While everyone talks about ADHD and time blindness, ADHD-ish host Diann Wingert spotlights the real bottleneck: working memory.

She unpacks what working memory is (and how it's not just short-term memory), why ADHD brains often struggle to keep pace in business, and why brain games probably won't fix the problem.

But it’s not all doom and gloom—Diann shares honest strategies that actually work, from building reliable external systems to reducing cognitive load with templates, checklists, and automation.

If you’re tired of forgetting your best ideas or fumbling through processes you’ve done a hundred times, this episode will empower you with practical tips to actually work.

What You'll Learn in This Episode:

1. Working memory vs. short-term memory: Get clear on the difference (hint: it’s not just about forgetting phone numbers!).
2. Where working memory trips up your business: From client calls that go haywire to onboarding step mix-ups — see if any sound familiar!
3. Why brain games aren’t your magic ticket: Diann gives it to you straight about apps that overpromise and underdeliver.
4. Practical, game-changing strategies: Discover ways to reduce your cognitive load and externalize what your brain shouldn’t have to hold onto (checklists FTW!).
5. How entrepreneurs with ADHD actually build smarter businesses: Find out why having to systematize things can become your secret advantage over neurotypical competition.

Actionable Strategies to Outsmart Your Working Memory

Build External Systems:

1. Use voice memos obsessively to capture ideas instantly.
2. Write everything down—client notes, tasks, processes.
3. Use checklists for multi-step processes, every single time.
4. Offload information for others; don’t be their external hard drive.

Automate and Template:

1. Batch similar tasks to minimize context switching.
2. Use templates and SOPs for recurring processes and emails.
3. Automate scheduling, reminders, and follow-up wherever possible.

Optimize Your Cognitive Capacity:

1. Prioritize sleep, exercise, and stress management—your working memory tanks when these are out of whack.
2. If you take ADHD medication, schedule your heavy-thinking work when it’s at peak effectiveness.
3. Try meditation to increase basic focus and reduce mental noise.

About the Host:

Diann Wingert (she/her) is a seasoned coach, consultant, and the creator/host of ADHD-ish. Drawing from her many years of experience as a former psychotherapist, business owner, and someone who thinks "outside the box," Diann is known for her straight-talking, no-nonsense approach to the intersection of neurodiversity and business ownership.

Resources Mentioned During the Episode

1. Tidy Cal - online scheduler to eliminate the email tango (lifetime offer)
2. Voxer - walkie-talkie app for voice notes (free)
3. Fathom - AI notetaker (free)
4. Dual N’Back brain training for working memory
5. Brain Workshop open source working memory training

Let’s put insight into action:

Ready to make your business less chaotic and way more effective? Pick ONE recurring task you’ve been trying to keep in your head and turn it into a system — make a checklist, create a template, whatever works for you. Your future self will thank you!

And if you loved this episode (or you’re new to ADHD-ish), follow/subscribe right now so you don’t have to remember to search for it next time.

For 1:1 customized help building ADHD-friendly systems that stick, check out Diann Wingert’s coaching at www.diannwingertcoaching.com.

© 2025 ADHD-ish Podcast. Intro music by Ishan Dincer / Melody Loops / Outro music by Vladimir / Bobi Music / All rights reserved.

So how many million dollar ideas have you lost between your brain and your notes app? Like you're in the shower, you have this incredible idea about restructuring your offer in a way that solves three problems at once. It's brilliant, it's clear, and you can see exactly how it would work. And by the time you've dried off and reached for your phone, it's gone. Poof, like it never even existed. Everyone talks about ADHD and time blindness, but nobody's talking about working memory, even though it's the thing that sabotages your client calls, your creative process and your ability to follow through on your own brilliant ideas.

So today we're going into the neuroscience of what's happening, where it shows up in your business, and most importantly, what you can actually do about it. Because, spoiler alert, brain games may be fun, but they're mostly bullshit and there are real strategies that work. Hey, boss. I'm Diann Wingert and this is Adhd-ish.

