The ADHD Skills Lab

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 with ADHD, endorsed by 55% of the sample. It was not close. A 2023 study then looked at what kind of perfectionism. Their findings indicate ADHD founders are not setting impossibly high standards. They are feeling the gap between what they expected and what was delivered more intensely than others. What drove avoidance most strongly was not perfectionism in the traditional sense, but the persistent feeling of falling short, even when the original standard was reasonable.
Delegation becomes the thing most associated with that painful shortfall. So the brain starts treating it as a threat.
Friday's episode covers the practical side: how to structure delegation so the gap is smaller from the start and your perfectionism has less to react to.
What We Cover:
Why ADHD perfectionism research suggests it is not about high standards but about feeling any shortfall more acutely than others
How the discrepancy between expected and actual output drives avoidance in ADHD founders specifically
The two scenarios where delegation breaks down even when the team is competent and the work is solid
Why the founder who re-enters delegated work is not micromanaging but responding to a learned pattern of emotional pain
What Friday's episode will cover on structuring delegation to reduce that gap from the start
 P.S. Losing work because the admin layer around your business can't keep up with you? Invisible Systems is a 90-day done-for-you sprint where I (Skye) extract the processes from your head, build the operating layer, and find the right person to run it. Six spots left at the founding price, book a call at invisiblesystem.co

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 work has appeared in the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, and Vanity Fair. She is the host of Everyone Gets a Juice Box, Understood.org's podcast for parents raising neurodivergent kids. She is also a mom of two teens who think differently, and someone who recognized her own ADHD only after researching her children's.
Skye and Jessica get into what the detective process actually looks like. Why parents are often dismissed first and believed later. How the school system's default response to a kid who cannot conform is to remove them rather than support them. What guilt sounds like when you feel like you should have seen it coming sooner. And why the window between noticing something and getting real support is longer, more expensive, and more isolating than it should be.
What We Cover:
Why parents are often the last ones taken seriously, and what it takes to keep pushing anyway
How school systems send a conformity message to neurodivergent kids and what it costs them long-term
The financial and time barriers to evaluation, and why they fall unevenly across families
What the detective process looks like when the parent doing the investigating also has undiagnosed ADHD
Why one parent's decision to reduce work hours for her neurodivergent child was called "trad wife" by colleagues, and what that reveals about the support gap
Connect With Jessica Shaw
Podcast: https://lnk.to/everyonegetsajuiceboxec!podcast_guest
ADHD Articles: https://www.understood.org/en/topics/adhd
ADHD & Women: https://www.understood.org/en/topics/adhd-women
Understood.org's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/understood/
Understood.org's Instagram: @Understoodorg
 P.S. Losing work because the admin layer around your business can't keep up with you? Invisible Systems is a 90-day done-for-you sprint where I (Skye) extract the processes from your head, build the operating layer, and find the right person to run it. Six spots left at the founding price, book a call at invisiblesystem.co

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 inflammation markers and later ADHD symptoms. It does not establish cause. The sample was small, blood draws were not standardized by time of day, and the researchers framed this explicitly as preliminary work to identify what warrants deeper investigation.
What We Cover
What cytokine levels are and why researchers used them to measure maternal inflammation
Where the methodology falls short and why the researchers themselves framed this as preliminary
Why future research in this area needs a systems-based approach rather than adding more pressure to mothers
 Want more of Will’s work? Go check out HackingYourADHD.com or subscribe to his YouTube channel
 P.S. Losing work because the admin layer around your business can't keep up with you? Invisible Systems is a 90-day done-for-you sprint where I (Skye) extract the processes from your head, build the operating layer, and find the right person to run it. Six spots left at the founding price, book a call at invisiblesystem.co

Description:
Presented by Understood.org
You don’t have a lack of focus. You have too many ideas pulling it in different directions.
This episode builds on Wednesday’s breakdown of ADHD novelty bias and shows you how to actually manage it without shutting it down.
Because the goal isn’t to stop having ideas. It’s to stop them from constantly disrupting execution.
You’ll hear how to treat novelty as input instead of immediate action, how to capture ideas so they stop feeling urgent, and how to create a buffer between what you’re thinking about and what your business actually does.
Right now, every new idea feels important. And when your attention shifts, everything else follows.
This is about keeping the ideas, without letting them take over.
What We Cover:
Why novelty needs a system, not suppression
How capturing ideas reduces the urge to act on them
The “novelty as input, not strategy” approach
Why your team follows your attention automatically
How to create a buffer between ideas and execution
Why most ideas lose urgency if you don’t act on them immediately
If you're enjoying ADHD Skills Lab, you may also enjoy Understood.org’s new podcast, Sorry, I Missed This.
Listen here: https://lnk.to/sorryimissedthisPS!theadhdskillslab
 P.S. Losing work because the admin layer around your business can't keep up with you? Invisible Systems is a 90-day done-for-you sprint where I (Skye) extract the processes from your head, build the operating layer, and find the right person to run it. Six spots left at the founding price, book a call at invisiblesystem.co

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 projects and no clear direction.
This isn’t random. Research shows ADHD brains assign higher reward value to novelty, even when it works against long-term goals.
We also look at the other side of it. Why boredom feels almost painful, why sticking with one direction gets harder over time, and how this pattern quietly impacts growth, team focus, and execution.
This isn’t about lack of discipline. It’s about understanding the pattern that’s driving your decisions.
What We Cover:
Why new ideas feel urgent instead of optional
How novelty bias overrides long-term plans
The “half-built business” pattern many founders fall into
Why teams follow the founder’s attention automatically
The link between boredom, disengagement, and switching
When novelty is useful and when it starts breaking the business
If you're enjoying ADHD Skills Lab, you may also enjoy Understood.org’s new podcast, Sorry, I Missed This.
Listen here: https://lnk.to/sorryimissedthisPS!theadhdskillslab
 P.S. Losing work because the admin layer around your business can't keep up with you? Invisible Systems is a 90-day done-for-you sprint where I (Skye) extract the processes from your head, build the operating layer, and find the right person to run it. Six spots left at the founding price, book a call at invisiblesystem.co