The Real Cost of the ADHD Tax: The Money, Time & Energy You’re Losing Every Week

[00:00:00] Hey there. Welcome back to The Easily Distracted Entrepreneur. I'm your host, Amber Holley. So I have a quick question for you before we get into today's episode. I want you to think back on this last week. I want you to think about the week, not the big stuff, the quiet stuff, the notification you swiped away and then completely forgot about, the software subscription you've been paying for since last spring that you haven't opened once, the hour that you spent Monday morning trying to find a file that was somewhere.

[00:00:37] I'm an extremely organized person. This is part of what I help people with in my work as a coach. And, uh, if you're in any of my memberships or worked with me, you know I have my stuff dialed in. But even I had a thing on Monday where I'm doing a project for a client, helping her with her- setting up her operations and, onboarding sequences, and I thought to myself, "Oh, I have something that would be useful for what she's needing that I've already created for myself.

[00:01:10] Let me go grab that and just make a copy." Like, work smarter, not harder, right? I started looking for that, and when I tell you the frustration, because, again, I do consider myself an extremely organized person, , I guess the rules, except for sometimes, I searched high and low and could not find that document.

[00:01:30] I tried thinking about every which way I could have named it. I thought it was in one of my dashboards. Like, I looked everywhere. Two and a half hours later, I was like, "Forget it. I will just create it," and it took me about 30 minutes. So it happens to all of us, right? So here's the question I want us to sit with today.

[00:01:54] What did this week actually cost you? Not just in dollars, in time, in energy, in the mental load of carrying it all, because there's a name for this, and it's called the ADHD tax. And today we're gonna take a look at it honestly, all three layers of it, not to make you feel bad, but because you can't address something if you haven't actually seen it or you haven't identified it for yourself.

[00:02:23] So what is the ADHD tax exactly? Simply put, it's that extra cost that ADHD imposes on everyday life and business, the premium you pay for having a brain that works differently in a world that wasn't really designed for it. And if you're listening to this show, you've probably felt this your whole life, even if you didn't have a name for it until now.

[00:02:47] Here's the reframe I want you to hold onto before we go any further. This is not a character flaw. It is not laziness. It is not evidence that you're bad at business or bad at adulting. It's structural. It's a predictable, measurable cost that comes with the way that your brain processes the world. And the first step before anything else is just to see it clearly.

[00:03:12] So let's break it down, because in my experience, most of us are only ever aware of, like, one piece at a time, but there are actually three layers. There's money, there's time, and there's energy

[00:03:24] So we're gonna start with the one that I think most people probably have noticed. It's the most obvious one, and that is money. Late fees because an invoice sat in the wrong folder and you didn't see it until the penalty had already hit. Subscriptions that keep quietly renewing for tools you stopped using six months, maybe a year, maybe two years ago.

[00:03:52] Repurchasing something you already own because you couldn't find it, and buying a new one was faster than looking. The impulse buys. I know you know what I'm talking about. The course, the app, the system that was going to be the thing that finally fixed everything, and then the hyperfocus wore off, and it joined the graveyard.

[00:04:12] Uh, I've talked extensively about this in many of the podcast episodes. , Definitely mine shows up in my course buying. And, you know, you learn this as a therapist especially. It's like you have that stress, that feeling, that anxiety. You buy the thing. It's kinda like when somebody books an appointment, and then you feel the relief, like, "Oh, I have the answers," or, "Oh, there's, there's something that's gonna handle it."

[00:04:42] And then you literally completely forget about it and move on to the next thing. I have not opened so many of my courses. I can't even tell you. And I have tried repurchasing. So I, I have a deep appreciation for people who have their courses set up to not allow the same person to buy the course twice because, 'cause I'm probably not gonna ask for the refund.

[00:05:07] I'm probably not gonna follow through at that level or even catch it. Um, so I have so appreciated that. Um, and now I do have a system, but still, like the money tax one is real. And then there's the opportunity cost, the follow-up email that never went out, the proposal that went out three days late, the client who moved on while you were in a spiral about whether the email sounded weird.

[00:05:32] It, it all adds up. Even roughly, what are you looking at per week, per month? I'm not asking you so you can feel terrible. I'm asking because making it real is the first step. Then there's the time tax. This one sneaks up on people, and we already know as ADHDers, like, our relationship with time is very different.