Okay, so before we get into where this screws with your business, let's talk about what working memory actually is. Because most people confuse it with short term memory, and they're not the same thing. Short term memory is just holding information briefly. Like someone tells you their phone number and you repeat it back to them. That's short term memory, working memory is different. It's not just holding information, it's holding it and manipulating it.

It's like your brain's scratch paddle. It's what you use when you're doing math in your head or following a conversation while also thinking about what you're going to say next. Or holding multiple pieces of information and comparing them to each other in order to make a decision. Think of it like the RAM in your computer. It's your active processing space and here's the problem.

ADHD brains are trying to run current programs on like 4 gigs of RAM when we actually need 16. And all of this is happening in your prefrontal cortex, which, fun fact, is the same part of the brain that's already struggling with executive functioning when you have ADHD. So we're asking the weakest part of our brain to do one of the most demanding jobs. The research is pretty clear on this. People with ADHD have significantly reduced working memory capacity compared to neurotypical brains, meaning we can hold fewer pieces of information at once and we can hold them for less time.

It's not that we're not trying hard enough or not paying attention well enough. Our brains literally have less capacity to work with. And here's what makes it even more frustrating, working memory is what you need for almost everything that really matters in business. Strategic thinking, you need to hold multiple scenarios in your head and compare them. Client conversations, you need to track what you're saying while also formulating your response. And project management, I mean, you need to hold the big picture and the details simultaneously.

So when your ADHD brain has limited working memory, it's not just, oops, I forgot something, it is a fundamental bottleneck that affects your ability to think strategically, communicate effectively, and execute on your ideas and nobody's fucking talking about it. Everyone is out here selling you planners and talking about how to manage your time. But if you can't hold enough information in your brain to make decisions, follow processes, or finish your own fucking thoughts, no planner on earth can fix that.

So I'm going to walk you through a handful of scenarios where this may be affecting you in your business. Because once you see it, you're going to recognize it everywhere that it shows up. And this is not to make you feel completely demoralized, it's so that you can use the strategies I'm going to share with you in just a few minutes. And I need to get specific here because I have a bad memory, it's just way too vague. Working memory issues show up in very particular ways in your business and once you see the pattern, you can't unsee it.

Knowledge is power. So here we go with the top six ways that I see working memory deficits affect my coaching clients. Client conversations are the biggie. You're on a sales call or initial consultation with a potential client. They're explaining their situation, they've got three different revenue streams. One of them is profitable, but they're bored out of their mind with it. One of them they love, but it's kind of inconsistent. And one is hemorrhaging money, but they're emotionally attached to it.

Oh, and they've got a team structure problem where nobody knows who's responsible for what and oh yeah, and a cash flow issue. So you're nodding, you're taking notes, you're fully present and then they stop and say, so what do you think? And your brain just like blue screens on you. You literally cannot hold all of those pieces in your head long enough to synthesize them into a coherent response. You can remember the first thing they said or the last thing they said, but the middle three things, gone.

So you're either frantically throw scrolling through the notes that you tried to take, which are probably unreadable, or reconstruct what they just told you or you're asking them to repeat themselves. None of which inspires confidence, you feel me? Now here's one that comes up all the time if you work with clients across multiple time zones like I do. Let's say you've got a client in London, a couple in California, one in New York and one in Berlin. Somebody emails you and says, hey, can we meet Tuesday at 2pm my time? Your brain has to hold their current time zone, convert it to your time zone, remember what day it is, check your calendar and respond.

That's like five pieces of information that you need to juggle at the same time and for a lot of ADHD brains, that's just too many. So you say, sure, add it to your calendar incorrectly and then end up either double booked or on a Zoom call at 5am wondering what the hell happened. Then there's the “why did I come in here” phenomenon. So you're working on a client proposal and you realize, oh yeah, I need to check something in my CRM. So you open your CRM and then you have absolutely no idea what you're looking for. So you go back to the proposal to jog your memory, return to the CRM and gone again. This can literally go on three or four rounds.

