The ADHD Habit That Is Silently Killing Your Business

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

About ADHD founders for ADHD founders.

Interesting in working together? You can click here to receive a free bottleneck audio session and learn more about what we do. https://www.unconventionalorganisation.com/unstuckaudiosession

Diagnosed with ADHD at the start of her PhD, Skye Waterson spent years researching what actually works and writing about it for thousands of founders. The pattern she kept finding: ADHD business owners don't have a focus problem, they have an operations problem, because the whole business runs through their own head. Now she and her husband, former programmer Robert Waterson, work as fractional COOs for those founders. They find the bottleneck, hire the fix, and build the system that holds.

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