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Welcome to Hacking youg ADHD. I'm your host William Curb, and I have ADHD. On this podcast. I dig into the tools, tactics and best practices to help you work with your ADHD brain. I've been thinking about the phrase I want to hit the ground running and how that's kind of how many of us try to start the year. I know it's how I felt and honestly in that first week of the year I was doing great. But then I got Covid that really threw a snag into things. With adhd, we tend to like to go fast with things we don't want to wait around, but that's usually not actually our best strategy. Going from one urgent task to the next can keep us motivated, but it can make it hard to get to the things that aren't urgent. In today's episode, we're going to be exploring how we use urgency as a drive to get more done, but how we also need to learn to make more time for those things that are important but not urgent. If you'd like to follow along on the Show Notes page, you can find that@hackingyouradhd. Alright, keep on listening to find out how we often mistake urgency for importance. It's incredibly easy to get caught up in the current of urgency, in the need to do more and more. Our internal messaging tells us that we have to do it all right now, that if we slow down that everyone else is going to pass us by. When we're doing this, everything tends to become a priority, but when everything is a priority, nothing is. Everything becomes equally as important as everything else, and we can't figure out what we actually need to focus on. I run into this issue frequently when I'm writing, where I'll be working on one section of an episode but get an idea for another and literally stop mid sentence of what I'm writing and jump over to work on that other section. Admittedly, this does work out great sometimes, but other times I come back to fragments of my previous sentences and have no idea where I intended to go with them. I can also have issues with the little red squigglies that appear all over my documents as I'm writing. Is it important that I fix those errors as they appear? Probably not, but does it feel important? Certainly. Also, just an aside here. I totally misspelled probably as poor b Ly while writing this section, and that's just a fantastic example of something that doesn't need to be a priority to be fixed, but absolutely feels like it anyway. What's Actually important while I'm doing my writing is just getting my ideas down first. I know this, but it's still hard to do, and this kind of issue comes up all over the place for us with adhd. One place I know I get this is when I'm trying to get my kids to clean their rooms. The tasks can be overwhelming for them because they don't know where to start. They're unable to prioritize and break the task down into what needs to happen. And admittedly, this happens to me as well. Certain cleaning and organization tasks aren't a big deal because I can just see what I need to do. But for other things, it can just become a series of moving stuff from place to place because I'm not prioritizing what needs to happen and in what order. And we all know that prioritizing things isn't nearly as easy as it sounds. While it seems like I should just be able to do the most important things first, it can be incredibly difficult for me to always identify what is genuinely important to do. And this is also confused by the fact that there are things that feel important but in fact are not such a big deal. Like those red squiggles under my misspelled words. I know for the final product I don't want to have misspelled words. So it is in fact somewhat important. But it's not the most important thing, especially because I might not even be using the sections that need the corrections. There are many parts of my writing that just get cut, so correcting those sections is entirely unnecessary. One of our biggest enemies here is urgency. When something is urgent, that feels like it should be important. And in many cases urgency is going to be the driving factor in what needs to be prioritized. But urgency itself does not always confer importance. In my mind, urgency implies that something needs to get done right now, and that implies that it must be important, right? Because if it wasn't important, then it wouldn't need to get done asap. But this is something that I've struggled with understanding for a while because I know that something can be urgent but not strictly important. Certainly I see edge cases where something like answering a text, but again, that only becomes urgent to answer if it's important that I answered in a timely fashion. I think with adhd, our bigger issue is that it feels like that if we don't get to something now, then we're just not ever going to get to it at all. We become aware of the dishes in the sink and we know that we can do them this instant. So it feels like that's what we have to do. Even if we're literally getting ourselves ready to leave the house in the next five minutes, we're time blind, so it feels like something we can squeeze in there. I mean, honestly, how long does it really take? Well, probably longer than five minutes. And that's where our real issue with urgency lay. Not in planned tasks, but when something comes up that we can do right now and we think, well, that now is the time to do it. I'm reminded of a bit from Malcolm in the Middle where Hal finds a burnt out light bulb and he goes to get a new bulb, but finds the shelf sitting on it unstable, and so gets a screwdriver to fix that, but the drawer with the screwdriver is squeaking and he grabs a can of WD40 to fix that, but the can is empty, so he needs to go to the store to pick up more. But the car is making a funny noise. And so then we have a scene where Lois comes in to ask Hal to change the light in the kitchen while he's fixing the car and he just