You start cursing yourself for being distracted, but that's not it. You just can't hold the “what am I looking for” and the “where am I looking for it” in your brain at the same time. Following processes without writing down every step is another fan favorite. You've done your client onboarding like 47 times, but every single time, you got to pull up that checklist because you cannot hold the sequence in your head. Send the contract, wait for the signature, send the invoice, schedule the kickoff call, send the intake form, grant access to the project management system, and so on and so on.

If you try to do that from memory, I promise you you're going to 100% skip a step and it won't even be the same step every time which somehow makes it worse. Then there's the mental math during sales conversations. So let's say somebody's looking to get a discount and says, well, what if I paid for six months up front instead of monthly? They're looking for you to make a deal, understood. So you need to calculate the amount, remember what your cash flow needs are this quarter, and decide if it works for you.

Plus maybe figure out what a reasonable discount would be that they would say yes to but you can't hold all those numbers and do the math at the same time. So, you either freeze up and most likely agree to something you shouldn't have or say, let me get back to you on that for something that would probably take 10 seconds to figure out. And it only gets worse when you forget to follow up. And here's the one that drives me batshit crazy, losing ideas between conception and execution as I talked about at the very beginning of the episode.

You have a brilliant idea while you're making coffee or feeding your dog, so you walk to your home office to write it down. By the time you sit down and flip open your laptop, it's g, g, g, g gone. The idea has completely evaporated. I like to think I write things in my brain with disappearing ink. Or you've got multiple ideas and you can remember that you had three really good ones, but somehow you can only retrieve one of them. The other two are somewhere in your brain, but you have no way to access them.

I had a client once who told me that he started keeping a running note on his phone called Ideas I Had and Lost. Like, just little snippets of ideas he knew he'd had but he couldn't remember them. Things like that thing about pricing or yeah, that workshop idea from Tuesday. He figured if he wrote it down that he's had an idea, maybe his brain would eventually cough it back up. Spoiler, it didn't. This is your working memory failing you in real time, and it's costing you money, credibility, and opportunities.

All right, now here's where I'm going to piss some people off assuming I haven't already, that is. But I'd rather tell you the truth than have you waste money, time and opportunity cost on shit that sounds too good to be true but because it is, you ready? You cannot dramatically expand your working memory capacity. There, I said it, I'm sorry. I know that's not what you want to hear. I definitely wish it wasn't true, but the research on working memory training, and there is a lot of it, is not promising. And nobody wishes it was as badly as I do because deficits in my working memory are one of my top, most frustrating ADHD traits.

Yeah, there are brain training apps and programs out there and they claim they'll expand your working memory. And look, if you practice working memory tasks, you will get better at those specific tasks. But here's the catch, that improvement doesn't transfer to the other areas of your life. It's like practicing juggling and expecting to get better at tennis or fencing or playing the cello, the skills don't generalize. There was this huge meta analysis done a few years ago that basically looked at all of the research on working memory training, and the conclusion was, it doesn't work the way people think it does. You're not expanding your capacity. You're just getting better at the specific game you're playing.

So if you've bought one of those apps and you're wondering why your business still feels chaotic even though you can remember longer and longer sequences of numbers, that's why you taught your brain a party trick, you didn't actually increase your ram. Now, before you throw your phone across the room, there is good news. You can absolutely reduce the load on your working memory and work with what you've got more effectively. And honestly, that's way better anyway, because here's what I've learned from working with neurodivergent entrepreneurs for over a decade.

The goal isn't to fix your brain, it never is. I mean, we can't for one thing. The goal is to build a business that doesn't require you to hold everything in your head in the first place. Doesn't that just make your shoulders lower just a bit? Neurotypical people can build businesses that rely on their brains to remember shit, good for them. They're storing client details, processes, ideas, even commitments in their heads. And it works fine for most of them most of the time, because their working memory can handle it but you, you can't do that. And honestly, you shouldn't envy them for that. Because when you build a business that doesn't rely on your brain's limited ram, you're building a business that's actually more scalable, more reliable, and more efficient than most of your neurotypical competitors.

