How To Make Time For The Important Stuff
If you're struggling to figure out your priorities, you're not alone. Picking out the tasks that are going to make the biggest difference is a hard thing to do and something that we're kind of just expected to understand - yet often there's no clear reason why doing task A is better than doing task B.
Let's start off by asking what makes something a priority. We can start off on common footing by defining a priority as a concern or desire that comes before all others. It was interesting that while researching this episode I didn't find a lot of stuff talking about what makes a priority a priority - it's just assumed that we already know why what we're doing is important and I don't think that is actually the case.
I may have gotten a little off track but I started thinking about a line from the movie The Incredibles from the villain Syndrom, "I'll sell my inventions so everyone can be a superhero and when everyone’s super, no one will be". While Syndrom might be a little bit crazy he's right, once a unique property like being a superhero becomes ubiquitous it's no longer special and this same thing is also true about your priorities. If you're making everything a priority than nothing is, and this means that the only reason we are completing anything is because of it's due date. Some of the most important things we do in our lives has no due date attached to it.
This means one of our first steps while we are prioritizing is acknowledging that not everything can be a priority. Some things take precedence even over due dates.
This then brings us to our values. So, what are your values? Do you even know what your values are? If you don't - that's okay we can work on that - no one told you that we were having a quiz today and I'm betting like me you probably missed the day at school where we went over setting our values. I know until recently I hadn't spent a whole lot of time thinking about what my values might entail and honestly the whole idea of it felt pretty overwhelming.
A great place to start though, is through journaling. Just spend sometime writing out what you think is important to you - but don't stop there, give yourself another why. If you wrote down that hard work is important to you ask yourself why hard work is important to you. Maybe you like the recognition from your peers or maybe you like how hard work gets you into the creative process. Don't let yourself settle for your first answer, keep asking why and really find out what's driving you.
I know I was a little lost when I started this exercise so let me give you a glimpse into my process. In thinking about what is most important to me the first things that come to mind are my wife and kids. I want to have a loving relationship with them and my kids really also help me define what's important to me because of the things I want to pass onto them. I want them love learning and I want them to be happy. I want them to live with integrity and to always being challenging themselves to do better. Now, if we draw a couple of key words out there we might define a few of my values as learning, happiness, integrity and challenge.
When you are doing this exercise, you might want to ask a similar question to mine, what do I want to pass onto my kids? If you don't have kids or want to take another angle you could ask, if you only had a year to live what would you want to pass onto the world? Or if it isn't too morbid for you, imagine you are at your own memorial service, what kinds of things do you want people to be saying about you?
Looking at those few words I defined as my values and I can go over my to-do list and ask myself, how are these things helping me learn? Are they bringing me happiness? Do they keep me in integrity? Are they challenging me? And using those values I can help define what the most important things are on my to-do list. If nothing on my list is in alignment with my values, then I have to start questioning if I need to make some changes in my life so that I can start doing the things that actually matter the most to me, because if I'm not doing things that align with my values, what am I really doing with my life?
We want to make sure we're prioritizing our own values. Often we'll find ourselves prioritizing off of what other people value, what we see as important to society around us or what media tells us is important, but that isn't going to help you do what's actually most important to you. When we prioritize by our values you can stop doing things just because you should do them and do things because you want to do them.
Just knowing what our values are isn't enough to make our to-do list fall into a nice tidy order of what to do next.
One of the most popular prioritization methods is the Eisenhower Matrix also known as the Eisenhower Decision Principle. The matrix stems form a quote from President Dwight D. Eisenhower, "I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent," although Eisenhower attributes the insight to an unnamed former college president. Regardless of it's origin you can use the Eisenhower Decision Principle to separate tasks into four quadrants: urgent tasks on the left side and non-urgent tasks on the right and then important tasks on the top half and not important tasks on the bottom half.
Important and Urgent: This is where we tend to live with ADHD, these are crises and problems with looming deadlines. Think assignments due today or an overflowing toilet (which is definitely urgent and important to deal with).
Important and Not Urgent: While these are thing we want to get done they don't have a set due date or the due date is well into the future. These are things that we want to get done, but more often than not fall to the way side to make time for all the urgent stuff we've got to take care of - examples might be things like exercising or long term projects.
I don't feel like I have to go over the top half of the matrix so much because these are the important things - while we might not be currently making time for the stuff that isn't urgent (don't worry, we'll get to that) we generally know what's important to us. But we're not going to forgot about the bottom half matrix. While it is easy to brush off the tasks that aren't important, they are actually some of the tasks that can really take up a lot of our time and well it's important to know what isn't important.
Urgent and Unimportant: This is a tricky category and one that is actually pretty easy to get caught in - the reason is because it is really easy to mistake something urgent for something important. An example might be getting a message from a co-worker requesting a report you already sent out. It isn't important because they could potentially find it on their own, but it feels urgent because your phone is buzzing right now. Or an alternative example might be posting hot takes on twitter - it's urgent cause you got to post it now for it to be relevant, but honestly it also isn't really important.
I will note that a lot of advice is to delegate this category - but I think that is a bit misleading because why are you delegating tasks that are not important - you want to be eliminating as many unimportant tasks as possible. So if you want to think about this as a category to delegate instead of thinking of it as unimportant tasks, think of it instead as tasks that are important, but aren't important for me to do. And this doesn't just mean tasks that you don't want to do - delegation is a great way to pass on tasks that other people would be better at doing than yourself. For example, I hire an accountant to do my taxes because not only do I not really want to do it, but they are also going to do a much better job than I am. It's an important task, just not a task that I need to do myself.
