How To Avoid Task Overwhelm With ADHD

0:00 You've made it to a leadership position, but now it feels like the systems and organizational tools that you had for yourself aren't working because you are running a team now. We're actually gonna go into a lot of detail about this. We're gonna teach you how to have a shared prioritization filter. So I guess there's two things you're gonna wanna know.

0:19 One, what is a prioritization filter? And two, what does it look like to have a shared prioritization filter? Hello everyone and welcome to today's episode of the ADHD Skills Lab. Today we're gonna be talking a little bit about why you might struggle to put everything into a single simplified system, practical strategies for some things you can do about it.

0:38 I'm joined, as always, by my husband, Robert Waterson and co-founder. We're gonna be talking about a system that we at Unconventional Organization had built over the last five years using a combination of experience, research, and a system that I think has been the source of a lot of conversation and debate in our household because we use it ourselves.

1:00 Getting it to work has been interesting. AI came and slopped it all and we fought it back and now we like AI. We like AI today.

1:08 That's the It's a love-hate relationship. Yeah.

1:11 I feel like we need like a how do we feel about AI today update and then a microwave's food loss to the microwave update. It's like both of those things. It's a constant moving target. But yeah, before we get started though, our mission at Uncomventional Organization is to support people who are starting businesses or scaling businesses and feel overwhelmed by the ADHD executive function struggles of it all.

1:36 We know from the research that if you have ADHD, you're more likely to start something like a business, but you're also more likely to struggle when it comes to scaling effectively. And some research indicates you might also make less money in your neurotypical PS. And if I'm being honest, that really frustrates me.

1:55 So our mission is to provide practical strategies and systems to help you move beyond that to scale effectively. We provide operational support, we provide coaching support, we provide one-on-one accountability. All of this stuff is down below. You can just click the links to whatever you need and uh we'll see you there.

2:16 So we spoke last time about this idea of the leadership problem. You've made it to a leadership position, but now it feels like the systems and organizational tools that you had for yourself aren't working because you are running a team now. We sort of ended it on two options, which was hire a really dialed-in support person and sort of the pepper pots to your business owner, to your Tony Stark, I guess.

2:47 Or doing systems skills centralized task systems. And really it was it was more about both. I think it might not have come up as much. You know, it's funny, I do the podcast and I teach this throughout the week in various ways, and I feel like it really is both. You want a good team and you want a good system.

3:09 Yeah, we were re-watching an episode from the founder struggles around tasks and projects, and the takeaway recommendation there was go and find a pepper bots who's going to be your working memory. Yeah. I think that is good advice, but it's also difficult and you need I think and even if you do have a pepper bots, you don't want to put the entire world on her shoulders.

3:32 You also want to have a system that's making things easier.

3:34 Yeah, they might work on holiday.

3:36 Yeah. And ideally, she might bring some of that skill set, but she also might not.

3:41 Especially now, especially in the world of AI. I mean, we were just talking about how cool one of our clients has an obsidian-based Hermes task AI repository of data, and how cool it would be to have that and use that. And that's not something that anybody is going to be taught if they graduated in these areas in the last like 10 years.

4:04 Yeah, it's a recent tool.

4:05 Yeah. I mean, there might be upskilling, but it's just, it feels like never before has there been so much upskilling that needs to be done.

4:13 I guess in that fictional world, I think Pepper Potts would have been the top of her field, hired by him, and she'd come in with her own systems and she's helping organize this chaotic genius. And you might be able to get someone at that level, but you also might get someone who doesn't have all of these systems, um, all of the systems knowledge.

4:33 And I think even if you do have someone, yeah, if you're lucky enough to find a Pepper Potts who can build the system for you and you don't even have to think about it, then great. But if you've just got someone who's really great at organizing, but they're grumbling a little bit under the stress of how much chaos you're loading onto their shoulders, then building a system like this is going to help them stay on top of it, get transparency on what they need to see.

4:56 And also, it's funny you should say this because actually, now that I'm thinking back, I haven't watched those movies in so long. They had an AI in that movie. It was called Jarvis. Jarvis. And I bet you that that was a system that was designed by Tony Stark and Pepper Potts was taught how to use it.

5:16 I don't think Pepper Potts came with Jarvis. You know what I mean?

5:19 Yeah. I mean, yeah, you're not wrong.

5:21 Yeah. I mean, it's a fictional movie based on a comic. I'm not gonna give you full full ideas, but uh, since we are using that reference, it is worth mentioning that it does include AI. The system, the the the Yeah, that eventually tries to take over the world. So yeah, I mean, yeah, it's complicated, but it is imagine there was an a scene that wasn't in the movie where it's initially an introduction of like this is my AI and this is what I need what it does, and this is how it works.

5:54 Paper pots hiring, as a such like, because that's actually what we're gonna talk about now.

5:59 I was like, this is ridiculous. I want pen and paper, that's how I've always done. There was research to back this up as well, which was the meta-analysis, Alderson and colleagues, 2013, 38 studies of adults with ADHD versus healthy controls. And they found that when you have ADHD, you are also more likely to have moderate working memory deficits, both chronological, verbal, and also visiospatial.

6:24 And what this really showed in this paper was that the uh working memory struggles that we found in younger people were persisting into adulthood with ADHD. And one of the reasons we're about to talk about the system that we are about to talk about is because you if you have ADHD and you work with teams, even if you work by yourself, this is gonna be very relevant to you, even if you work by yourself.

