← Overcoming Distractions-Thriving with ADHD, ADD
Overcoming Distractions-Thriving with ADHD, ADD
Prioritization for the Real World When You Have Adult ADHD
00:18:51
Loading summary
Transcript2 lines
- [00:08]
A
I'm Dave Greenwood and this is Overcoming Distractions. If you are an adult with adhd, a busy professional, an entrepreneur, a high achiever, or just need some strategies to navigate your adult adhd, you're in the right place. Who am I? I'm an entrepreneur with ADHD and the author of two books, Overcoming Distract and Overcoming Burnout. I coach and mentor people just like you, and together we navigate the ups and downs of adult adhd, from getting out of our own way to helping people just like you thrive in the workplace. That's what I do. Want more info on working with me? Hit overcoming distractions.com ready? Let's get to today's podcast.
- [01:06]
B
All right, everybody. Welcome back to Overcoming Distractions. It is your humble host, Dave, and I'm bringing you advice for you, the busy professional with the demanding career and all the other stuff going on that just happens to have adult ADHD or you think you have adhd. And again, as I've said before, you do not need an official piece of paper to hang out with us here. That's just the way we are. If you are new to Overcoming Distractions, welcome. This is your place. We don't talk about kids or college kids or schoolwork or anything. Well, we talk about schoolwork, the report cards that are stacked up or maybe you burn them, right? If you like me. So anyway, hey, I work with busy people just like you every day. If you're one of those and you feel like you need a little bit more than just a podcast episode or a book, just go to overcoming distractions.com, hit that 15 minute chat button and let's see if we're a good fit and see if I can help you solve some problems in some way. And if you want to support the podcast and you have gotten some value out of it, just go to buymeacoffee.com overcoming d and you can buy me one coffee, five, ten, whatever it may be. I live on coffee. I'm not ashamed to admit it. So, so there we are. So you know what a common thing for us when we get super busy, we got all these things going on in our life, the job or our business is cranking, a lot of things going on is prioritizing stuff. So you're busy, your calendar is full, your to do list is, is like hemorrhaging, right? You have adult adhd, yet somehow I think the most important work for some of us just still doesn't get done for some reason, right? And I think for those of us who are busy people with ADHD prioritization, it's not about like, discipline, I don't think. I think it's about clarity, one of my favorite words. And it's about kind of managing our energy around those kind of times that we dedicate to trying to get stuff done. I'm not a doctor, I'm not a therapist. I am an entrepreneur and a former executive who has lived with ADHD since childhood, has. Many of us have. And this is where I've kind of developed some kind of chops in this area. So if you're new here, this is kind of the advice that you get. So. But today I want to focus on, like, how to sort certain tasks. And I know that's a broad word, but we can sort them by importance, urgency, energy. I think in a way that actually works not only in real life, but for our ADHD brain. So why is prioritizing things so challenging for those of us with adhd? Right. Let me know if this, you know, these few things ring a bell. Everything feels urgent, right? Boom. I think we just described adult ADHD in a busy environment. Right. Everything feels urgent. I know. I still, I still feel that way. Sometimes we gravitate towards maybe what's interesting, sometimes what's easy, less friction. Or sometimes we gravitate towards the thing that might be, have some immediate rewards or dopamine hit. We overestimate what we can do in a day. And I think that that falls into that prioritizing category. I think sometimes we avoid high impact things that lack clarity or feel overwhelming. And I think a lot of times we, some of us mistake, maybe that's the wrong word, but maybe we mistake activity with actual progress. Right. And if you kind of think about it, prioritization isn't so much about organizing tasks. It's about deciding, you know, what matters most right now. And I think we can all agree that if we sit down at our desk, there are things that are more important than others in a given day. So. So here's the thing. You've probably heard of it. I think some things work for those of us with adhd, some don't. We're all different. So you choose. But some people I've talked to use what they call the Eisenhower matrix of the box. Right. And I'm going to go through this quick. Okay. Because sometimes it just doesn't work for all of us. And I think quite honestly, for some of us, it's a little complex and maybe we can make things a little easier. But this was like from Dwight D. Eisenhower. Right. Okay. And he, he prioritized things into kind of four boxes. Urgent and important. Important, not urgent, urgent, not important. And then the last one is neither. Okay. Hopefully all your stuff isn't neither. But I want to kind of, I want to move towards more of a ADHD friendly type of prioritization strategy, if you will. So ask yourself a few questions here. Does this truly move the needle in my favor? Okay. What happens if I don't do this? Okay, I don't like to live in fear, but sometimes if you don't do something or get something done or meet a deadline, there are consequences. And then that's a whole nother level of the ADHD brain that reacts to that. Right. So the first two, does this truly move the needle? What happens if I don't do this? And think about this, what level of focus does this require? I think sometimes we do kind of neglect, maybe if that's the right word, important but not urgent. But sometimes something is important but doesn't need to be done asap. So many things in our work and our business are important, but do they need to be done right this second? I would argue no. So here's another thing that maybe you can help sort tasks, things you need to do that might be a little more friendly to your busy ADHD brain. I think there's the must category, right? That's non negotiable. There are real consequences. But I think it's important at least at the beginning of the day to keep that to like one to three items, right? We've talked about our top three little list there. Go back and find that one or we can refresh in a new episode soon. About that. It's just what it says, top three. These are the three most important things I need to get done today. In the should category, maybe it is meaningful, but you have a little flexibility. All right, now flexibility is a little dangerous for those of us with adhd. Right? And then should maybe means that it might be helpful if you made a little bit of progress on this. And then the could little category here