How about that? And if we can't expand our working memory, then we've got to figure out a workaround, right? We build systems that don't require it, we offload the cognitive load, and we optimize the limited capacity that we do have. So let me break this down into three specific categories of what actually works, because I know you've been waiting for it. External systems, reducing cognitive load, and the few things that actually do help your working memory function better, starting with external systems. And I love to think of my external systems as my second brain.

Now, first, everything, and I mean every freaking thing, goes into a system immediately the first time. Don't wait until you've done it a hundred times from scratch. Just assume, if you've got a sustainable and perhaps scalable business, if you do it once, it needs a system because you will be doing it again. You don't build the system when you have time. You do it immediately. And here's a few ways that I do and I teach to my clients. First of all, I use voice memos, like obsessively. The second I have an idea, I pull out my phone and record it. I don't trust myself to remember it for the 30 seconds it might take for me to walk to my office.

And here's the thing, I'm right not to trust my memory. Now before each client call and if you happen to be a client listening now, you know. I review what we've been working on right before each call, every single time, even if we exchanged Voxer messages yesterday. Because I cannot hold your business model, your current challenges, and what we're focusing on today in my head simultaneously. Even if you were my only client, which you're not so I don't try. I write it down, I review it, and I show up looking like I have my shit together, most of the time.

Now for coaching calls, which are virtual and recorded on Google Meet. I also have an AI transcription app called Fathom riding along. I will link to this in the show notes. Fathom records the call, creates a summary, and even captures next steps and action items for both the client and me. I don't have to trust my memory. I don't have to trust my client's memory. And by the way, all my clients have ADHD so this is a good thing. And we both have access to that information immediately after the call.

Here's another thing I do, process checklists, check lists for everything that has multiple steps and I mean everything. My client onboarding checklist has like 12 steps on it, I've done it dozens and dozens of times. I still use the freaking checklist every single time because if I don't, I'll skip something. It might be step four this time and step nine next time, but something will get missed. And this is a big one and if you have difficulty with boundaries, this one may take you a little while to get fully installed.

I do not hold information for other people. If someone says I'll send you that document or remind me to tell you about X next time, I will immediately say, send me that in writing. Send it an email, shoot me a Voxer. I usually don't say the quiet part out loud, but if I did, I'd say, I am not holding your shit in my brain. I have enough trouble holding on to my own. But do not hold information for other people because you are stressing your brain out in a way that it just makes you look bad and they don't even know why.

All right, now we're going to move into things you can do to reduce your cognitive load. These are not new, they are not original, but I promise you, if you've ever resisted doing them and you have difficulties with working memory, I really sincerely hope you'll give them a second thought. Batch similar tasks if you don't, you're constantly context switching. So if you're doing sales calls or initial consultations, do them all on the same day. If you're writing content, block out the time and write three pieces in one sitting. Every time you switch contexts, you're dumping your working memory and having to reload completely different information. It's exhausting and inefficient.

Here's another one, say no to holding information for other people. Now, I know I already said it, but it's worth repeating because people will try to use you as their external hard drive. Can you remind me about this later? Nope, write it down. Now, I'm not being selfish or rude, I am protecting my cognitive resources. So whether you say it a little sheepishly, whether you say it with humor, you come up with your own style. But say no to holding information for other people, it'll slow you down.

Automate. Automate. Automate. Automate everything you possibly can. Use an online calendar link instead of back and forth emails for scheduling. Canned responses in your email that you can judge up a little bit to personalize them. Auto reminders for tasks, every little thing you automate is one less thing taking up space in your limited working memory. Now, there are several things that you can do that actually do improve your working memory. They're not the games, by the way. And let me be clear, they're not going to expand your capacity, that's impossible. They will help you use what you have more effectively.

