Feeling overwhelmed by constant fires in your business? Learn proven strategies on how to prioritize tasks, stay focused, and keep moving forward even in chaos.
IE 453: How do you Prioritize Tasks when Everything is on Fire with Skye Waterson
Skye Watterson is a former academic turned entrepreneur. She helps entrepreneurs and business owners with ADHD manage their lives and time so they can grow without burnout.
She is the founder of Unconventional Organisation and hosts a podcast called The ADHD Skills Lab.
How do you mentally stay grounded when everything feels urgent and important?
One of the first things Skye does is to discover why this is a problem. With ADHD, you have executive function struggles, which means your working memory can struggle to hold all of the different parts of a task in your head.
It can cause time blindness; overestimating what you can do during the day. All of these things can make it feel like you wake up, get into the office, and then everything starts coming at you.
The first thing you want to do is a brain dump, writing down everything in your head. Don’t go into your email. Just stick with what is in your head.
Take that list and determine what needs to be done in the next 24 hours or there will be a significant, external negative consequence. Skye calls this a SENC.
This might be a bill that doesn’t get paid or a presentation you aren’t prepared for. These are the urgent things. Everything else is not urgent.
Everything else is a combination of not urgent or important, but not urgent. If you do an Eisenhower Matrix, those with ADHD may struggle with working memory. It can be difficult to hold multiple steps in the brain at once.
Just because you feel bad about not getting something accomplished does not make it urgent.
The next step is to determine the important stuff, and this starts to help you with your business. You think about the thing that could grow your revenue by 20% in the next year and determine that you haven’t been doing that task because you have been checking email.
Do you use a specific method or framework (like Eisenhower Matrix, ABCDE, etc.) to prioritize tasks when things are chaotic?
Skye teaches the prioritization filter (The Two Minute Focus Formula). This is based on research but morphed into an alternative version of the Eisenhower Matrix.
The next step is to determine what is important. You go through the rest of the list and you pull out one to three things for the week that if you accomplished them, it would be your 80/20.
What is that thing that you absolutely have to do that could explode your business? Maybe if you added this piece to your business, it would have a huge impact.
This is what you want to use as important but not urgent. You will put this task into your calendar and block it off just as you would a doctor’s appointment.
The important things need to be connected to revenue. We often get these creative ideas to add a new product or service because people are asking for it but it seems overwhelming and daunting.
When you have a large project, the first task, when you have an ADHD brain, is to sit down and plan. The first thing on your calendar is “Plan this project.” You might grab a chocolate biscuit, a cup of coffee, add music, and then sit down and start working through this particular task.
There is a free tool called Goblin Tools built for people with ADHD. You type in the task you want to do and it will break down that task into its component parts. Chat GPT might do this for you. Using something like this can help.
You can also grab a piece of paper and think through all the steps involved.
Think about being in an office and you want to improve the look of your office because you are an influencer. You might want to get a better rug. The simple version is “Get a new rug.”
It sounds like an easy task. How are you going to buy this? Craig’s list? Buy it new? What happens to the old rug? Do you need to measure it? Where is the measuring tape? Something simple, like getting a rug, has a lot of components to it.
There are three reasons people with ADHD don’t want to do a task.
- It is too boring.
- It is too confusing.
- It is emotionally salient. You might feel that you will be rejected.
What is the dopamine hit you mentioned?
Skye calls it sensory stacking. It is based on research on the dopamine transfer deficit and neuroscience research on how our brain works. There seems to be a little deficit when we start a task.
If you are ADHD, your brain doesn’t think of all the positive consequences of accomplishing the task. Instead, it thinks the task is boring and doesn’t want to do the task. It is like you are shepherding a grumpy teenager to do the task.
That means you need to negotiate. Think about your five senses: touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight. What can you give yourself to start the task? What can you stack?
