The ADHD Skills Lab

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

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