Multiply Your Success with Dr. Tom DuFore

280. ADHD Brain on Fire: How to Prioritize When Everything Feels Urgent—Skye Waterson

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Do you manage someone with ADHD? Or, do you have ADHD or ADHD type symptoms? Our guest today is Skye Waterson, and she shares with us some techniques and strategies to help support the ADHD brain. 

TODAY'S WIN-WIN:
If your systems are not working, it is likely your systems and not you.  

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ABOUT OUR GUEST:
Skye Waterson is an ADHD strategist who helps entrepreneurs and executives with ADHD or ADHD symptoms replace chaos with clear, workable systems that fuel growth. As founder of Unconventional Organisation and host of The ADHD Skills Lab podcast, she’s worked with business leaders worldwide to stay focused, follow through, and scale sustainably. Drawing on science-backed strategies, Skye shows that it’s not your brain that needs fixing, it’s the system – and equips leaders with practical tools they can implement immediately to drive measurable results.  

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Tom DuFore:

Welcome to the Multiply Your Success podcast, where each week we help growth-minded entrepreneurs and franchise leaders take the next step in their expansion journey. I'm your host, Tom Dufour, CEO of Big Sky Franchise Team. And as we open today, I'm wondering if you happen to manage someone with ADHD or maybe ADHD symptoms. Or do you have ADHD or maybe exhibit ADHD type symptoms? Well, our guest today is Skye Waterson, and she shares with us some of the techniques and strategies to help support the ADHD brain. Now, Skye is an ADHD strategist who helps entrepreneurs and executives with ADHD or ADHD symptoms to replace chaos with clear, workable systems that fuel growth. She's the founder of Unconventional Organization and host of the ADHD Skills Lab podcast. She's worked with business leaders worldwide to stay focused, follow through, and scale sustainably. Drawing on science-backed strategies, Sky shows that it's not your brain that needs fixing, it's the system and equips leaders with practical tools they can implement immediately to drive measurable results. And that's exactly what we talk about in our interview today. You're gonna love this one, so let's go ahead and jump right into it.

Skye Waterson:

Yeah, thanks so much for having me. My name is Sky Waterson. I run Unconventional Organization. We help business owners with ADHD symptoms focus, get their time back, and grow consistent revenue.

Tom DuFore:

Fantastic. Well, thank you for that overview and intro. And the focus of our conversation is really to talk about owners, founders, business leaders that have ADHD, ADHD symptoms, or maybe may not even be aware that those types of things exist. So talk a little bit about challenges that you see entrepreneurs, founders have that have ADHD. And what do you generally see as those challenges, I guess?

Skye Waterson:

Yeah. Yeah, 100%. And a lot of people will come to me and say, you know, hey, I don't have a diagnosis, but I just resonate with the systems. You know, ADHD symptoms are very common when it comes to entrepreneurs specifically. That's why we like to run our own businesses. So there's some strengths, amazing creative thinking, outside of the box thinking, taking action, etc. But there's also weaknesses around particularly working memory. So forgetting things that you've just been told, you know, hey, can you grab this? No worries, awesome. And then oh, it's out of your brain. Things around time blindness, we're gonna get this done by next week. Realistically, it's next month, you know, things like that, as well as impulsivity. You know, you hear of the entrepreneur whose team are like, oh, what book are they reading now? Like, what giant new system are we gonna have to do now? Or on the other side, you know, hey, what happened to that lead flow process? It was working really well. Could you delegate it? And they're struggling to do that, they're struggling to kind of organize their their business as they scale. So I have clients from, you know, people who are running software businesses to people who run, you know, trades businesses. And, you know, I have, for example, I have a client in the building industry right now, and the biggest problem that he's had is the lead flow has been good, like they've dialed that in, but okay, then you get a quote, and then it just sits there, you know, what happens next? So, so it's not necessarily always about not knowing what to do, it's about knowing how to do it. How to actually say, okay, how do I focus on doing the admin when I just want to get back on the tools? I want to get back to work and it's not my thing. How do I delegate that piece when delegation involves actually sitting down and doing a little bit of work to get to that delegation? Like, how do I run that cadence with my team members? The amount of business owners I tell you who have million-dollar businesses, and I ask them, do you have an assistant? And they say no, is massive. So, how do we build out the system that's going to support you as you scale, which is a massive struggle for a lot of entrepreneurs, especially those who have ADHD symptoms, because they will often build in this very hard, you know, they'll they'll do a lot of work, they'll push through a lot of things, and it's that growth. And, you know, obviously you work with franchisees, so you will understand that scaling that becomes hard because the dopamine and a lot of ADHD stuff is about dopamine regulation. It just isn't there as much as it used to be when it was like, hey, we've got to put food on the table. How are we gonna do that?