6:51 We actually have a version of this just for people who work by themselves. But if you have a team, you're gonna need a system to manage tasks and who's doing what and and what's next, even if they don't. Like even if they're like, No, I understand, I have full working memory.

7:10 Uh, you don't you don't we even have a very low-tech first version of this, which doesn't involve any database.

7:17 Those people who are afraid of databases, and that included me, for a while.

7:21 The downside is you have to move everything manually.

7:23 So there's a joy to it. Like a lot of people like that. It's really cool. It's like toggles anyway. Yeah. But you talk me around to the new system, especially when we have teens. Yeah.

7:34 I think the due date can tell you what category it should be in.

7:38 I am the kind of person who gets a journal. At least I used to. I don't anymore, but up until very recently I would buy a journal and be like, that's it.

7:45 You still kind of do. I mean, yeah, we're we're not buying beautifully textured journals anymore, but you you still have a digital one.

7:52 That's true. That's true. So it's it's it's it's good for everybody. Okay. So we want to try and take the load off working memory. And there was, you know, there's research that we've referenced before by Koffler and colleagues in 2018 where they talked about working memory being linked to organizational problems, and specifically they talked about task planning, task um tracking, managing materials, tracking due dates, like all of these things are a particular struggle for ADHD.

8:22 Yeah, and they suggested, which I think was part of their hypothesis at the end, but they suggested circumventing the problem with written lists and like breaking things down.

8:30 Exactly. And we took that idea as a suggestion and we ran with it. And we've been running with it for five years, because a lot of this research, you know, we've been reviewing for a long time, basically all the way back since I've been writing blogs back in 2020. So, what does it look like to have a shared prioritization filter?

8:49 Because we're gonna teach you, we're actually gonna go into a lot of detail about this, but we're gonna teach you how to have a shared prioritization filter. So I guess there's two things you're gonna want to know. One, what is a prioritization filter? And two, what does it look like to have a shared prioritization filter?

9:06 So, a prioritization filter is something that we designed about five years ago and we've been testing ever since, that is an alternative to the eyes and how matrix. So if you're a person with ADHD, you've probably heard of the Eisenhower matrix somewhere in your in your study of you know productivity systems.

9:25 And it's the idea of identifying things as being important or urgent or important but not urgent or urgent but not important. And one of the interesting things about the process is you've got these four boxes and you're supposed to decide what goes where. We know with ADHD, because we struggle with working memory, we struggle with manipulating information in our heads.

9:46 And so holding something in your head and deciding based on subjectivity, which is also not our strength, which whether it's important or urgent or what it is, is pretty tricky. And so the prioritization filter at its core is based on the idea of taking the things off your working memory, putting it somewhere, and then filtering it down.

10:12 So it's really hard for you to get stuck putting everything on urgent or lose material or do all of the kind of things that you might not even realize you're doing, but when you struggle with executive function functioning can be really hard when it comes to task lists.

10:28 Yeah, I think the other big thing it's doing is just condensing everything down to what's next. I remember this was an issue we were having where whatever the system we were using back then, it had so much information about what the plan was for the month and for the next quarter. And it was overwhelming when you're like, I've got I've got a set period of time today to get something done.

10:51 I just needed to know what's next. I don't want to get distracted thinking about all the things I have to get done later this week or next week or this month. I just want to know the one thing I have to do next.

11:02 Yeah. And I want previous guy to have told me that I don't want to have to do it now. If you are the business owner who is growing, your operations and delivery are growing, and you're starting to feel pretty overwhelmed, like you're not getting enough time, you're struggling with consistency, and you'd really like somebody else to get it all out of your head and project manage it for you.

11:22 That's what we do. We are fractional operators for your business designed for ADHD symptoms. We take it out of your head, we set it all up for you, and you just kind of watch. It's pretty, pretty fun. Click the links down below, and if you're interested, you can book a call with me. When you have a filter like this, a shared one across your team, what it looks like is everybody knows what to do next.

11:45 You're dropping less things. Any tasks that are obsolete, so something that was relevant no longer necessary because maybe something shifted or a project got dropped, that becomes very evident very quickly. Um there is no more. Did I get in that task? Do I I don't really remember? It was Friday afternoon.

12:07 I was stressed. I said something about a thing, but didn't really kick that on board. Like, is that task now handed off? That's you know not a question you have to ask anymore. And it's really easy to surface problems because you can really see what everyone's doing.

12:20 I'm not sure that one of the things it does is surface obsolete tasks. It just makes them accessible. So if someone else is running obsolete tasks that you have hand you handed them three months ago, the system's changed.

12:34 Okay, so how do we set up a prioritization filter? So, first of all, we give this away for free in all of its iterations. I have always, right from the beginning, when we started talking about this, given away the prioritization filter for free. The reason being because it is helping someone go from overwhelmed to focused, which is that key part of like, I don't even know what to know what to do.

12:58 And that's a really unhelpful space to do anything from, to make decisions, to run a business. And so I always wanted to give that away. So if you go ahead and click the links down below, you can um download the team's one. And then when you've done that, you can just DM us or email us or whatever and say, Hey, can I have the solo version or the one-on-one version?

13:22 If you message us prioritize on Instagram, you can also get it there as well. So feel free. It is free for you to use. So the first thing, which I referenced before, is that you need to brain dump everything. I know brain dumps feel a little bit like, oh, brain dumps, it's that thing I do and it feels good for three minutes, and then I ignore the brain dump, and so it's not worth it.

