Do you ever come across a piece of productivity content that sounds helpful, but when you go to apply it you find it just doesn’t stick? For our ADHD brains, this can even be counter-productive.
The truth is, these productivity gurus don’t have your unique ADHD brain in mind when they share these otherwise useful productivity hacks.
Let’s take a look at 3 of the most well known mainstream productivity hacks and break them down.
1. Eat the Frog
In the book Eat That Frog: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time, author Brian Tracy offers one of the most well known tips for prioritizing tasks.He calls it “eat the frog“, which means tackling your hardest task first thing in the morning so the remaining tasks become much easier to complete.Where this method falls short for people with ADHD is that it doesn’t take into account energy levels, motivation or the impact of the task.For many of us ADHDers, we are more likely to engage in a harder task once we have built momentum throughout the day and reached our higher energy levels.
2. The 2-Minute Rule
In his best selling productivity book Getting Things Done, David Allen presents a famous concept known as the “2-minute rule.”Essentially, this rule states that if a new task arises while you are engaged with another task, and the new task can be completed within 2 minutes or less, you should simply do the new task.While it sounds good on paper, this rule might not compliment our ADHD brains.
Given our difficulties with time blindness and task switching, the 2-minute principle may even work against our brain wiring. Not to mention, it can make it even more difficult to switch back to the original task that you were engaged with and you can lose all that momentum you had engaging in a higher impact task because of a low effort task.
So I propose the ADHD friendly version of this rule, which is to do the complete opposite. I call it the low impact neglect rule:
When you are engaged in a high impact task, any lower impact task should be neglected as a distraction. Use this rule to leverage the momentum of your energy to get higher impact tasks done.
3. Time Management
Technically, managing time is impossible since its completely out of our control. Not to mention, we have these traits called impulsivity and time blindness which obviously makes prioritization incredibly difficult. This is why its more practical and efficient for our ADHD brains to use a prioritization matrix.
Of the 2 known prioritization matrixes – the Eisenhower matrix and the Effort/Impact matrix, I find that the latter is much more complimentary to my ADHD brain.
The Eisenhower matrix can be very useful for ADHDers but I sometimes had difficulty determining which tasks are important and which tasks are urgent. Plus the 3rd quadrant, delegate, is usually not an option if you are working individually.
So the effort/impact matrix is much simpler and effective – you run a quick cost/benefit analysis on your task and measure it based out energy required and potential reward it offers.
Easy. This removes time management and micro-prioritizing from the decision making process, then you can flexibly time block tasks based on your energy levels throughout the day.If you’d like to see how this system works and try it for yourself, I’ve included a free download of my priority matrix cheat sheet, you can download it here.
Now go leverage your efforts to accelerate your impact!
Your Coach,
Tony |