Why Prioritize?
When you have ADHD, prioritizing your goals can be extremely difficult, yet it is an important skill to develop. Prioritizing your goals allows you to focus on the most important ones. With prioritization you can gain:
- focus on what is important
- positive feedback when you accomplish necessary tasks
- more time when you can take lower priorities right off your list
Without prioritization, we may get overwhelmed by too many goals, especially if we have a large number we would like to achieve. All of your goals, of course, have some importance to you, but I would encourage you to move away from the idea that everything must be accomplished TODAY. By applying some priority to your goals and responsibilities, some of the typical overwhelm can be taken away.
Priorities Change
Remember, your prioritization may change over time and that is perfectly okay! Review your goals regularly to ensure they are still prioritized correctly. Of course, this happens with business projects all the time, but it can also happen in our personal lives.
How to set priorities
There is no secret formula that is going to work for everyone when setting their priorities. It can be helpful, however, to ask yourself a series of questions such as:
- Do any of your goals have external deadlines?
- What are the deadlines and are they negotiable?
- How do the deadlines impact the priority of your goals?
- Is this goal a high or low priority? (Remember, this isn’t set in stone. What feels right this moment)
After working on your priorities, take a step back and determine what you need to put on your Must Do list. Remember that you can’t get it all done at once. What are the critical goals and action steps that you need to set in the next day, week and month?
How do you prioritize and how can we help?
Related Posts:
by John J. Ratey, M.D. is a good resource if you are interested in learning more on this topic.