13:46 But we have a system where your brain dump will be worth it, but you still do need to start with a brain dump. Well, we says um a lot of times when I talk to somebody about this, I say brain dump and everyone's eyes kind of glaze over and they go, oh, like that thing that I do. But what what you don't realize is that when you do a brain dump, it's usually into onto like a piece of paper.

14:06 Like it's a Wednesday and you're stressed, so you just write everything down on a piece of paper, and then you lose that piece of paper immediately, and then the next day you write another brain dump. In fact, there's some systems that involve every day you brain dump everything, which feels like an exhausting process.

14:22 Yeah, that doesn't seem very efficient.

14:24 Yeah. So in this context, you want to brain dump into a space you're gonna use again. Like we use Notion because it's a really easy way to give you the filters, but if you use something else, you can put it there. What it doesn't matter what you use, as long as it's a space you're gonna come back to.

14:39 It can't be a random piece of paper or a napkin or something like that. And you don't categorize while you bring up. You just write down everything that's in your head. Don't look at your emails, don't look at other things, but just what is in your head, just keep going until it's all gone. I always say, like, look in the curtains, under the floorboards of your mind, like as you start, I work with so many people, and then like a single task, but I know I'm overwhelmed.

15:08 And then it's like pulling on a thread, like you pull one out, the next one comes, and the next one comes, and we kind of like get that. Yeah, usually people will find themselves writing for ages.

15:19 You're clearing out that working memory that's sort of overloaded with I need to not forget this. I'm I'm gonna I I've got to do this this week because otherwise I'm gonna lose it.

15:27 Yeah. And people are often in this weird position because we do struggle with working memory. It's hard for us to recall something. So if I said to you, what's on your task list in your head? You'd be like, well, what's on your task list in your head? Can you like quickly recall everything? Or does it just a general sense?

15:44 No, it mostly all goes away, but that's because it's in the system now. Like we had something on the walk back and we just paused and I put it into the system.

15:53 So you you that's extremely rise at the time because I think when you're just putting one thing in, you normally can. Yeah. But yeah, it's it is nice.

16:04 It's in there now. It's scheduled for next Monday as a due date because I want it to be the first thing we do before we do this podcast Monday again. Yeah. Um I want to improve the system. I can't remember what it was exactly.

16:18 But yeah, well, that's a great thing. You so the first thing you want to do, like Robbie did, is you want to brain dump. Don't categorize, just do the brain dump, especially the first time and then you know, extra for experts later.

16:29 We've talked about that, where if I'm trying to put two things in, I won't be categorizing because I'm gonna lose the second thing. I there's a good chance I'm gonna lose the second thing anyway, trying to put the first thing in. I haven't had any luck. I've still caught myself wanting to put something in, remembering something else, and putting that thing in first because now it's in front and losing the second thing.

16:47 But yeah, definitely don't get caught up adding extra information like due dates and importance levels if you're trying to just get everything out before you lose it.

16:55 The next thing you're gonna want to do, and I'm gonna jump around a little bit here for that purpose of that. But the next thing you're gonna wanna do is you're going to want to go ahead and say, okay, based on what is written down here, what do I have to do? What actually has a deadline? And to figure out what has a deadline, I tend to use the waiting room metaphor.

17:17 I kind of just think I came up with it on a podcast one time, and I've used it ever since it's quite worked out quite successfully. But the metaphor is essentially that you're in a waiting room, like your day's gone sideways. Now, for whatever reason, you're in a waiting room for the rest of the day.

17:32 What is the stuff that you would still do on your phone, or you'd have to call somebody and say, hey, I can't do this tomorrow because I haven't prepared for it? That's urgent. Nothing else has an urgency. So think about those things and then give those things a deadline. It might be urgent today, it might be urgent this week, it might be like, well, if I was waiting in a waiting room today, it wouldn't, I wouldn't need to do it.

17:56 But if I was in a waiting room on Friday, then I would need to do it because it's due on Saturday. Like that kind of thing you need to think about.

18:04 Yeah, and just to be clear, we're done with the brain dump here. We've moved on to now you've got this big list of uncategorized tasks and you're trying to first sorting process. This is the first step.

18:14 Yeah, exactly. So that's what you want to do. And in our process, there's a little space where you put the deadlines for the things that have deadlines. Really, really, really importantly, if it doesn't have a deadline.

18:27 Yeah. Don't make updates. Don't yeah. It's like very, very common, right? You it doesn't have a deadline, you're like, oh, well, it'd be good to have it done by this Friday. Or you're like in a world where my week doesn't fill up with things, it'd be great. Like these sort of what do we call it? Magical thinking when it comes to time.

18:42 Yeah. Yeah. Sort of aspirations, deadlines, and timelines that just aren't going to pan out. And you've overloaded the system with all of these fake deadlines that are crowding out the real deadlines.

18:53 Yeah. And pretty quickly, as soon as you overloaded a system, you again, your executive functioning struggles will come back into it. So if you've overloaded a system and now you have to look at a task list and kind of figure out which is the real deadline and which isn't, you're just going to ignore everything and just do whatever you want.

19:09 Well, it's also it's easy to do anyway. If that happens, it's failing at doing its job, which is what's next.

19:14 Yeah. I always say you just want to see reality. You can choose to do with reality whatever you want, but we're just trying to make a system that shows you and shows your team reality. So the thing you want to do once you've gotten those deadlines is you want to go ahead and say, okay, with everything else, now I want to give it a subjective rating.