yells, what does it look like I'm doing? It's a great bit. And I'll link it to the show notes so you can see what I'm talking about. And what it really helps illustrate is just how urgency can be a trap. We just wanted to do the one thing, but one thing led to another and we're 20 tasks away and doing something completely different now. But what's the right answer here? Do we simply skip fixing the shelf even though it should only take a couple of minutes to screw that bracket back in? Or do we add it to a list that we're never going to get to? The thing to look at here is what is genuinely urgent, what needs to happen right now so that everything else can still happen. The only thing from this Malcolm in the Middle example is you need to have light in the kitchen to do all the kitchen things. Sure, all the other things need to get done. The shelf needs to get fixed, the drawer needs some WD40, WD40 needs to be replaced, and absolutely the car needs to get worked on. But life can go on. Despite all of those issues. And what I was alluding to earlier, we also don't just want to forget these things or add them to a list that we never get to. And this is something that we frequently battle when we're dealing with these little issues. This means that what we need to be doing is building in time for These important but not urgent tasks. And I know this isn't easy because most of the time we're riding by the seat of our pants and we feel like we can only focus on what needs to happen right now. Part of what's going on here is that with adhd, we tend to need a little extra motivation to do things we don't want to do those boring tasks. But you know what spices up those tasks a bit? A big looming deadline. Honestly, it's how I get through a lot of my writing for this podcast. I quite literally am writing this on the same day that I'm planning to get this episode to my editor. And that's not especially unusual. And while this works for me, getting my episodes out mostly on time, it also makes it incredibly hard for me to get ahead when I'm sick. I either have to work through my illness or I have to post a rebroadcast or, you know, skip the week. And the thing is, I absolutely could spend more time writing and build myself a little bit more Runway, but that doesn't work if I'm using this deadline method to create that drive to do more. And this is definitely something I'm going to be working on in this year trying to build that Runway. And so I'm going to need to work on figuring out how to get some more of my important but not urgent work done. As I said earlier, the key here is that we need to be building in this extra time for these important but not urgent tasks. This can be as simple as scheduling the time when we're going to be doing the thing. Often we think we're going to find time to do something, but I know I rarely find myself both having the free time and the desire to do those tasks. Having a specific time on my calendar can help me follow through with those intentions of doing those tasks, although I can still have some trouble with the desire to do those tasks. And so getting something on your calendar isn't always enough. As we said, these can be things that, sure, we want to do, but we might not have the drive to follow through on. One of the best ways we can start working on overcoming this is through some accountability. And this can come in a few different ways. One of the easiest is to find an accountability partner and let them know what you want to do and when you want to do it by, and then have them check back in with you. This creates an artificial deadline for your task, albeit one with fewer consequences. Now, if we're looking to get away from that deadline, modality However, a more effective method can come through bodily doubling or co working. In this, you're simply finding someone or a group to do your important but not urgent tasks with. You're letting them know what your intentions are and then you get to work. This can be online or in person. This is great for doing those cleaning tasks that you want to do or going through mail or email whatever your important but not urgent tasks are. I've been out of the habit recently, so perhaps this is the kick in the pants I need to get back at it. And at the core of all this is just our need to slow down. Often we're on this treadmill of urgency because we think we need to do more. ADHD can come with a lot of failure and that can lead us to believe that we're just behind in life. But everyone is on their own journey and I think this is an idea worth exploring more. So we'll be coming back to it next week. Thanks for sticking with me all the way to the end. Before you go though, let's do a quick rundown of Today's top tips. 1. Just because something feels urgent doesn't mean that it's actually important that we do it right that instant. 2. We often use deadlines to motivate ourselves into doing important things, but living deadline to deadline only allows us to work at things that are urgent and lets many things that are important but not urgent fall by the wayside. 3. Using accountability is a great way for us to follow through with our plans to complete all of our important but not urgent tasks. We can do this either through creating artificial deadlines or through co working. That's it. Thanks for listening. I'd love to hear what you thought of this episode. You can leave me a Message over@hackingyouradhd.com contact if you'd like links or to read this episode's transcript. You can find those on the show notes page@hackingyouradhd.com if you'd like to support the podcast. The best way is to share episodes with someone you think would get something out of it. Just click the Share button on your podcast player and send your bestie the link with something like Hey, I loved this episode of Hacking youg adhd. 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