The Problem

“Oh my gosh!  I have all these things to organize.  How can I get it all done? Where do I begin?”

Setting priorities is a huge part of life.  Whether we notice it or not, we are all concerned with time management and setting priorities every day, all the time.  Think of how many routine tasks of our every daily lives involve prioritizing:  Think of organizing your children’s activities (who needs a ride where, when, for how long?).  Which household chores need to get done first?

What do I do first? Then second? And so on.

What purchases do I need to make?  Which ones can I afford right now?  How do I balance my time with my family’s needs, with my friends’ needs, and with the demands of my job? The list seems endless.

Prioritizing is a part of life, yet many people with the ADD syndrome have a difficult time assigning priorities to the things that they need to accomplish.  By “prioritizing” we simply mean looking at several tasks in front of you and assigning different degrees of value to each of them. What must be done now?  What can be put off until later? What can I ignore all together?  Usually, paying that overdue electric bill should be more important than folding laundry, cleaning the kitchen, or even writing an article that is not due until next week.

A non-ADDer makes these decisions almost automatically.  They can “see” the different levels of importance of the tasks before them. But for the ADDer, prioritizing them is done only with great effort or not done at all.

One ADD client described it to me this way: “Everything is in a gray area of equal importance.  At a given moment, vacuuming the living room, writing a report that needs to be completed, making a phone call to the dentist, answering email, finishing a newspaper article that you started reading– all these will all have equal importance in the mind of one who has ADD.”

The Impact

One result of not being able to prioritize is that the to-do list of an ADDer who has trouble prioritizing might have way too many tasks on it, far more than can be accomplished in the time allotted, such as a single day.

Secondly, he doesn’t know where to begin.  A person with ADD would only know or feel that these are all tasks that must be completed. None would have more importance over another.

Eventually, the ADDer is drawn to the task that interests him the most at that moment.  John Ratey, co-author of Driven to Distraction, suggests that ADD can be thought of as an “addiction to the present”.  Tasks are then prioritized according to which will offer the most interest or immediate gratification. This can wreak havoc in one’s personal or professional life when deadlines are missed or projects are not completed.  Many times, ADDers who, by some standards, wind up working on the wrong task, fairly quickly feel overwhelmed.  It’s a feeling: “Oh my gosh!  I have all this to do. How can I get it all done?  Where do I begin?”

Sari Solden, in her book Women with Attention Deficit Disorder, suggests that many ADDers have difficulty creating a plan of attack in accomplishing even simple tasks:

I get up in the morning with no idea how to choose from what seems like millions of possibilities of things I need to do, or how to organize my day . . . so I just sit there.  My non-ADHD husband tells me how to clean the kitchen after a meal. First, put all the perishables in the refrigerator.  Then you put away any other food in the pantry. Then you throw out everything that can go into the trash.  Then you stack dishes and glasses together. Then you clean out the sink. At that point you start rinsing the dishes, stacking them again in categories before you put them into the dishwasher.

This sense of organization is often overwhelming for an ADDer.

What to do?  What to do?

There is a plethora of planners, organizers, and organizing systems out there.  And of course, it can benefit anyone to look at those and give a few of them a try.  Considers Stephen Covey’s quadrants, David Allen’s “Get Things Done,” the ABC method, or others.  If using part or all of any of these systems work for you, that’s great! But the truth is that for most ADDers, other people’s organizing and prioritizing systems often don’t work.  And when it doesn’t, the important thing to remember is to NOT beat yourself up, as many of us tend to do.

Well, what does work then?  Probably the best thing to consider is just writing down the tasks you need to complete and then talk about them.  If you spend twenty minutes a day verbally processing about the impact of choosing one task over another,  you will undoubtedly see new insights about each of them.  Also, keep in mind, that even though things don’t always get done in the ideal order, they usually do get done.  And if they don’t, perhaps they were not that important after all.