Not Urgent and Unimportant: This is a dangerous categories - when we look at these tasks we'll often as ourselves, "if it's not urgent and it's not important than why are am I doing it?" Most advice is to just delete these things from your life. But what tasks are actually not urgent and not important? Examples I can think of are things like watching TV and playing games - both not that urgent and not that important, but if you're not careful (and not clear on your values) it can be really easy to decided that everything that isn't "work productive" isn't important. Watching television in itself might not be important, but taking breaks and doing things like watching TV with my wife or kids can be really important for bonding. It's really easy to drop blanket statements on stuff that isn't important but fail to see them in the bigger picture of things - we don't want our life to become all about being "productive" and this is why being clear with our values is really important because otherwise it becomes all to easy to just eliminate fun from our lives because it doesn't seem important.
With this matrix we can start getting a handle on how our workflow is panning out - take a look, what part of the matrix are you spending most of your time? Most of us with ADHD are going to be spending more time on the urgent side of the matrix. With this in mind look back to the values that you identified in the first part of the episode, does your task list still represent those values? If not, what can you change to get more aligned with those values?
Once we're able to put our tasks into the matrix it is a lot easier to determine what our next actions need to be. However, one of the most difficult things we deal with having ADHD is time blindness. We went over a lot of those issues in episode 2 on timing your day, but one thing I didn't cover then, was time horizons. Basically the idea of a time horizon is that after a certain amount of time you just can't see past that date - at least not accurately. At some point in the future things stop seeming real - it's just to abstract for us to imagine. Everyone has a time horizon but those of us with ADHD tend to have much shorter ones. If I asked you what your life would be like in 10 years, how well could you picture it? How about 5 years? Or even 1 year? How about a month from now? Next week? Time horizons tend to grow as we get older - neurotypical adults can have time horizons from anywhere between 8-12 weeks but with ADHD we might have time horizons that only extends out a week or two.
What this means is that when you are trying to plan out your to-dos once something gets beyond a certain scope it becomes much harder to conceptualize it. I know I have to get in shape some day, but as we all know, some day isn't on my calendar.
Let's take a closer look at one of those tasks that's important but not urgent, something that's distant but not too distant, like writing a term paper. You might have three months to write a 20-page paper. Really the length of the paper isn't important here. What's important is that you have something that's due outside of your time horizon, this means that due date isn't something that is particularly real to you. Unsurprisingly, this is a big cause for procrastination, why do something when you can't even picture that date even coming.
This becomes a big reason that when you've got ADHD you are only focusing on the tasks that are urgent, things don't feel urgent when they are beyond our time horizon - even if we need put in work now to achieve those goals. We don't want to only live in the urgent side of the priority matrix but when we can't see time it's really hard to make time for anything that isn't urgent. If we're only making time for things that are urgent, are we really living up to the values that we wrote about earlier? It's easy to pretend that we want to live fast and loose without a schedule and without a plan, but that doesn't let us make time for the stuff that matters the most to us.
When we're thinking about these big tasks that go beyond our time horizons one the things we really need to focus on is breaking the project down into it's more component parts. For example, when I was starting up this podcast there were a lot of things that I needed to work on. I need to build a website, come up with a podcast name, design a logo, get some music for the podcast and of course also write my initial episodes. And that's just to start with, it was a big project that took a lot of effort to get organized and while some things were obvious priorities, others felt important but weren't going to actually help me finish the podcast sooner.
Let's take a look at some ways we can figure out how to prioritize that list - we start by looking for bottlenecks. A bottleneck is simply something that will slow down or stop the progress of everything else. Writing is an obvious choice for bottlenecks since without content the podcast wouldn't be anything. If I completed everything else on my list but didn't have content I still couldn't launch the podcast. Or we could think of something like the music for the podcast, while not essential, it does set the tone and without having picked out music I wouldn't be able to finish producing an episode - and just a quick aside here, I said the music wasn't essential but I'm trying to imagine a podcast with no music at all and... I don't like it.
Another way to think about bottlenecks is to look at if they knockdown other dominoes in your to-do list or if they make any other dominoes significantly easier to knock down. Getting a name for my podcast is a great example here, once I got a name it made it much easier to knock down a bunch of other dominoes in my to-do list. Before I had the name I wasn't able to buy a domain or register my podcast with any podcast directories. The name also made it way easier to get a good logo designed because then I had an idea of what I was looking for.
Our hardest things to prioritize can come from things that feel important or fun, but unless they are actually getting us closer to our goals we don't necessarily need to be making them a priority. I like designing websites and when I was getting started it felt like something that I needed for the podcast, but it didn't make sense for me to prioritize making a website because nothing about building a website made anything else in the podcast process easier, and in fact it would have been pretty easy for me to launch without a website at all. So while it was something that felt important to me, it wouldn't have made sense for me to do first.
When we're prioritizing it's not always easy to see the big picture and what's actually the most important thing for us to do. Our biggest key here isn't that we've go to always pick the absolute most essential task - instead it's just to work out what we think is going to knock down the most dominoes and then sticking with that task. Sometimes we're going to be wrong and that's okay. But if we stick with it and focus on stuff that aligns with our values we're going to really be making progress towards our goals.
This Episode’s Top Tips
To really get the most out of setting your priorities you've first got to understand what your values are
You can use the Eisenhower Priority Matrix to separate your tasks into Important and Urgent, Important but not Urgent, Urgent but Not Important and Not Important and Not Urgent
Large projects should be broken down into their component parts, once they are broken down look for tasks that are bottle necks or that will make other tasks easier to complete - those should become your priorities