Tom DuFore:

I liked how you started talking about some of that delegation. What are some of those challenges that you see with the delegation? And how have you found folks be able to do that successfully?

Skye Waterson:

One of the biggest things I found is that, and I and I relate to this because I'm a business owner with ADHD myself, but you know, once you've decided, okay, I want to delegate this task, your desire to ever do the task again drops to below zero. You're like, I never want to do this again. And I work with a lot of business owners who you know who you are, you have that task that's gonna be a massive lever in your business, and you're just not doing it week after week. Something else is coming up. And so when it comes to delegation, we have a process that we teach where basically you talk to AI to get the sort of like little framework, you give that to your team member, and then we have a process you go through where you're essentially empowering them to become responsible and take ownership of the task. And all you're doing is answering questions at the right time. So we give you that sequence, and what that allows you to do is essentially hand off tasks without doing them, which is massive for entrepreneurs because so often they'll come to me and they'll say, Yeah, sure, I did the thing, and maybe I even talked to the AI and I got a doc and now I have to read it and finalize it and format it. And so it just goes in the pile of things that never get done.

Tom DuFore:

Talking about ADHD and ADHD symptoms, how do you see owners turn that into a strength or an advantage for them?

Skye Waterson:

Yeah, there are a lot of real advantages. Like everything I do is based on research. I'm a former academic before I, you know, grew this business. And when we're talking about the strengths, you know, we see a lot of creative thinking. So the ability to go, oh, let's let's think outside of the box. When everyone else is like, what are we gonna do? Da-da-da-da-da. You know, it's the it's the entrepreneurs with the ADHD symptoms who will come in and say, oh, well, let's do this wholly different idea, which is often, you know, massively it's great for being first to market. It's great for being somebody who is able to sort of cut through the competition. That whole blue ocean, red ocean thing is really helpful. And then in terms of action, a lot of times when you are a business owner, that impulsivity has been great. You know, other people are dithering around, like, oh, I don't know, we should ask stakeholders, et cetera, et cetera. And you're going, let's do it, let's do it by next Friday. And you've got that hyper focus when you're, you know, directed to actually get it done. And so you can push a massive amount of movement through when you are motivated. And so often for business owners, that is the those strengths are what got them to that million-dollar business that they have now. The only problem is now the business is okay. There is nothing on fire, on fire. Like, yes, there's still all these fires, and we can talk about how to prioritize with that. But we're in the building phase. And the building phase is often where people really, really struggle when they have these symptoms.

Tom DuFore:

How do you kind of help work through some of those things or process some of that?

Skye Waterson:

Well, the first thing we do is we look at focus. So generally, people will be very unfocused. They'll have kind of like half a dozen things going on, especially, you know, you you start the day, you open your email, there's like tons of people talking to you. There's lots of things that are on fire. The first thing we want to do is prioritize what is truly important, what is truly urgent. Then we want to go in and say, okay, what is your actual 80-20 task? What is the thing that's gonna, the 20% that's gonna give you 80%? Usually it's a mundane thing that you don't want to do. And so then from there we go, how do we get you to do it? We have a focus formula that we've taught for years that works really effectively. And then we help build this into your team processes as well.

Tom DuFore:

Thinking of the tasks to be delegated. My son has ADHD, and sometimes there's a struggle in kind of figuring out what do I actually prioritize in going through certain tasks and things. So I'd imagine, and I've seen this in other owners, sometimes there's a challenge with figuring out what do I prioritize? How do you help folks sort through that?

Skye Waterson:

Yeah, I have a process actually, and and I give this one away. If you message me success on Instagram at unconventional organization, I give it to you because I don't think anyone should be overwhelmed. But the process essentially is you go through and first thing you want to do is you want to grab a document or a journal, something you're gonna be able to reuse, because we don't believe in writing a list and then ditching it. And you want to go ahead and just write down everything that is in your brain. So don't go to your emails, don't go to your extra task list, just what is in your head, what's cluttering up your brain right now. All the tasks, whether they're home tasks or work tasks, anything like that, write them all down. Once you have those, you want to go in and you want to say, okay, what is truly urgent for today? As in, if I didn't do it today, there would be a negative external consequence. And one of the ways, again, with ADHD, we can be a little bit tricky to really understand this. And so a metaphor that I use is the waiting room metaphor. So if you your day went sideways and you ended up in a waiting room, that was your day. Uh, what would this what are the things you would still do on your phone, or the things you would message someone and say, Hey, I can't do this tomorrow because I'm not going to be prepared? Those are truly urgent. Nothing else is truly urgent for tomorrow. And then from there, you know, and I've done this with hundreds of people, we never get more than five. Even the people who swear they had 200 never get more than five. And then from there, you actually have time and you can use that time to say, okay, what are the needle movers? What is that 80-20 task and find time for that? And we have a more in-depth process in, you know, seven days, et cetera, et cetera. But essentially, this is how you prioritize, especially when you have ADHD symptoms.