The first is meditation now look, I know, I know a lot of people recommend meditation for ADHD, and I'm one of them and you might be thinking that's bullshit, but here's the thing. Meditation is not about clearing your mind or becoming more Zen. Do I seem Zen to you? For working memory, it's about practicing focus and reducing the mental noise that's eating up your ram. So even five or ten minutes a day really makes a difference. Now, I've been Buddhist for about 25 years, so I may be biased, but there's a lot of research that backs this up. And by the way, you obviously don't have to change your religion to benefit. If you're on ADHD medication, think about the timing. Your working memory is going to function better when your meds are at peak effectiveness.

So if you've got some strategic planning or other deep work to do, schedule it for when your medication is working, not when it's wearing off. This seems obvious, but a lot of people don't even think about it. Next up, sleep. Now, I hate this one because it's so unsexy and everybody says it, but your working memory tanks when you're sleep deprived, like dramatically. So if you think you're doing well on five hours of sleep, you're already operating at reduced capacity before you start your day. Don't stack the deck against yourself. Think of it this way, sleep is strategy.

Then there's exercise, I know, boring and basic, but it's true. Physical activity improves cognitive functioning across the board, including working memory. You don't have to be a gym rat. Even a 20 minute walk at a brisk pace makes a hell of a difference. There are a ton of walking paths and hiking trails where I live, so I just ordered a weighted vest so that my walks count even more when it's all I can do. Then there's stress management.

When you're stressed, your brain prioritizes threat detection, not executive functioning, which means you're already limited working memory gets even more limited because your brain is busy scanning for danger. So whatever you do to help you manage stress therapy, medication, breathing exercises, just walking away from your computer, dancing in your living room or whatever, do that. And there is one specific working memory exercise that actually does have some research behind it. It's called dual and back training. I'm not going to explain it in detail because it's actually really complicated. I will drop a link to it in the show notes because there is some evidence that it can help.

There's also an open source version of it called Brain Workshop and I'm linking to that in the show notes as well. I personally found it boring AF, which is why I won't be doing it. But it is one of the few working memory exercises that shows some ability to transfer to other cognitive tasks. So if it's really important to you and you're really curious about it, rock on with your bad self. I got the links for you, but honestly, for me and for most of us, the real strategy is building systems so that you're not relying on your working memory in the first place. Now here's where this gets interesting from a business perspective.

When you radically accept that your working memory is limited and you build systems to compensate for it, you're actually building a better business than most of your neurotypical competitors. Don't you feel clever? Think about it. They're storing client information in their heads, they're remembering processes, they're holding onto ideas and trusting that they'll recall them. And most of the time, it works for them. But you know what it doesn't do? It doesn't scale. When their business grows, when they hire a team, when they take on more clients, their brain based system falls apart because you can't delegate what's only in your head.

You, on the other hand, had to externalize everything. Your processes are documented, your client information is in a system. Your ideas are captured, your decisions are templated. Which means when you want to scale, if you want to scale, you don't have to go back and build all that infrastructure. You already have it. You built it out of necessity. But it's the same infrastructure that every growing business eventually needs. See how smart you are? Your external systems are also more reliable than most people's brains. And by the way, that includes most neurotypical people's brains, a checklist doesn't forget steps. A CRM doesn't lose client details, a voice memo doesn't evaporate like your thoughts and in the shower.

So yeah, your working memory is limited. And yeah, that creates real challenges in your business. But it's also an invitation to build a business that runs on systems instead of on your brain's ability to remember shit. And in the long run, I call that a competitive advantage. So here's your action item for today. Pick one recurring task or process in your business that you've been trying to hold onto in your head and externalize it. Just one, make a checklist, create a template, set up a workflow in your project management software.

Whatever it is, get it out of your brain and into a system because your working memory is limited, and that's not going to change. But your business doesn't have to run on your brain's ram. It can run on systems that serve you. If you want support in building these kinds of systems for your business, that's just one of the ways I help my clients create more sustainable success. Visit my website at diannwingertcoaching.com and remember, Diann has a funky spelling, so you should click on the link in the show notes to make sure you actually get there. And if this is your first time joining me on ADHD-ish, welcome. And be sure to hit follow or subscribe in your podcast app so you don't have to remember to look for it again and hey, you're welcome.