19:37 So this is very specific to our system. Like I said, you can try our system for free, and you can also go ahead and Okay, so the second thing is the subjective. So we've gotten rid of the urgence, like has to, you know, like has a deadline stuff. And we're not calling it importance because uh I'm calling it deadlines, but you can call Sorry, the there's deadlines and then there's importance.

19:59 Yeah, so the deadlines are kind of the urgent. So if you're thinking back to the Eisenhower matrix, the the deadlines match to urgency. Is there an urgent deadline? And the more subjective ratings are ratings of importance. How important is this? And there's a couple of ratings. There's do first, which is very rarely used, but sometimes something comes up and you're like, I have to do this today.

20:23 It basically kind of is almost like a double up for like really, really urgent in some ways.

20:30 It's putting it in front of all of the do today. It's did the deadline is today. It's particularly useful when you have a team. So you're saying, like, start with this, please.

20:40 Yeah. Sometimes you have a team where you're just like, the first thing I want you to do when you get into the office is this, and then you set it as do first. The second thing we have is a game changer. So this is a task where you don't have to do it today, but if you did do it today or this week, it would really, really benefit you and benefit your business.

21:02 So examples are the big things that a CEO is supposed to be doing hiring, setting the vision, looking at their cash flow, that kind of stuff.

21:12 Yeah, it might be role-dependent because I'm thinking these are the automations that I know are gonna save us time.

21:20 You're like, I disagree.

21:21 No, that's that's fair. I'm I guess to be fair, I don't really know what hiring entails. Yeah. So it just seems like too big a lot.

21:30 That's because it's that I would say that's my number versus your.

21:32 It kind of makes sense though. Hiring is a little bit like automations, where it's it's something that's gonna take a lot of time. It is really important. You're gonna have to steal time during the week to get it done. And you know it's gonna make yeah, no, it's it's a very similar thing, actually.

21:46 Yeah, the last hire we made was really great, and it took me maybe six weeks to do it. Like there's a lot of behind the scenes, like thinking about what to say and thinking about what to like before you actually find someone. It's a lot of work.

22:00 Trevor Burrus And it doesn't have a deadline. It's just, it's going to be really, really good when it's done. And so you keep you want it to keep bumping the top of your list. The rationale for it is basically if you're done with everything that's due today and due tomorrow, these will pop up next. As yeah, you might have some stuff that's still this week, but you're ahead by two days.

22:21 It's time to get, in my case, this automation pushed through because the sooner it's done, the we're going to be wasting less time. Every team member is wasting time on this thing that could just be automated. And the sooner we can get it done, but it doesn't actually have a deadline. If it got pushed by another week or another week, yes, there's a loss in efficiency.

22:38 But the things with real deadlines do have to take priority.

22:42 I think about it as similar to the 80-20. So those who've worked with me before will know that I've talked a lot about the 20% that gives you the 80% return. And I think about the the game changer as similar to the 80-20, but it's the thing that if I work at it, it's going to give me an 80% return on cash flow or having teams or operational support or something.

23:04 It'll it'll have a big impact that will last for a very long time. I think that's why if you go back to Casey Neistat's stuff about like things that last and things that don't, you do um there's a there was an episode we did um a couple of months ago on Casey Neistat, and you talked about there are those tasks that you do and then you just have to do them again tomorrow or next week.

23:26 And they feel like they don't really matter. They don't really have grab or like long-term value. And I feel like the game changer tasks are the ones that like if you do them well now and you set time aside for them, you can be in a materially better place in the future.

23:44 Interesting. I I thought because his main comparison there was sort of the boring business stuff that's necessary versus the content that lives forever that he's proud of.

23:55 Well, I think that was his game changer stuff. But I think for other people, they it might be a different thing.

24:02 I feel like in Casey's case, a game changer would be building the rig that lets him shoot a top-down shot way more efficiently because he knows he's trying to create that green content that he's really proud of that sort of it feels like it's sort of his legacy, but he's having to spend three hours on something he knows should only take an hour.

24:23 And so the game changer is like, I'm gonna take, I'm gonna steal time every as soon as I'm two days ahead in our system of my schedule, of of in terms of deadlines, I'm gonna build that rig now. Because and and I might only get 20% of it done, but if I do that every week or every time I'm I'm two days ahead for the next three weeks, I'm gonna get it done.

24:42 It's gonna happen before everything else. And now I'm gonna be like cooking with the ass. I'm gonna be I'm gonna be moving faster because of this. And so it yeah, it wouldn't be versus the blue, which is I've still got to pay my bills, so the power stays on, or I've still got to respond to these emails, or again, the blue, I think, is the color he chose for the work that's necessary, but not yeah, just the routine work, paying bills, things like that.

25:12 Yeah.

25:13 In our system, the green and blue stuff would all still just be, I mean, I don't even know, with a YouTuber creating content. I think I think they have deadlines. They've got certain consistency targets they need to meet. And so that would be deadlines for content, um, wire free times to Yeah, things like that as well.

25:33 Would brand deals have a deadline? I think they would just be uh it depends.

25:38 It depends, I think. It depends on what it's for.

25:41 Yeah, I mean I guess I think again it's gonna sit in a subjective importance space and it's gonna find a a place to live between the real deadlines. Unless they said get back to me by Friday, otherwise we're not gonna we're gonna go with someone else. In which case, yeah, that's a deadline.

25:57 I've worked for some content creators and it really is dependent. And even if there's deadline sometimes, people will push it. So it depends. Yeah. Okay. Should we talk about importance?

26:06 The level of importance we've called important.

26:09 Yes, yes. So yes.

26:11 We could rename it.