Tom DuFore:

Thank you for sharing that. And listening to you talk through that made me think a little bit about we work with companies that franchise our business, and now they're a franchise or they eventually will have franchisees. Well, there's probably a good chance either subordinates or employees or some of these franchisees in the system, now you're managing a key person at your company that may exhibit ADHD type symptoms. How do you help a leader support their staff or support their franchisees in this type of a situation?

Skye Waterson:

It's a great question. And I, you know, I've worked with the New Zealand government on this exact problem because they, you know, especially when ADHD became something that people were looking into more. Like, what do we do? How do we manage the managers with ADHD? When it comes to these kinds of strategies, the biggest thing is really understanding the struggles that they're gonna have. So, understanding, for example, that if you just send out an email with a reminder, like, oh, can you do this on Wednesday? Da-da-da-da, it's probably not gonna get done. It's hard for those things to be processed. It's really important to have systems and processes system that they can see and use easily. One of the things that I teach for my my entrepreneurs, and I also recommend if they're working with their own team, is to build an SOP pipeline. So it's not just a document, like a big book of stuff. There's actually a visual pipeline of, you know, acquisition, lead flow, you know, first value, retention, things like that, where they can see these are the different pieces of the business that you value, and then they can link in there. And I just use Mira, but there's lots of different ways you can do it. They can link in there to the SOP for that particular task. Things like that, making a little bit more visual and working on, and this isn't, you know, I have mentors who say this all the time. This is not for me, but understanding is it a people problem or is it a process problem? But really focusing if it's a process problem, then we should be going into that SOP pipeline, looking at, you know, red, orange, green, like what SOPs have we missed, and having a cadence with the team to say, okay, we're gonna look at this on a, you know, when when someone is an entrepreneur and they're working with their own team, I highly recommend a weekly basis where they look at the pipeline and they review it. Obviously, you guys will be more experts on that and how that would work with a franchisee, but really having that connection rather than relying on ad hoc emails, because that is not gonna grow your team's understanding. It's usually gonna lead to a lot of overwhelm.

Tom DuFore:

That really helps out a lot. And thinking about, okay, this is great and helping sort out delegation, helping get uh someone a little bit more organized. What about on the other side where someone maybe is at a burnout phase or maybe helping someone avoid or prevent that kind of burnout?

Skye Waterson:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think this is so important because especially when you struggle with ADHD symptoms, burnout is often on the other side of it. Because usually what people will say to themselves is they'll say, Well, I just need to work harder. They'll listen and they'll be like, that's cool, Sky, but mostly I need to work harder. I am the poster child for that. When I was in academia, I worked so hard up until the end of my master's. I was working three jobs, contracted with multiple universities, that when I graduated my PhD, I just left and worked as a cashier for a year in a bakery. Like I could not do it. So trust me, I have done the um, you know, just try harder, just push through method to its extreme. And, you know, one of the things that I see often is that you will reduce burnout when you build systems that work for your brain. So if you are in a position where you're saying, I just need to give myself, give that extra 10%, give that extra 20%, usually what people are doing is they are working as hard as they can. And that goes for you, and that often goes for your team as well. It doesn't necessarily always look like the same in terms of output, but when you look at it in terms of input and the amount of times they spend procrastinating, because that is the time. And yes, I see you spending all day not doing the thing and then doing it right before dinner and coming home late and being like, oh, work was crazy. You know, that that kind of thing, it's still effort. So if we can build a system where everything flows more effectively, your time is used more effectively, you're not gonna have that. You're gonna be able to be more present, you're gonna spend more time with family, and you are going to be able to reduce that burnout risk.

Tom DuFore:

As someone's tuning in and says, Sky, love what you're sharing. What's the best way for someone to get in contact with you or find out more information?

Skye Waterson:

Yeah, so you can find me at unconventional organization or on Instagram at unconventional organization, you can DM me success, and I'll send you the focus routine to help you go from overwhelmed to focused. And then if you are in a position where you want to listen to another podcast, I have the ADHD skills lab. We focus on helping entrepreneurs who want the strategies, want the research, and just want the next steps.

Tom DuFore:

This is a great time in the show, and we make a transition. We ask every guest the same four questions before they go. And the first question we ask is Have you had a miss or two on your journey and something you learned from it?

