How to Prioritize with ADHD

Prioritization is important, sure, but how do you do it with ADHD? I'm going to talk you through that right now, step by step. 

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Transcript

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:22:24
Arianna
What's up, suckas? It's me. I'm back. And before we get into the video, you know, I always got up before. Just wanted to remind you guys that the Digital Summit Digital conference, whatever you want to call it, that I am putting on in September chased the chaos is still officially selling tickets at its early bird price, which is lower than it will be after August 15th.

00:00:22:25 - 00:00:48:20
Arianna
So if you want to pay the cheapest you possibly can to get into what's going to be one of the coolest digital conferences, and I am not saying that just because I put it together, you are going to want to get your ticket before August 15th in case you cannot remember what chased the chaos is. It is, like I said, a digital summit, digital conference that is dedicated to supporting and giving advice to ADHD.

00:00:48:20 - 00:01:07:12
Arianna
Women and women who have multiple different interests, because right now we all kind of feel like we have to pick one. We don't really know how to honor all those parts of ourselves, how to integrate all those parts of ourselves, how to make sure that we're doing everything that we want to do without feeling like we are sacrificing parts of ourselves.

00:01:07:14 - 00:01:32:01
Arianna
That is the point of chase, the chaos. It is a way to help you find out how to fit all of that into your life and how to be proud of the fact that you like multiple things and that you want to be known by multiple monikers. And it's going to be great. We have everybody from a witch to a divorce counselor to a psychotherapist talking.

00:01:32:01 - 00:01:48:07
Arianna
It's going to be a great time. So link to tickets is in the description. Come join us. We would love to have you. Please, please, please. It'd be amazing. And with that, let's get into the video.

00:01:48:10 - 00:02:08:13
Arianna
Okay. So if this is your kind of thing, if you're just finding me. Hello? If you're back. Welcome back. If this channel is giving you all that you need, if it's or not, even all that you need, if it's just something you need, make sure that you like and subscribe, please. It helps cool people find me, helps me find cool people.

00:02:08:15 - 00:02:31:06
Arianna
And I just Who doesn't need more cool people in their lives? Mm hmm. That's what I thought. So I wanted to talk about usually, you know, I've been talking a lot about apps and concepts, but I also want to make sure that a lot of you out there who are watching me are getting plenty of practical advice, things that you can actually enact now.

00:02:31:10 - 00:02:54:27
Arianna
And this is one of those things. This is something that I go through with my clients in almost every session because prioritization is something that a lot of ADHD struggle with. And it's extremely frustrating, right? Because any time that you'll see like an infographic or you'll have somebody being like, you know, five tips to get yourself more organized, it generally will say, just prioritize.

00:02:55:00 - 00:03:22:27
Arianna
And ADHD brains. Part of the reason we're ADHD is that we don't know how to prioritize. We don't quite understand exactly how that works. So the concept of just prioritization, just telling us to prioritize is not going to work. So I'm going to talk you through how to prioritize with ADHD. It is honestly going to take me longer to explain than it would take for you to do.

00:03:22:28 - 00:03:46:04
Arianna
It's one of those things that, you know, I want to make sure you understand, but once you do, you honestly will not need me to explain it much further. And one thing that I want to suggest before we start getting into these steps here in prioritization is that I would suggest that you do this every day. Obviously, if you don't have anything planned that day, if there's no reason for you to be prioritizing.

00:03:46:04 - 00:04:23:26
Arianna
Right. Like if you're planning, if you're on vacation and you're planning on sitting by a pool every day and just like eating cinnamon bun waffles, like a very lucky friend of mine is eating right now. Obviously, you don't need to prioritize anything except for maybe some Pepto-Bismol. But other than that, you don't really need to prioritize. But any time that you know, you're going to be getting anything done, even if you just have one or two things on the list, this is going to be a very important exercise for you because it's going to put down in black and white in undeniable proof what it is that you actually need to be doing and focusing

00:04:23:26 - 00:04:40:17
Arianna
on. So when I bring this up, this is not something that I think that you should just do in the event of a large project or just if you have a very busy day, I think that you should be doing this every single day because you want to make sure that at the end of the day you're satisfied.

