind it yet.

In this Research Recap, Skye and Will unpack a small study that tried to measure what happens when people with ADHD symptoms experience social exclusion. Using a deliberately unfair ball-tossing game, researchers compared how rejected participants said they felt with changes in their heart rate and blood pressure.

The results didn't line up the way researchers expected. This isn't proof that RSD is or isn't real. It's a look at what one study found, where the results got messy, and why measuring rejection sensitivity is more complicated than it sounds.

Want more of Will's work? Visit HackingYourADHD.com or subscribe on YouTube.

What We Cover:

• How the Cyberball task was used to create social exclusion in a lab setting
• Why participants reported feeling excluded while the physiological data didn't show the expected response
• The unexpected drop in blood pressure and what researchers thought might explain it
• Why self-reported rejection sensitivity didn't line up neatly with ADHD measures
• How the study's small, self-selected sample limits what we can conclude
• Why this paper raises useful questions without settling whether RSD is real

P.S. If you’re a founder who’s tired of the mad scramble of disorganized systems and stressful HR, and you want a business that feels as easy as plugging your headphones into an iPod shuffle, I’ve got something for you.

Want to grow your business? 

My Focused Balanced Growth Program has everything you need to build consistent ADHD-friendly routines and processes to grow. Click here to learn more.

Looking for a coach who's also an operator who'll turn your business into a finely-tuned profit and peace machine designed for your brain? 

I work with one company a month as a fractional consultant and COO, learning about your business and implementing systems that allow both trust & transparency with your team. Click here to book a call and discuss.

You hired help. You still find yourself taking things back on.

Kara Kushnir built A Work of Heart Counseling and Wellness from a part-time practice into a fifteen-provider team. But growing the team meant learning that she couldn't keep doing everything herself.

In this episode, Kara talks about the temptation to say yes to everything, the burnout that follows, and how she learned to delegate, ask for help, and build a team she trusts enough to tell her no.

What We Cover

• Why trying to do everything yourself is a direct route to burnout
• Why Kara still catches herself taking on work she should delegate
• How saying yes to too much led to overwhelm and depletion
• Why asking for help and knowing who to ask are skills you can build
• How transparency about her weaknesses changed the relationship with her team
• Why knowing what you're not good at is part of building a healthier business

Connect with Kara:

• A Work of Heart Counseling
• Instagram: A Work of Art Counseling
• Instagram: Taking Cara

P.S. If you’re a founder who’s tired of the mad scramble of disorganized systems and stressful HR, and you want a business that feels as easy as plugging your headphones into an iPod shuffle, I’ve got something for you.

Want to grow your business? 

My Focused Balanced Growth Program has everything you need to build consistent ADHD-friendly routines and processes to grow. Click here to learn more.

Looking for a coach who's also an operator who'll turn your business into a finely-tuned profit and peace machine designed for your brain? 

I work with one company a month as a fractional consultant and COO, learning about your business and implementing systems that allow both trust & transparency with your team. Click here to book a call and discuss.

ADHD treatment works. But does it keep working the same way eight years later?

In this Research Recap, Skye and Will dig into the MTA study, one of the largest and most influential ADHD treatment studies ever conducted, and what researchers found when they followed the same kids over eight years.

They unpack why the strong early treatment gains had disappeared by year eight, why medication use dropped dramatically over time, and the surprising finding that even the group still taking medication didn't maintain the same early advantage.

They also look at what happens as kids move into middle school, when organizational demands increase and strategies that worked before may no longer be enough.

Importantly, they separate what the research actually tells us from what it still can't explain.

Want more of Will's work? Visit HackingYourADHD.com or subscribe on YouTube.

What We Cover:

• Why the MTA study's early treatment gains had disappeared by year eight
• Why only about a third of participants were still using medication
• What the research does and doesn't tell us about stopping medication
• Why changing life demands can require changing ADHD strategies
• What the middle school research suggests about symptoms at home versus school
• Why "pills don't teach skills" matters when thinking about long-term ADHD management

P.S. If you’re a founder who’s tired of the mad scramble of disorganized systems and stressful HR, and you want a business that feels as easy as plugging your headphones into an iPod shuffle, I’ve got something for you.

Want to grow your business? 

My Focused Balanced Growth Program has everything you need to build consistent ADHD-friendly routines and processes to grow. Click here to learn more.

Looking for a coach who's also an operator who'll turn your business into a finely-tuned profit and peace machine designed for your brain? 

