Dr Jennifer Dall was told by a clinician in her fifties that she couldn’t possibly have ADHD. She had it her whole life. The diagnosis came late, after twenty-five years as an educator, after decades of building workarounds so effective that the system never noticed what was underneath them. The label wasn’t the problem. The decades without it were.
She now runs ADHD Holistically, a practice for women who were diagnosed late and are trying to build a business or career around how their brains work. She has also founded Curveball Press and is releasing four books in a single year. The structure of her work is itself an argument: she is not waiting for a traditional publisher or a conventional productivity model. She is building around what her brain can do.
This episode is worth your time whether or not you have an ADHD diagnosis. Much of what Dr Dall describes, including the deep focus that arrives on its own schedule and the to-do list that grows longer every time you look at it, shows up in many business owners who have never been tested. The systems she uses are built around how her brain works, and they transfer well to a lot of brains that don’t fit the standard model.
Why ADHD in women goes unrecognised for decades
The clinical picture of ADHD was built from research on boys: visible, external, disruptive behaviour that was difficult to miss in a classroom. Girls with ADHD typically present differently. The hyperactivity is internal, the disorganisation is hidden by compensation, and the coping mechanisms develop early enough that masking becomes automatic. The social cost of being labelled lazy or difficult is high, so the workarounds get very sophisticated very fast.
Dr Dall explains that women with ADHD often spend thirty or forty years doing the extra work required to appear functional. They build systems, over-prepare, and get diagnosed with anxiety or depression before anyone looks at what’s underneath. The anxiety is real, but it is frequently downstream of the ADHD: a brain working twice as hard to meet expectations that were never designed for it. Treating the anxiety without addressing what generates it is a partial fix at best.
By the time a late diagnosis arrives, the emotional response is rarely simple. Dr Dall describes it as relief and grief arriving together. Relief because the difficulty finally has a name. Grief because of what came before: the self-blame, the years of believing the problem was character rather than neurology, the paths not taken. That grief isn’t a detour in the process. It is part of the work, and in her practice, it is taken seriously rather than skipped past.
The ADHD tax: what it quietly costs
The “ADHD tax” is Dr Dall’s term for the overhead that comes with operating in systems built for a different kind of brain. Some of it is financial: late fees, duplicate purchases, subscriptions to tools that don’t get used. Some of it is relational: missed appointments, conversations dropped mid-thread, the slow accumulation of being perceived as unreliable. And some of it is professional, in the form of the energy required to perform consistency when your brain doesn’t naturally produce it in even, predictable output.
For business owners, this overhead compounds. Dr Dall draws a clear distinction between a motivation problem and a fit problem. If you are consistently struggling to complete tasks within a particular business model, the first question is whether the model was ever a good match for how you work, not whether you need more discipline. Willpower is a finite resource. It runs out faster for people managing executive function gaps without structural support. Fit is a design question, and design questions can be answered differently.
The grief-informed element of her practice exists because a late diagnosis doesn’t only change what you know about your brain. It changes the story you’ve told about yourself. Many of the women she works with have spent years believing they were disorganised, undependable, or simply not suited to certain kinds of work. Reframing that history takes time and typically needs support. Dr Dall’s view is that skipping that step produces a specific problem: people who understand the diagnosis intellectually but can’t yet act on it, because the old story is still running in the background.
The Three-Day Sprint: how to finish things when grinding for weeks doesn’t work
One of the most transferable ideas in this conversation is Dr Dall’s Three-Day Sprint system. The premise is straightforward: ADHD brains generate intense, focused output in short windows. Sustained, even-paced effort across extended periods is not only difficult; it degrades in quality and often ends in shutdown. The sprint is designed to stop fighting that pattern and start working with it.
Three days of concentrated work on a defined output. Then day four is rest, and that part is not optional. The rest is what makes the next sprint repeatable. Dr Dall is explicit: removing day four to produce more output doesn’t work. It depletes the conditions that made the sprint function in the first place. The system holds together because of the rest, not despite it.
This matters for how you structure your week and what you commit to. The default productivity model assumes that consistent, incremental daily output is what good work looks like. For some brains that is accurate. For others, that model produces guilt more reliably than results: a gap between the expected output curve and the actual one, with no framework for understanding why. If your output is more variable than the standard model assumes, designing your schedule around that variability is not a concession. It is competent system design.
Four books in one year: why she built a publishing imprint instead of chasing a deal
Dr Dall’s decision to self-publish through Curveball Press is a structural choice, not just a personal preference. Traditional publishing runs on low author control and extended feedback loops: from proposal to publication is often two or three years, during which you are producing work without knowing whether it will land. That model does not suit a brain that works in bursts and needs relatively fast signal to sustain momentum.
Self-publishing compresses the cycle. Feedback arrives sooner. Decisions stay with the author. The four-book product line is also a deliberate strategy: rather than a single title, she has built a body of work that addresses different facets of the same subject. Each book is complete on its own and useful individually, but they form a coherent set. That is a better match for how she works than a single extended project with a two-year runway and one release date at the end.
The underlying logic applies beyond publishing. When a standard industry structure is a poor fit for how you work, designing around it is often more productive than forcing compliance. That applies to publishing timelines, employment arrangements, business models, or any system someone else built for someone else’s brain. Dr Dall’s practice is built on that premise, and so is her imprint.
About Dr Jennifer Dall
Dr Jennifer Dall is a former educator of 25 years, a grief-informed neurodivergence specialist, and the founder of ADHD Holistically. She is also the founder of Curveball Press, an independent publishing imprint, through which she is releasing four books in a single year. She works with women who received a late ADHD diagnosis and are building businesses and careers that work with how their brains think.
Website: adhdholistically.com
Instagram: @adhd.holistically
LinkedIn: Dr Jennifer Dall on LinkedIn
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