26:12 Yeah. Well, it's just important. It's like stuff where you're like, ah, this is important. I have to do this. I have to pay a bill. Well, actually, no, not pay a bill. That's urgent. But I have to fill out a form for a thing. I should do this, I should get a doctor's appointment booked. I should like those things.

26:29 We are pushing up against the limits of our system because you can put a bill off. I guess a bill technically has a due date of when it becomes a problem.

26:37 When it becomes overdue.

26:38 Yeah. Ideally automate that and stop having to do it.

26:41 Yeah. Well, it's tougher than it looks. We we know that from experience.

26:44 But yeah, so we've got to still have an actual due date.

26:47 Important, yeah. We've got important as a subjective. And then we have would be nice. And Robbie and I had a lot of conversations about the exact language of this because a lot of times would be nice is actually what people would identify as should do. I should do this, I should clean out my closet, I should, you know, make sure that my kitchen counters are cleaned all the time, or I should, I should, I should, I should.

27:13 Whereas what we've renamed it as is it would be nice if I do this. It doesn't, it doesn't really qualify, it's not urgent, and it's not even really important. It just it would be nice.

27:26 Yeah, I think a lot of websites a lot a lot of the stuff that you're embarrassed about not having fixed yet, but you're just like it's not actually that important.

27:36 What would be that it would be nice? I I would love to do more work on the website. That would be nice.

27:41 Yeah, there's probably a few broken links that we should get someone to clean up at somewhere, but it's not it's not a game changer. It's not moving the needle enough that we should prioritize it over the yeah, over the game changes and also over all the important stuff that really does need to get done.

27:57 It doesn't have a deadline, but we have to get to this at some point. It it needs to be surfacing at a higher level than all of the stuff we're putting into would be nice.

28:05 And then the last category, and we've had this for a while, actually, is ideas. So originally when we talked about this, and this is actually before you came on to it, we talked about the idea of having an ideas trellis. So we talked about the um your prioritization filter as a tree, and ideas will choke the tree.

28:25 Because when you have ADHD, you will have a ton of ideas. You will have ideas every day, multiple times a day, most likely. So we need a home for ideas that isn't the top of your task list. Because a lot of people operate in a world where ideas get to the top of your task list without any pre cognition around like, is that really where it needs to be?

28:49 Sometimes, but not always, especially not if it's a if it's not a game changer. If you say, Oh, it'd be really idea, good idea if I did a collaboration with this person about this thing, because they mentioned something on a podcast and it's really interesting. Just put it in the ideas section.

29:03 Yeah, we thought about would be nice and ideas and later and having them all sort of collapse into one. And I'm happy with where we've arrived. I think it's one of those things as well where I think I wouldn't put something like podcast ideas in there because I just have a place in storage in in a folder where those live and I can pull from them if I'm looking for ideas.

29:24 I don't think it needs to get into your to-do list and start cluttering it for no reason. But I think ideas for things that might be worth investigating at some point in the future. They're going in here because we want them out of your head.

29:37 Yeah. We need everything out of your head. That's the key. At this point, Robbie and I, when we're doing this right, we have brains that are just just for coming up with interesting ideas and creative solutions, and that's it.

29:51 You can forget about tomorrow because you're going to see what's next. I mean, you're not forgetting about tomorrow. You can see what's happening tomorrow on on the list, but it it can just leave. You're not having to hold it so you don't lose it and so that you remember, I'll go do this first next tomorrow, and then I need to remember to do this as well, first thing.

30:08 It's just in there and it's going to be at the top of the list, and you'll just work through it.

30:12 Yeah. And what that what we've set up, the prioritization filter, and the reason we like it is this is all organized so that you can identify what's urgent and what's important, and it will all go in one column. So if you go to the link in the show notes to the focus filter, you will see that column and what that looks like where it says, okay, this is this is urgent and this is due tomorrow, but underneath that, these are the game changes.

30:41 And then when you have what's due seven days from now, and then underneath that we've got important. So it kind of all goes in one long line. I recently did this with a client actually last week, and what it's what this meant was you don't have to figure out what's next. You just have to figure out what's truly urgent, when it's due, and what's important.

31:03 And the system will figure out what's next for you, which is really nice.

31:07 All the important importance columns will shuffle around the real deadlines. So the deadlines will keep coming to the front. Game changes will keep turning out if you have cleared out your due today and due tomorrow. Then you're not going to get important tasks to the top of the list until you've cleared out a whole seven days.

31:24 Again, we might want to rename important.

31:26 Well, we can have a long walk and debate about that, I'm sure. That's how we did all these names. If you guys have a name that you want to call it, tell us. Because I love feedback on this stuff.

31:37 And then would be nice is you have to have cleared out 14 days worth of deadlines to get to that stuff because it's really not actually crucial. But you could do that. And the awkward truth about particularly ideas, but also kind of the would-be nice, and there was a reason why you wanted to just collapse them into one column.

31:56 But I think it's useful. It's conceivable. I think that the would be nice is kind of this actually, I do want to get this done eventually. And I'm not letting go of the fact that I want to get it done eventually. But the reality is it's going to go into this column and you're not going to get to it in the immediate future.

32:11 And it is, you are going to have to let go of it a little bit because you shouldn't be working on it. You should be working on the game changers. You should be working on the things that are truly important that you've been letting would-be nice take precedent over.

32:23 Yeah. And that's the truth. Like sometimes we don't even notice that we're doing that because it's just a little bit easier to do the would-be nice stuff and a little bit harder to do that deep work game changer stuff. And so we just re-prioritize it so you're like, ah, but I'm doing things, I'm busy all day, but you're not actually making progress.