You might say, “I am going to sit down, read an article, have a cup of coffee, eat something spicy or fun, sit somewhere I like, maybe a nice window. Once you have done those things and sat down to work, you can grab a Post-it note and write down what you are going to do during this work session. This will be a recipe for yourself so you won’t forget later.
Then, you open the application and get started. Skye has seen people shift from going from fire to fire at work without making progress, to consistently doing the thing they have been putting off for six months or a year.
From a business perspective, it has tremendous upside because you can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on business strategy, but if you never open the program or implement it and build the thing you need to build, you are not going to be able to do it.
Post-it notes can be the breadcrumbs to get back to the things you need to do. Jenny’s audience often has so many ideas (i.e., “breadcrumbs”), they get out the post-it notes, and because they are not organized, they cannot remember exactly what the idea was.
How can you park your ideas and strategize them based on your current status?
Skye talks about the 2-minute Focus Formula and making your one list. We love to make a new list every day.
This is like planting a new tree in the orchard and then never looking at the tree again. The tree dies. We end up with an orchard full of dead trees. You want to plant one tree, water it, take care of it, and nurture it.
You can use a journal, an AI system, or whatever you want to do. You need one place where you are putting your tasks down and filtering them. Is it urgent? Is it important?
At the end of the day, you remove the things you have done and add new things at the top. You can create an idea trellis. Ideas can be weeds on our task list.
We have a bunch of tasks and a bunch of ideas. You want a different section of your journal or a link as long as it is connected to the list so you don’t lose it. That is where Skye recommends you put all of your ideas.
Throughout the day, whenever you have an idea, you want to open your page and write it down. Once a month (or week), you schedule a time to look at your ideas and decide if they are going to become tasks.
Otherwise, instead of a parking lot, you have a dumpster fire of all the different ideas. An idea trellis keeps the vines away from the tree because we don’t want to choke the task list tree.
How do you handle competing deadlines from different people or departments?
This is a tricky one. 99% of the time, when you say everything seems urgent, it is usually that people are bringing you things that are urgent to them but not to you.
As a business owner, it is really important to bring your goals in line. Where are you going this quarter? Are you trying to gain recognition? Are you in acquisition? Expansion? What are you doing? Is your sales pipeline strong?
If you are in a position where you have a ton of leads but are not closing them at 40% or above, you might have a sales problem. That is the thing you need to fix or your priority.
If your website could be nicer, that isn’t the problem. If you have leads coming in but they seem confused and are not really buying, then maybe the problem is with the website.
You have to have both motivation and tactics when you are ADHD. You have to understand your goals and also the mission and vision for your business. We tend to get sucked into social media and see other business tactics that maybe are not the right ones for us.
Determine the vision for your business and make sure your tasks are in line with your vision.
What do you do when someone else’s fire threatens your focus?
This is where we sometimes get stuck in time blindness. We think if we have one free day, we can get every task done in our business, all the way down to the bottom of the to-do list.
We want to have a conversation about how much time we have and how much we can get done in that amount of time. Skye recommends cutting in half what you think you can do because that is a more accurate estimate.
You have to set boundaries. You want to make sure you are communicating with others. Did you communicate that you want to get work done? Surprisingly often, that doesn’t happen. Did you confirm they understood? Were you consistent with the fact that you are working during a time period?
If you tell others you work in your office on Mondays but then many Mondays you don’t want to work, it can be confusing to others that you want to get work done. You get distracted and get out of the zone, and then you need to focus.
We need to have conversations and put things on the calendar to make it easier to get things done. If you have confirmed it, are being consistent, and have clearly communicated, you will need to have a conversation with them. Maybe bring them in on your goals by offering them rewards if you hit your revenue target. That can help.
2-Minute Focus Formula
Channel chaos & overwhelm into momentum-building focus in just 2 minutes.
- Get clear in 2 minutes.
- Find your real priorities fast.
- Ditch the busywork that’s draining you.
If your brain is full of tasks, you won’t have the space to use your strengths. Let Skye help you get clear by downloading the 2-Minute Focus Formula Here!
Action Steps:
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