Do you have ADHD and have trouble keeping your life organized? Why do people with ADHD have a harder time staying on task?
According to Phil Boissiere, a hallmark challenge of ADHD is difficulty keeping your life organized and making plans. This challenge arises from anxiety over not finishing overwhelming tasks.
Continue reading to learn how to prioritize with ADHD, even when it feels impossible.
Making Plans and Prioritizing
When you’re unable to properly plan out the tasks you must complete—work projects, household chores, and so on—they feel more overwhelming, provoking anxiety. Feeling anxious makes it more likely that you’ll procrastinate on the task, which can lead to missed deadlines, work backlogs, and a continuous cycle of overwhelm. This is exactly why it’s important to learn how to prioritize with ADHD.
For example, say you have friends visiting next weekend. You need to clean your house before they arrive. You also know you’re going to have a busy week at work, and you struggle to plan time into your schedule to complete your household tasks. Every evening, you’re tired after work, so you tell yourself that you’ll do the chores the next day. By the time Friday arrives, you’re overcome with anxiety when you realize that you’ve done none of the chores and your house is messier than it was earlier in the week. Because you procrastinated, you have to spend almost all night after work cleaning, so you’re exhausted by the time your friends arrive.
(Shortform note: In The Procrastination Equation, Piers Steel advises breaking large tasks into smaller steps to avoid getting anxious and overwhelmed when planning. Each step should be something you know you can accomplish. This builds your confidence through small wins—every time you complete one of the steps, your confidence and motivation increase, propelling you toward the next step. In the above example, this could look like writing down a small chore to do each day of the week instead of planning to do them all at once.)
Boissiere explains that ADHD can also make it difficult to decide which tasks to do when, meaning that people who have it often spend their focus and time on the wrong things. When you’re not allocating your time well, you may feel like you’re constantly running behind, making it even more difficult to decide which tasks are most important. Instead, you address tasks as they come to you, regardless of how urgent they are. Thus, your most important tasks can get left behind in favor of those right in front of you.
(Shortform note: This “out of sight, out of mind” tendency may be particularly pronounced in people with what clinicians call inattentive presentation ADHD. People with this type of ADHD tend to focus on immediately relevant stimuli at the expense of other tasks and obligations—which means they may not get some tasks done because they simply forget about them.)
Prioritize Your To-Dos
To help you plan and prioritize, Boissiere suggests writing down a list of tasks you want to accomplish each day. Place each task in one of the following categories:
Category #1: I must complete this task. You must do these things because their deadline is today or because another person is depending on you to complete them today. There will likely be unfortunate consequences if you don’t complete tasks in this category.
Category #2: I should complete this task. These are things you should do today because their deadlines are coming up soon or because they’ll significantly benefit you in your personal or work life if you complete them.
Category #3: It would be nice if I complete this task. These are things that don’t necessarily need to be done today, but it could be helpful or enjoyable if they were. They’re the lowest-priority tasks.
| The MoSCoW and ABCDE Methods of Prioritization This prioritization technique that Boissiere describes is often called the MoSCoW method: M – must do S – should do C – could do W – won’t do The “won’t do” category complements Boissiere’s suggestion by providing a place to put tasks that were on your initial list, but that you’ve decided not to do that day. Including this step may create a sense of relief, as you realize that you have less to do than you thought. Some experts recommend reserving the MoSCoW method for times when your list of tasks isn’t too long. If your to-do list is too big, you may have too many items in each category, and it will still be overwhelming. If your list is long, try Brian Tracy’s ABCDE method, as outlined in Eat That Frog!. Categories A through C match the order and content of the first three steps of the MoSCoW method, but category D represents tasks that you can delegate. Tracy states that you should delegate anything that someone else can do—this creates time for the tasks that only you can do. Category E tasks are ones you can eliminate because you no longer have time or they’re no longer relevant. |
