Important But Not Urgent (IBNU)

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 and start the year. I know that’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 anything that isn’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 time for all those important but not urgent tasks.

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 place and literally stop mid-sentence of what I’m writing and jump over to work on that other section. Admittedly this works out great sometimes… while other times, I come back to the 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 squiggles that appear all over my document as I’m writing - is it important that I fix those errors as they appear? Porbably not. But does it feel important? - also, just as I totally misspelled probably as “porbably” while writing this section, and that is just a fantastic example of something that doesn’t need to be a priority to fix but absolutely feels like it.

Anyway, what’s actually important while I’m doing my writing is getting my ideas down first. I know this, but it is still hard to do. And this kind of issue comes up all over the place for us with ADHD.

One place I get this is when I’m trying to get my kids to clean their rooms. The task can be overwhelming for them because they don’t know where to start, they are unable to prioritize and break the task down into what needs to happen. And admittedly, this happens to me as well; certain cleaning and organizing tasks aren’t a big deal because I can see the path that needs to be taken, 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.

But we all know that prioritizing things isn’t nearly as easy as it sounds - while it seems like I should just do the most important things first, it is incredibly difficult for me to always identify what is genuinely important. And this is also confused by the fact that there are things that feel important but are in fact not such a big deal - like the red squiggles under my misspelled words. I know for the final product I don’t want to have to 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 section that needs the corrections. There are many parts of my writing that get cut so correcting those sections is entirely unnecessary.

Our biggest enemy here is urgency - when something is urgent, that feels like it is important. In many cases, urgency is going to be the driving factor in what needs to be prioritized, but urgency 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 it’s something like answering a text, but again that only becomes urgent to answer if it’s important that I answer it in a timely fashion.

I think with ADHD, our bigger issue is that it feels like if we don’t get to something now then we’re just not going to get to it at all. We become aware of the dishes in the sink and we know 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 5 minutes. We’re time blind so that feels like something we can squeeze in there, I mean honestly how long does it really take? That’s where our real issues with urgency lay - not in planned tasks, but when something comes up that we can do right now.

I’m reminded of a bit from Malcolm in the Middle where Hal finds a burnt-out light bulb, and goes to get a new bulb but finds the shelf their sitting on unstable and goes to get a screwdriver to fix that but the drawer the screwdriver is in is squeaking, and he grabs the WD-40, but that’s empty so he needs to go to the store to pick more up, but the car is making a funny noise, and then we see Lois come in to ask Hal to change the light in the kitchen while he is fixing the car and he yells “what does it look like I’m doing?” - It’s a great bit, and I’ll link to a clip in the show notes.

But what it really helps illustrate is how urgency can be a trap. We just wanted to do the one thing, but one thing leads to another and we’re 20 tasks away doing something completely different.

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 the 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 now so that everything else can happen? The only thing from the Malcolm in the Middle example is changing the light bulb - you need to have light in the kitchen to do kitchen things. Sure, all the other things also need to get done, the shelf needs to get fixed, the drawer needs some WD-40, and sure the WD-40 needs to be replaced, and the absolutely the car needs to get worked on. But life can go on despite all of those issues. But as I was alluding to earlier, we also don’t want to just forget to do these things or add them to a list that we never get to. And this is something that we frequently battle with when we’re dealing with little issues.

This means that what we need to be doing is building in time for the important but not urgent.

And I know that 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 get to 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’m quite literally writing this on the same day that I’m planning on getting 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 to get ahead. When I’m sick I either have to work through my illness or I have to post a rebroadcast or simply skip the week entirely.

And the thing is I absolutely could have time to write more and build myself a little runway, but that doesn’t work if I’m just using the deadline method. And that’s definitely something I’m working on getting out of this year.

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 simply as scheduling the time when we’re going to do the thing - often we think we’ll find the time to do something, but I know I rarely find myself both having free time and the desire to do some of these tasks. Having a specific time on my calendar can help get me to follow through with those intentions to do those tasks.

But just 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 best ways that we can start working on overcoming this is through some accountability. And this can come in a few 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 have them check back with you. This creates an artificial deadline for your task, albeit one with fewer consequences.

But if we’re looking to get away from that deadline modality, a more effective method can come through body-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. I personally use the ADHD reWired Adult Studyhall rooms for this kind of work, although I’ve been out of the habit recently so perhaps this is the kick in the pants I need to get back at it.

At the core of all of this is just the need to slow down.

Often we’re on this treadmill of urgency because we think that we need to do more. ADHD can come with a lot of failure and that can lead us to believe that we’re 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.