32:41 And the truth is, this whole prioritization filter can be looked at like a pit, like a um like a triangle, where the urgent tasks are the the rarest, the truly urgent task, the rarest. And the biggest block for you is gonna be ideas followed by would be nice. Like most of your things are gonna filter down into would be nice and ideas.

33:06 And that's okay. That's super normal. That's actually how you make progress. If you demand that they stay and change and you have like 15 game changes, you're not really gonna get that much compared to somebody who just has three or five.

33:22 Yeah, you're also gonna be swimming through them to find the thing that's actually important for you to be working on. Or you yeah, or you're gonna pick the first thing that appeals and and do something that's actually actually a distraction.

33:33 Yeah. And again, we we just want it to match reality. You can look at reality and then you can be like, whatever, I want to go do something else. And that's fine. That's your choice. But we just need to see what's really happening.

33:44 Yeah, you can always you can always override it and go, yeah. Yeah, you might decide, I've only got an hour left in the day. I'm gonna, I'm not gonna take on one of these higher level tasks. I'm I'm gonna go do a would be nice that I know only has a 30-minute execution time. That's okay. That's again, depending on how much energy and how much time you have, you can make little decisions like that.

34:04 The other thing I wanted to say about this is you're not going to see all the would be nice and all the ideas. When you when you go to what's next, you're just gonna be looking at the next week. Yeah, okay.

34:13 So you're we have a filtering system, so you don't see everything in it unless you go to the all view.

34:19 And you can set up whatever view you want. The views are filtered, sorted lists of or subsets of the of the database that's containing everything. Everything for you, everything for your team, but your day-to-day view is just gonna be your stuff and just the stuff for this week, or maybe even just the stuff for the next three days.

34:37 Yeah, 100%. So this is the prioritization filter. But the problem is now you're gonna have to sell your team on the prioritization filter. And teams don't always some teams are great and they embrace these systems and they'll take it on board and they'll do it. But a lot of people, a lot of teams, for for a lot of really good reasons, don't love change and they don't really want the system.

35:01 There's a lot of reasons they don't want the system. Maybe you have burned them out on a ton of systems. Like you know who you are. I I am definitely one of those people who like always has to hold myself back from being like, here's a new system and here's a new system, especially given that my job is to test systems.

35:16 I've got what was it, Tom's planner? I'm gonna try that.

35:19 Yes. A nice man out of a cafe. Recommended uh simplified Gantra.

35:25 We were sitting at a cafe talking about systems and planning everything and a schedule. What are you guys talking about? He organized boats, I think.

35:35 Boat schedules. Yeah, boat schedules.

35:36 Anyway.

35:37 Like 20 people or so.

35:38 Yeah. So I I love trying things as part of my job.

35:42 This isn't a recommendation for Tom's.

35:43 No, we've not tried Tom's Matt. Yeah, but it's part of my job to try things. And so, yeah, I understand that not everyone's as excited to try a new system as I am. And so you may have tried a whole bunch of new systems with your team. And so now they don't really want a new one. They're like, why would I do this?

36:02 What's it gonna change? They also might have their own personal systems and their personal task list of processes that work for them. They're like, I have a notebook, I write it in the notebook, I take it off, I do the next one, especially if they don't have working memory struggles, they won't necessarily feel the personal benefits, although the team will feel the benefits, but they won't feel the personal benefits necessarily of this process.

36:25 So all that to say is there can be resistance and it makes a lot of sense and it's totally reasonable, but it's still really important that you get your team on a shared task system for the you and for the business as a whole. For all the reasons that we've said. So let's talk a little bit about some of the reasons that your team doesn't really want shared tasks, but some of the benefits of it.

36:54 I think the first most common bit of resistance you'll get is just they already have a system. And it might just be post-it notes or a spreadsheet of their own.

37:04 Wouldn't know.

37:05 That's the problem with not having it. They'll have a system and they won't want change because no one wants change. Yeah.

37:10 The other reason is people dislike being micromanaged, they sort of want to go do their own thing and not necessarily, you know, there's that term micromanaged. I prefer the term transparency. I really do believe that.

37:23 Yeah, I think the goal is transparency, not to micromanage.

37:29 No, no. I mean, once you have a team that you trust, they could be doing this and you could like never look at it except to remind yourself what you gave them. It's also really worth pointing out that you are also going to put your tasks in there. You're also going to be transparent. And surprisingly often, as an ADHD founder, that accountability is going to be useful for you as well as it is for them.

37:51 Yeah, it's probably worth alleviating that concern if you have a team that you know how hard they're working. Make it very clear, this is this is for me. I want to be able to see what's happening. We've had clients where they're actually they want the transparency so that they're not doing things like adding tasks that the person's already handling or doing a whole lot of sort of anxious messaging to people to make sure, like again, the micromanaging is coming from not being able to see themselves.

38:19 Whereas if there's one single source of truth for what is being done and when it's being done, and the fact that it's on someone's task list and it's going to be serviced at the right time because it's it's been given the correct details, the correct deadlines, et cetera, the CEO or whoever can go in and see that.

38:36 They don't have to have any interaction with you. They don't have to have micromanaged you and and reached out to you and said, Hey, hey, you haven't forgotten this thing, right? They don't start adding tasks to your task list, being like, Don't forget this, this and then now you have duplicates that you're that start overwhelming the system.