[00:05:57] This one's sneakier and honestly, often bigger. The transition drag, so when you finish one task and it takes you 45 minutes to actually start the next one, not because you're lazy, but because your brain needs a runway and you haven't set things up to support needing those transitions. So you haven't built in the buffer, so you're constantly running behind or you are doing too much task switching, which again, just eats away your day.

[00:06:27] The search task, as I talked about, the time spent every week looking for things, files, notes, emails, the actual physical object you put somewhere logical. It was really logical at the time, and now you cannot find it. Add that up across a week and it's a significant number. Redoing work that you already did because you lost it or because you'd forgot you had done it, or because past you put it somewhere present you cannot locate.

[00:06:56] Decision loops, so circling around the same choice four times because your brain won't let it land. That's not indecision necessarily. That's a real executive functioning challenge, and it burns up time every single day I see this all the time with my clients where there's no buffer between sessions or things that they have to attend, meetings.

[00:07:21] And there's also, like, no understanding of the actual transition time that's needed or not really paying attention to all the things that have to be happening. And so somebody will say, "Oh, I'll be there in 30 minutes," and then they're actually there an hour later. Showing up constantly 20 minutes late to everything, and then feeling like you can't get the value out of meetings or trainings because you feel like you're already behind.

[00:07:49] You come in feeling you're behind. And then, of course, you know, the, "I don't wanna ask a question because maybe it was already talked about before I got here" thing, when really it could be a totally valid question. Uh, it all adds up. And if you listened to the last episode on time blindness, this is that in action.

[00:08:11] Those lost hours aren't a sign that something is wrong with you. They're a symptom of how your brain processes time and also having a lack of systems. But you cannot solve a symptom you have not named yet. And then there's the energy tax. So this is a layer that most people don't talk about as much.

[00:08:32] It's the one that makes everything else harder to fix. Masking, so the energy that you spend in every call, every meeting, every client interaction, performing a version of yourself that looks and sounds neurotypical. It doesn't show up on a time sheet, but it depletes the exact same tank. The emotional labor of managing shame around the same reoccurring problems, forgetting the same thing again, losing the same kind of thing again.

[00:08:59] The internal beat down that follows the shame spiral, that costs something too. And the cognitive overhead of holding 100 open loops in your head because nothing has a reliable home. The constant low-level hum of everything that is unfinished, untracked, and unresolved

[00:09:18] This one really shows up for me after, like, having visitors in my home, you know, like staying with me or even my kids' birthday parties because it's on top of all the day-to-day normal stuff that I'm managing and taking care of and keeping clear. It's the logistics of planning and setting up a successful birthday party or, you know, ensuring that your guests feel welcome and have everything they need, and I love doing all of that.

[00:09:51] Like, I enjoy it, so it's not even a not enjoying thing. But afterwards, there's definitely a very... Like, I hit the wall, right? And that's because of, like, all that extra stuff that, that energy that goes into doing it all and, and again, trying to mentally hold it because it is harder for us with our executive functioning.

[00:10:16] It's extra draining. You know, I just, I've learned now just to give myself that space afterwards, but it's exhausting. So here's what I want you to hear. You're not tired because you're weak. You're not tired because you don't work hard enough. You are tired because you're running a more demanding operating system and doing it without the right support.

[00:10:37] That is not a personal failing. That is a systems problem, which the good news is that's fixable.

[00:10:43] Here's the thing about these three layers. They don't sit in separate buckets. They feed each other. The money hit creates shame. Shame drains energy. Low energy tanks your time management. Poor time management creates more money hits. That's the loop, and understanding it, really seeing it, is actually where the leverage is.

[00:11:03] Not because awareness magically fixes it, we all know that's not true, but because you can't interrupt a pattern you haven't identified yet. This is the kind of honest accounting that I talk about all of the time in the Inner Circle membership. In the coaching and workshops, it's what I call the assess phase.

[00:11:24] Before you can address anything, you need to see it clearly without the shame spiral on top. See it for what it is. The only thing that I'm gonna ask you to do this week is pick one layer: money, time, or energy, and just get curious about your own tax. Don't fix it yet. Don't spiral about it. Just notice it.

[00:11:46] Start to notice those patterns and try to separate judgment of yourself. That's your whole assignment. You can write down in, on a notebook page every time that it happens. So you're picking one of those layers and noticing throughout the week all the different ways it shows up.