00:04:40:19 - 00:05:05:10
Arianna
I haven't said this in a while. I'll remind you guys that pure that true productivity. True success is satisfaction, not perfection. So in order for you to be satisfied by the end of the day, you have to make sure that you have focused on the things that you want to focus on or that need to be focused on in order for you to sleep without waking up at 3 a.m. being like, Shit, I forgot this thing.

00:05:05:10 - 00:05:31:29
Arianna
Right? So just keep that in mind. All right. So the first thing that you're going to want to do when you are working on prioritizing, when you're sitting down before your day starts to prioritize, is to make it visual. Too many of us feel like we shouldn't have to do that. Like we should just be able to think about the three things we have to do get up and go do those and sometimes it really is that simple.

00:05:32:06 - 00:06:00:29
Arianna
But in order to avoid missing things that might be super important or wasting time on things that actually could wait, it's really a great idea for you to make sure that you can see what it is that you are planning on working on. ADHD brains. A lot of studies are starting to come out that suggests that ADHD brains work much better with visual AIDS, much better with visual proof.

00:06:01:01 - 00:06:23:15
Arianna
And while I am clearly not a neuroscientist, I can say from my experience with myself and with clients that this tends to be true, the better that we can see in front of us what it is that we have to do. The less likely we are to miss things that we really didn't want to miss. So basically you don't care if it's a pen and paper.

00:06:23:16 - 00:06:46:01
Arianna
I don't care if it's Google Docs. I don't care if it's a whiteboard. Your hand, whatever you want to make sure that you bring dump everything that your brain can think that you might need to do that day, no matter how small. Okay, I whenever I wash my makeup brushes, I have to actually put on my list to remember to go take them out of the solution.

00:06:46:03 - 00:07:02:24
Arianna
Otherwise they will literally so-called day and then into the following day. And I don't know if that's bad. Hopefully there's nobody in my audience who's like a huge makeup enthusiast who's going to be like, ah, you know, like got. Yeah, But that is one of those things that I will put on the list, right? Put in solution, take out solution.

00:07:02:24 - 00:07:23:23
Arianna
So it can be really, really small. But you want to make sure that everything that you could think of that might need to be done is written down. Don't worry about importance. Don't worry about deadlines. Don't worry about any of that. Right off the bat, you just want to write down the things that you are pretty sure that you are going to have to get done that day.

00:07:23:23 - 00:07:44:11
Arianna
And there is a an additional reason for this, and I'll get into that in a minute, because we're going to go into step two, where you now are going to worry about deadlines. Estimated time and urgency. Those are the three things that you want to make sure that you indicate by each task that you wrote. So I'll go through that again.

00:07:44:12 - 00:08:13:26
Arianna
Deadlines. When is it do not When do you feel it's due? When is it actually do? So if it is something that you're like, I really need to get to that laundry. That laundry has been bugging me. Okay, yeah, that could be bothering you. But what is the deadline if nobody's coming to your house, if nothing's really going to push you to get it done that day, it might not be as important as it feels.

00:08:13:28 - 00:08:39:18
Arianna
A lot of us tend to get really sucked in by how much a task is bothering us or how important it feels to us. But that is not what you're going off of. And that's actually probably in my experience anyway, the highest reason that people don't get the most important thing done that day because they act off of how important something feels and now not how important it actually is.

00:08:39:25 - 00:09:02:07
Arianna
So deadline is going to be one of the most important things for you to take into account and when you're taking that into account, you want to make sure that you are you are being honest with yourself. Again, going back to that laundry example, if the laundry's not due right now, if it literally does not need to be done today, then make sure that you indicate that there's no deadline.

00:09:02:10 - 00:09:21:03
Arianna
It's the same with urgency. We're not talking the urgency that it feels okay. We're not saying how urgent it feels. We're saying how urgent is it really? Is it something that can wait or is it something that if you don't do it, like, obviously, you know, if your laundry is attracting roaches for some reason, then yeah, that's probably pretty urgent.

00:09:21:06 - 00:09:40:23
Arianna
But if it's just sitting there and it's bugging you, that's not as urgent as, say, you know, a project you have to get done for work. And then the third thing is the estimated time that it'll take you to finish. This is also important because it's going to kind of help you basically just figure out how much time you've got in your day to get it done right.