38:49 Yeah. And also it's worth saying that, yeah, without the system, the person doing the anxious messaging is me all the time. Because this is a real, this was a real struggle until we, you know, until we built the system out for the team. Um, I think it is really hard because a lot of people will set their their tasks in a system like Slack or Teams or WhatsApp, and just giving someone a task there, you know, you don't necessarily know if they're gonna do it, when are they gonna do it?

39:17 Is it is it at the top of their priority list? Is it not at the top of their priority list? Is it at the top of their priority list and actually it wasn't that important? And you wish that they wouldn't have taken their time out of their day to do this instead of the other thing? Like all of these things that, especially working now with a hybrid team, we're often working with people partially online, partially not.

39:38 It's really helpful to have the standard conversation.

39:41 Something I'm gonna start doing, because I'm hand I am handing off tasks in Slack. And then I've now got, I think they are being turned into tasks in the prioritization filter. And that's saving me the job of having to do it, which is nice. But I don't have a way of following up and checking on them except to go in there and find that I'm I'm looking forward to connecting Claude, I mean it's already connected, to the task system and to Slack, but actually having a conversation every morning and saying, I've assigned a bunch of tasks in Slack.

40:11 Can you confirm that they've been moved to the system and that and what they've been assigned in terms of your due date and importance level and let me know that they are actually going to get executed on.

40:20 As soon as you do that, give it to me and then uh build it into something we can give to all of our clients and members. Because that sounds cool.

40:28 And then remembering to do it every morning. So that's a habit.

40:31 It is worth also saying one thing, which is that there is another reason that people may resist this, and that is because they are they are wasting your time. You know, it it's not what you want. You assume. I always go in assuming that everyone is not doing that. Sometimes that is the case, and those people are also going to push back on this kind of transparency.

40:50 And it is helpful for you to have full confidence that no one in your team is doing that because you know exactly what they're doing.

40:58 I don't think the default template for the team's prioritization filter has a effort column, but you can add columns for expected number of hours for a task. You uh you can have recurring tasks and you can measure that against how long you could add a column for how long it actually took, and you could do some timekeeping with this.

41:17 That's not in there by default, but it will it will sort of show up the full list of what they're doing this week.

41:21 So this is kind of the benefits of it, is you will learn really quickly if you have a people problem or a process problem, because you'll actually have a process of tracking tasks, which you uh most likely haven't had, unless you've been putting things in a very specific thing. But even with clients, you know, I've noticed you can have clients where they're like, Well, my job is to put things into like a system.

41:46 We have clients who, you know, like I build construction, you know, I renovate. And so my team members' job is to like help this process go through, and it's all very systemized. There is still a need to understand, like, okay, but what do you spend most of your time doing? Is it this part of the process or that part of the process?

42:06 And this still like lots of room for it's really hard to communicate.

42:10 Yeah, it's really hard to communicate one, the priority of tasks. So when you're just assigning tasks, I think something that really goes missing in Slack or just comms communicated tasks is the the correct rank ordering of all these things. And that's something you need to be able to go and see them all lined up, see how they've lined them up if you're assigning them in Slack, and be able to change that and go, no, no, no, this one first, and then these are urgent, that doesn't have a due date.

42:37 And no, that's definitely just a would-be nice. I did not mean for you to interpret that as a high priority right now. The completion date and the effort stuff is all things we'll add for clients when time sheeting is something they're trying to do to track where the time for a client is actually going for a client, where the time for one of their uh employees or contractors is actually going.

42:56 The other thing there as well is it's not always malicious. So I wanted to say a lot of the time, again, in the same in the same way that we're sometimes miscommunicating the importance of something, and it would be nice as ending up as taking priority over things that were really important. Sometimes you've also got employees who are running tasks you gave three months ago and they're completely gone from your from your memory.

43:20 You forgot you even said that. You have changed the systems three times since then, because you're an ADHD founder, and they're still running these redundant scripts or these redundant checks, and having all the tasks in one place and being able to say being able to see what's on their week schedule, being able to see what got completed last week, lets you discover, oh, I'm wasting 10 hours a week on something that really doesn't need to be being done anymore.

43:42 And it's not their fault. They're they're executing the order as as requested.

43:46 100%. I think this this system works because we really underestimate just how complicated it is to communicate. And so, yeah, we really do need that level of detail in order to effectively communicate what people are doing.

43:59 We've covered before. For the brief gap as an issue for ADHD founders trying to communicate and the team just going, You've only given us a fraction of the puzzle we need. Your vision, the difference between your vision and what you've actually said, there's a big gap there.

44:13 Yeah. And this is a similar one. It's like the difference between how what your team is spending time on and what they need to be spending time on and what you need to be spending time on can be really large and you you can miss things. So if you have a system like this, it really helps helps to avoid that.

44:28 So yeah.

44:29 It's funny how bad AI is at finding certain things. So the crown, episode season six, episode six.

44:35 Yeah. Okay. And there's a round. Let's explain, let's explain this. So um one of the benefits of our prioritization system is you identify obsolete tasks, which is what you said. Robbie and I both remembered a story, and we couldn't figure out where it was from, of somebody, a really funny example of this.

44:53 British royal family, and I have a memory of seeing someone go into a room and wonder what the hell's going on.

45:02 Setting a table for a dinner.

45:04 Yeah, and I can't for the life of me. I feel like it might have been a documentary, and but I it's found an episode of the Crown. So we'll go through what the episode was, and we'll try and remember if this is what we were.