is, yeah, be nice to do, but maybe it's low impact, doesn't really move the needle forward. Does it need to be done? Yeah, but it's also maybe kind of easy to just knock off your list when 4 o' clock in the afternoon hits and you've got some low energy. Right. Maybe need to make a call or knock out a couple quick emails or, you know, some. But remember this, when it comes to prioritizing things, if everything is like a must have, then Absolutely nothing is. And then we get to five o' clock and we wonder what we did. So been there, done that. Here's the other thing I think we can also, if this works for you, is let's kind of decide high impact versus low impact. Right? High impact for many of us is things that generate revenue, things that do require decisions. Maybe that's for us or others or in your team strategy decisions. I know for many of you in marketing, you know, or pr, like I was and still am to some extent a creative that they're. There has to be time to develop a strategy. You don't just like come up with a marketing plan, right? Okay, you need time for strategy and that's high impact. You need to have those important conversations with those relationships that matter. Whether it's your clients, your customers, maybe it's a boss, a supervisor, whomever. And then the other high impact are the things that are on deadline, the, those deliverables. Some of the low impact things, I mean, maybe cleaning out your inbox. And yeah, some of us are, you know, maybe we mark that email unread for a few days. We do need to get back to it. But generally speaking, I think a good chunk of our inbox, especially just like deleting spam and all the other crap or the, or the things we like, got BCC'd on endlessly, right? That's low impact. Being a perfectionist, you know, or overdoing something, I think could possibly be categorized as low impact on that lines. Maybe some kind of minor reformatting or formatting of things, reacting. Right. Unless it's just something we forgot and it's on fire, then maybe that goes back to the high impact. And then I think things that maybe somewhere in your head feel productive but change absolutely nothing. Right? So, and I think going back to that top three, think about like one huge thing that you could get done today that will make like the biggest impact or difference. I mean, what would that be? Right. I think that's an important question for us to ask because I think sometimes we get kind of fatigued with that decision. So here's the other thing. Let's just get practical here. I don't care if you're a CEO or a business owner or you're in sales or whatever. If you're that busy professional, sometimes we have to just get as street smart as possible. I know what I'm about to say sounds simple, but just stick with me. And I think the first thing we do need to write everything down on a fresh legal pad. Or wherever something is going to be in your face and go ahead and say, oh, Dave's telling me to write stuff down, but I know there were, there are a bunch of you out there that still have challenges doing this. Okay. You know, keep nothing in your head, you know, externalize it. We just talked about that a week or two ago. Maybe you can circle or highlight anything that actually is really on fire does need to be done. This mission critical, the high impact things, right. Maybe you could color code these things too. Right. Maybe you can put a check mark or some other whatever next to things that maybe, maybe they create some long term value but don't need to be done right this second. All right. After that, maybe you choose those one to three must haves for today. You know, I'm going to plead guilty on this, but what I do, I keep like a running list of what I just talked about like on a larger piece of paper and I will take a post it or one of those kind of little pads you get at the hotel where like you write a phone number down or something, those little tiny pads and I'll put my three things right on there. Okay. I'm, I'm, I'm not shy about being as caveman as it gets when it comes to getting stuff done. So wherever that may be, maybe you need to schedule these things. Maybe you need to put them right in your calendar. Okay. I fully support that. And then protect that time at all costs. That's your time. Keep your word to yourself. Okay, next. We've talked about this. We don't just manage time, we manage the energy around it. We manage our nervous system too. Right. If we're getting stressed out and I think there's, when it comes to adhd, there's a number of zones of energy we might have, if you want to call it that, or levels. That's the high focus. Where we get the deep work done is a moderate where we're starting to kind of dwindle a little bit. And maybe that's, maybe you can jump in a meeting or maybe some more structured work that doesn't require like intense thought. And then there's the low stuff like the admin logistics again, those emails that you just gotta bang out real quick. So, but I think when it comes to prioritizing things, we got to match the urgency and maybe even the difficulty or the challenge level to the energy that we actually have. And I think we learn this, we do get in a rhythm. For me, I've said it a thousand times on here, it's the morning. I can kick ass in the morning. When I get to that mid afternoon, then my energy starts to fall off a cliff. So remember this. Prioritizing things is a skill. It's a muscle. We build with those systems and as simple as they get, doesn't matter. I don't think it's a trait, so to speak. It's. And it's not a flaw. I think we can. Whether you're the CEO, whoever you are, the entrepreneur, prioritizing things can be a skill if we work it. Remember this urgent does not mean important, right? Something is urgent, but it may not be important. And something may be important but not urgent. Busy doesn't mean productive, right? If you get to five o', clock, six o' clock at night and you can't tell me what you did, you might have been busy, but you certainly didn't get anything done. So remember, energy is as important, if not more important than the time we allot to something. And then I think when we're talking about our ADHD brain, let's talk more about progress over perfection, okay? If your weeks feel out of control, I don't think it's because we're flawed in any way. I think it's because we don't have a system of prioritizing things, of energy, of time, of, of realizing what's important, what's urgent, what needs to be done. Clarity, control. All those words I love, right? If your week does feel out of control, and maybe the podcast has given some ideas, but you want to work side by side with somebody, just hit my website. Overcoming distractions dot com. Book that 15 minute chat button with me, see if we're a good fit. See if we can embark on some level of, you know, working together. Overcoming distractions.com and hey Gang, I'll catch you next time.