00:09:40:25 - 00:10:07:26
Arianna
If you know that you've only got an hour to get something done and it is due practically yesterday, then you know that that is the thing that you want to focus on first. So you're going to write these three things down or for every task, not just once, and then you're going to move on to step three, which is where you are going to reorder everything according to deadline and urgency.

00:10:07:28 - 00:10:32:14
Arianna
It is super, super simple to do this with things like click up and even Google Google Docs to a degree. If you don't feel like rewriting it. One way that I suggest doing this is via color coding where you could take, you know, like a bunch of colored pencils or a bunch of colored pens and circle the stuff that is the most urgent and like red or pink or something like that.

00:10:32:14 - 00:11:04:07
Arianna
Or you could draw shapes next to each thing. Everything that's got a star is important. It doesn't really matter how you do it. You just want to kind of make it clear to your brain these are the things that I should be focusing on today. I don't suggest going past five things, but I really would suggest keeping it at three on days where you are really low in energy, try to keep it to 1 to 2, anything more than that and we're messing with that satisfaction level that I told you about.

00:11:04:10 - 00:11:33:07
Arianna
So when you put these things in order, when you say, okay, I've reordered my tasks by deadline and urgency, these are the 2 to 3 things or 3 to 5. If you're feeling super energetic or if three of those things are super quick and easy, now that you have those reordered and now that you can look at what things are at the very top of your list, urgency and deadline, why is now we prioritize?

00:11:33:09 - 00:12:00:29
Arianna
And if you're like, well, Ariana, haven't I been prioritizing this whole time? Yes. However, now we're going to go ahead and take that prioritization and put it into practice. And the way that you're going to do that is you are going to basically take a look at the three things. One thing, two things, whatever, that you have decided to do, and you're going to figure out where it fits into your day in reference to what you might already have on your calendar.

00:12:00:29 - 00:12:27:26
Arianna
And here's what I mean by that. So say that you have two things that are high priority, high urgency. You need to get those done today. You also know that you have a doctor's appointment that afternoon and maybe you're also well aware that you are not going to make it past 2 p.m. because just for some reason that's when you get hit by exhaustion and you don't get shit done after that.

00:12:27:28 - 00:13:04:13
Arianna
So then at that point what you're going to do is you're going to say, okay, now I know that this number one thing is very high urgency and very high, high dependency or high deadline. It's got a very important deadline coming up. So, you know, then at that point that it needs to be put in in your mood, you're basically going to go ahead and plug them in as priorities in reference to the things that you already have to do that day, knowing that you should probably be done by 2 p.m. because that's when you're going to get tired, right?

00:13:04:16 - 00:13:31:29
Arianna
So essentially all you're doing, I told you that this was going to take longer to explain that it's going to take for you to do basically what you want to do is you want to take these tasks that you have floating around your head and you want to give them a place to rest, and then you basically want to think about them as brass tacks, as close to reality and not connected to your own personal feeling of urgency as you can.

00:13:32:01 - 00:14:02:29
Arianna
And then you want to, based off of that information, decide what actually earns your attention that day. Doing that and in what order. Right. Doing that will 99.9% of the time result in you getting the things done that you actually wanted to get done? And if I may, and you know, you might be like, you may not, Ariana's shutting you off like, shut up.

00:14:02:29 - 00:14:34:27
Arianna
But I'm going to say this anyway, if I may, when you were trying to think up those priorities, don't forget to try to prioritize some rest, some time to yourself. In my example, you're tired by two. If you work in an office and you can't leave till five, then maybe, you know, agree with yourself that you're going to finish all of the really heavy brain work stuff by two and that you're going to try to go easy on yourself till five.

00:14:34:29 - 00:15:00:20
Arianna
But don't forget to prioritize yourself. That's probably one of the most important priorities you've got. All right, So that's it. Hopefully, that was helpful. If you have any questions, please drop them in the comments. I'm always happy to answer. Thank you very much for watching. Drink plenty of water. Take good care of yourself and I'll see you in the next video.