45:14 We looked everywhere. I read so many historical articles about the British Royal Family for this one like anecdote. It's kind of crazy.

45:22 Yeah, because all AI could find for the longest time was Prince Albert's Queen Victoria. But that's just a sad story about a woman who wanted like that was that was a That was very legitimate.

45:32 She was she was, you know, she was mourning.

45:35 Yeah. She was just keep putting stuff out for him. Okay, so what isn't a story we were looking for?

45:39 What did you find? And is it attached to like what is it what's the reference actually?

45:44 So it's about modernizing the monarchy, which is where I thought we saw it. They definitely touched on sort of wastefulness and and the public discontent around obsolete.

45:54 But yeah, we know, and we both have this shared memory. It's one of those things. You remember people have shared memories that aren't even real?

46:01 Like what's the theory where you've actually just what was that show?

46:06 There was a show where something actually got changed.

46:08 Well, there was a show where you could slip out of your timeline and there was a show about jumping timelines. But there's this there's this sort of conspiracy theory around remembering brand logos and things that have changed, but you're like, no, I'm confident it was this. And I come from the timeline where that was true, and I'm now in the timeline where it's not true.

46:26 Okay. All of that to say that, you know, when you think about obsolete systems, the one that comes to mind and came to mind for both of us is like situations like the royal family, where they, you know, have a lot of examples either from from like I guess fiction about them from the crown or documentaries of times that people were, you know, wasting, you know, like setting tables for people that weren't there anymore, or having a guard posted outside uh for a to watch over something that wasn't necessary anymore.

47:01 And it just Yeah, that was Catherine Catherine.

47:04 And that happens so often. And you might not be the royal family, you know, this sort of institution of tradition where that is probably very common, but even in your own business, you would be surprised how quickly you can find yourself with a sort of a business equivalent of a of somebody setting a table to dinner every night for a group of people who no longer come.

47:28 Like think about a workshop that gets set up and nobody that workshop isn't happening anymore. So the setup is unnecessary.

47:34 Yeah, you also get, I guess it's the other form of miscommunication, is around the scope of how long something should take. So you've you've given someone something thinking that should be about a two-hour job and they're spending 10 hours on it somehow.

47:43 And it's not because we've seen that a lot, actually. We have a lot of times that's happened in the past.

47:48 You had in your head, there's no way this should take longer than X hours, and they either really enjoy that part of the job or they are really bad at it, or they're doing it just because they don't have like the basic skills for that they haven't learned like Or they want to re do a really good job.

48:04 Like a lot of times people have said like they're really double extra check in, like they're overvaluing how costly a mistake is relative to the cost of their hours.

48:14 Yeah, and that comes up as well.

48:15 So I think it's also they're just they're it can be as simple and innocent as they're lacking the training to know how to use the tool and to use templates and to And you didn't know that because you didn't have the tasks and you didn't have the system.

48:27 So this is all about actually having more teamwork. When you can see what they're doing, when they can see what you're doing, it's more opportunity for for you to help each other, for them to say, Hey, I noticed that you were doing this part of your emails, and I thought that was my job. So do you want to maybe stick that over on my side?

48:47 You know, sometimes as found as we can kind of take little bits that we are really supposed to be handing off to people and be like, this is mine. Um I don't want to delegate this. It's I want to avoid.

48:57 I was gonna say the would be nice category is also a good space to go, could I put this on someone else's would be nice, delegate this. And because again, with team, it's good to have it's actually good to flesh out their don't do this first. Like, no, there's a there's a very set order to when you're allowed to get to this, but I want you to have a lot of stuff in there for when you have a downtime or a a lull in in our workload, and I want to have a big list of would-be nice stuff for you to start getting through when that happens.

49:30 If I know we've had a quiet two or three weeks and you haven't made a dent in our would-be nice, then like what's going on?

49:36unknown Yeah.

49:36 Yeah. It allows you to identify where people are are getting stuck. So yeah, these are all the reasons why, even if you're a founder and you have a team and there may be a little bit of resistance to the idea of change, this is a good one to do. I highly recommend this. This has been the bedrock of what we've taught for years now.

49:53 And it's been nice to be able to bring it to the to a team space. And yeah, largely thanks to you, Robbie, for for designing it.

50:00 It's still a trade-off between putting every little feature that could be in it versus keeping it simple.

50:06 Because again, the debate between us is simplicity versus um versus systems.

50:11 If you want us to make it do more things, you're welcome to work with us.

50:14 Yes. Yeah, you're welcome to work with us, you're welcome to ask us questions. We take these systems and we build them into very beautiful personalized processes for team members, for founders. Uh, we love doing that. But yeah, recommendations. What are the takeaways? First of all, I want to know from you guys.

50:30 Let me know. You can email me Sky at Unconventional Organization, you can DM DM me at unconventional organization on Instagram, and let me know what you are taking away from this, what are you gonna try? If you try the prioritization filter, how did you find it? Yeah, work with the team, use this process, get that trust and transparency by shifting to a shared task list, and it will help you with your ADHD struggles.

50:57 It's designed for working memory, it's designed for these processes. And ultimately, if everybody is communicating, they really know what they have to do, they really know what everyone else's has to do, you have a better team in terms of tasks you have to do, teamwork in general, and it's just more likely that you're going to be able to reach your goals with the stability that we want and we know that we struggle with with ADHD.

51:21 Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the ADHD Skills Lab. If you liked it, leave us a five star review. It helps other people learn more about us. And thank you so much to our wonderful team for making us sound good, look good, we couldn't do it without you.