The ADHD Skills Lab

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 annually.
Nicole explains why standard budgeting fails ADHD brains, why most business owners are solving the wrong financial problem, and how her method works without willpower or expense tracking.
She also walks through her five-problem financial diagnostic. Less than 10% of people actually have a spending problem. Most are misdiagnosing themselves entirely.
If avoidance has been your default financial strategy, this conversation gives you a different place to start.
What We Cover
Why budgeting fails ADHD brains - it looks backwards and produces shame, not behaviour change
The five financial problems and why most business owners are fixing the wrong one
How the Money Momentum Method was ADHD-designed before Nicole knew she had ADHD
The curiosity framework: look at your numbers as if they belong to a friend
Why financial problems are solvable problems, not evidence of who you are
 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

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 ADHD. He tracks his tasks in real time, explains the system he uses to manage everything, and ends by accepting the chaos as part of the deal.

Skye and Robert disagree with that conclusion.

In this standalone episode, they break down the hidden problem underneath Casey’s system — why ADHD business owners keep ending up trapped in urgent work, why prioritization systems collapse under pressure, and why the issue is usually structural, not motivational.

What We Cover:

- Why ADHD urgency bias overrides even well-designed prioritization systems
- How Casey’s four-color framework mirrors the Eisenhower Matrix — and where both break down
- Why task capture and task prioritization are two completely different cognitive jobs
- The real reason everything keeps ending up in the “urgent” category
- Why delegation is usually delayed far too long by ADHD business owners
- What changes when low-value operational tasks are consistently removed from your plate
- Why “being good under pressure” quietly creates long-term business chaos

This episode is less about productivity tactics and more about the hidden operating system underneath ADHD work patterns.
 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

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 nearly never got posted, how a business coach’s field guide exercise became the product she actually needed, and what happened when she had to tell 28,000 pre-order customers their books were running late.
We also get into the part nobody warns you about: what hiring looks like when there are no SOPs, no infrastructure, and no clear handoff between the creative work and the operational side of the business.
This is a conversation about the hidden cost of scaling creative ADHD-led businesses — and why building the thing is often easier than building the systems around it.
What We Cover:
How Dani designed The Anti-Planner around what she actually used instead of what productivity systems were “supposed” to look like
Why she turned down traditional publishing and protected creative control over the product
The pre-order strategy that generated 42,000 orders across two launches
What happened when she had to email 28,000 customers about delayed orders — and why almost nobody asked for refunds
Why scaling an ADHD-led business gets operationally difficult long before it looks successful from the outside
Connect with Dani Donovan:
Website: https://anti-planner.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/danidonovan
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@danidonovan
 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

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 ADHD founders, including what they have lost money figuring out so you do not have to.
The hiring side covers why video applications and paid test projects replace interviews, how to write a role description that filters for initiative rather than compliance, and what it looks like when you have found the right person versus when you are about to make an expensive mistake.
The handover side covers the 10-80-10 rule, writing a one-sentence definition of done before anything starts, naming your re-entry triggers upfront, building a decision boundary so the team knows what comes back to you and what does not, and scheduling check-ins so the anxiety has somewhere to go other than a late-night message.
They also cover the two failure modes when none of this is set up: the founder absorbs everything back, or the team stops trying.
What We Cover:
How to write a role description specific enough to attract the right person and filter out everyone else
Why paid test projects show you more in two hours than an interview shows you in two rounds
The 10-80-10 rule and how to use it to stay connected without pulling work back through the middle
What a definition of done actually looks like in writing, and why naming your re-entry triggers before the project starts changes everything
How scheduled check-ins replace anxiety-driven re-entry and give the founder's worry somewhere structured to land
 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

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