I work with one company a month as a fractional consultant and COO, learning about your business and implementing systems that allow both trust & transparency with your team. Click here to book a call and discuss.

You know what you want in the future. You still can't make yourself do the boring task today.

Skye and Robbie break down the goal setting system Skye actually uses, adapted from Dan Martell's framework. It works backward from a 25-year vision to one specific goal this year, then down to one daily non-negotiable that makes that goal inevitable.

They also get into what happens when you miss a day, why trying to focus on five goals at once backfires, and how immediate rewards can make the thing you keep avoiding easier to actually do.

What We Cover:

• The full process from a 25-year vision to a daily non-negotiable
• Why your yearly goal needs to be specific and measurable
• How to choose the one priority that matters most right now
• Why five new non-negotiables at once can become zero
• How immediate rewards and recovering from missed days keep goals alive

P.S. If you’re a founder who’s tired of the mad scramble of disorganized systems and stressful HR, and you want a business that feels as easy as plugging your headphones into an iPod shuffle, I’ve got something for you.

Want to grow your business? 

My Focused Balanced Growth Program has everything you need to build consistent ADHD-friendly routines and processes to grow. Click here to learn more.

Looking for a coach who's also an operator who'll turn your business into a finely-tuned profit and peace machine designed for your brain? 

I work with one company a month as a fractional consultant and COO, learning about your business and implementing systems that allow both trust & transparency with your team. Click here to book a call and discuss.

You know what needs doing. You have the ideas. So why is actually finishing the thing so hard?

Jason Chatfield has written and drawn the syndicated comic strip Ginger Meggs for sixteen years, writes for The New Yorker, and built a career across cartooning, comedy, and writing. But he learned he cannot rely on his brain to generate ideas and execute them at the same time.

Instead, Jason built physical systems that separate thinking from doing: external deadlines, index cards, a wall calendar, batching, and pairing difficult tasks with things he actually enjoys.

In this episode, Jason breaks down the practical systems he uses to turn ideas into finished work without relying on willpower.

What We Cover:

• Why Jason stopped planning and executing in the same block
• The index card system that makes finished work visible
• How external deadlines give his ADHD brain structure
• Why his wall calendar beats another productivity app
• How he pairs difficult tasks with things he enjoys
• The first-thing, last-thing routine that separates planning from doing
• Why it took three ADHD diagnoses before he believed it

Connect With Jason Chatfield

https://www.jasonchatfield.com/

https://www.instagram.com/newyorkcartoons/

P.S. If you’re a founder who’s tired of the mad scramble of disorganized systems and stressful HR, and you want a business that feels as easy as plugging your headphones into an iPod shuffle, I’ve got something for you.

Want to grow your business? 

My Focused Balanced Growth Program has everything you need to build consistent ADHD-friendly routines and processes to grow. Click here to learn more.

Looking for a coach who's also an operator who'll turn your business into a finely-tuned profit and peace machine designed for your brain? 

I work with one company a month as a fractional consultant and COO, learning about your business and implementing systems that allow both trust & transparency with your team. Click here to book a call and discuss.

You built the business because you were good at the work. Nobody warned you that promoting it might be harder than doing it.

New research on neurodivergent entrepreneurs found that maintaining a social media profile was the most commonly reported self-employment challenge. Ahead of work-life balance, unpredictability, and financial pressures.

In this episode, Skye and Robert unpack why social media has become such a difficult part of running a business, what else neurodivergent entrepreneurs say they struggle with, and the support and habits they find most helpful.

What We Cover:

• Why maintaining a social media profile topped the list of challenges
• How work-life balance, unpredictability, and marketing compared
• Why peer support, professional networks, and mentorship matter
• What entrepreneurs said helped their wellbeing, from movement and sleep to boundaries

P.S. If you’re a founder who’s tired of the mad scramble of disorganized systems and stressful HR, and you want a business that feels as easy as plugging your headphones into an iPod shuffle, I’ve got something for you.

Want to grow your business? 

My Focused Balanced Growth Program has everything you need to build consistent ADHD-friendly routines and processes to grow. Click here to learn more.

Looking for a coach who's also an operator who'll turn your business into a finely-tuned profit and peace machine designed for your brain? 

I work with one company a month as a fractional consultant and COO, learning about your business and implementing systems that allow both trust & transparency with your team. Click here to book a call and discuss.