Skye Waterson:

Yeah, yeah. Well, we had a ton of misses. I think the first thing I'd say is like before this business, I was the co-founder of a frozen food business that I ran with my boyfriend now husband. The big miss for us was the business got shut down during COVID. So we spent years setting up, you know, there's a lot of regulation that goes into running food, making finding a kitchen, renting a kitchen is very expensive to do. And then setting it up and, you know, making it all great, A-grade, et cetera, et cetera, only to have the whole thing shut down. So that was a huge, you know, ultimately it was a good because the business I think that we run now is is just a better fit and it just makes more sense. It's that first business energy where you're like, I would have done it differently. But it was it was a miss in terms of actually the success that we were looking for, but it was definitely a benefit in terms of the amount of learning that we got out of it.

Tom DuFore:

Excellent. Well, let's look on the other side. Let's talk about a make or a highlight or two you'd like to share.

Skye Waterson:

Yeah, well, highlights for me, I think, have been really focusing in on business owners who have ADHD symptoms. So when I started this business specifically, we're working with professionals and then being able to focus in on business owners and bring in business strategies, which is something I'm really passionate about and I've been doing for a long time, has been amazing. It's been amazing to see the wins that people have been getting. We've had people triple their revenue from the previous month. We've had people get the sponsorships they need to race overseas or, you know, get grants to be able to, you know, really push their business forward in terms of growth. So that would be the things that I really appreciate is the wins that other people have been able to get and the ability to, you know, have a stable business that they don't have to spend all their time on.

Tom DuFore:

The name of the show is Multiply Your Success. And we like to ask have you used a multiplier to grow yourself personally or professionally or any of the organizations you've run?

Skye Waterson:

Yeah, well, I mean, I love podcasting. I love going on podcasts, I love talking on podcasts. I was so nervous, you know, when I started podcasting, I think a couple of years ago. And it's just been an amazing experience. Everyone has been so lovely. And especially when I first started, I remember there were a few podcasts that just so many responses from so many people saying, This is me, this is my experience. So the ultimate multiplier for me has been connecting with other people and talking about what I do.

Tom DuFore:

And the final question we ask every guest is what does success mean to you?

Skye Waterson:

Success for me means having stability, the ability to support my family, to do what I want while I support my family, and to help other people do the same.

Tom DuFore:

And Sky, as we bring this to a close, is there anything you are hoping to share or get across that you haven't had a chance to yet?

Skye Waterson:

Not really, but I think I just want to remind people: you know, if the systems you're using aren't working, chances are you need different systems. And it's not just you doing badly. Because so often we can we can tell ourselves that. And it's sad because it's actually really simple to get systems that are going to work better for you.

Tom DuFore:

Sky, thank you so much for a fantastic interview. And let's go ahead and jump into today's three key takeaways. So, takeaway number one is when she talked about the challenges for entrepreneurs and leaders with ADHD. And some of those examples are forgetting things that you've been told, time blindness, impulsivity, not knowing what to do and how to delegate it, and having challenges with delegation. And takeaway number two are the advantages. So here's some really great things that someone with an ADHD brings creative thinking and thinking outside the box. It's great to help you be the first to market or come up with a brand new product or service. And she said that action impulsivity is also a positive because it gives you the ability to get things done and push for a lot of action and see something through in a short window of time. Takeaway number three is when she talked about what happens when you're managing staff or managing franchisees with ADHD. And she talked about having clients build an SOP pipeline to see all of the pieces and how they sync together. And she talked about making that a visual pipeline. I thought that was a great idea and asking the question is it a people problem or a process problem? And now it's time for today's win-win. So today's win-win is tied to the very end of takeaway number three, which is where we talked about is it a process problem or a people problem? And what she said is if your systems are not working, it's likely your systems, and it's not you. And she said, sometimes people think, oh, I just have to work harder. And she gave that example of herself when she was finishing her PhD, and she kept pushing, pushing, pushing and burned out. And she said she took a year off of just doing almost anything and just took a job working at a local coffee shop or local bakery that she had said and talked about. And so I just think the win-win is recognizing that sometimes grinding it out or quote, working harder is not always the solution. It's sometimes taking a look back to see what is the process here. Maybe you can improve on that. That's the episode today, folks. Please make sure you subscribe to the podcast and give us a review. We always greatly appreciate those. And remember, if you or anyone you know might be ready to franchise their business or take their franchise company to the next level, please connect with us at BigSkyFranchise Team.com to schedule your free, no obligation consultation. Thanks for tuning in, and we look forward to having you back next week.

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Tom DuFore

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