ADHD and Prioritizing

My internal 'prioritizing' filter lets too much stuff through. And when everything seems equally important... nothing is.

People assume ADHD means not caring what’s important. It’s closer to the opposite: everything arrives marked important, all at once, with nothing to sort it.

Two filters, side by side

The comic draws prioritizing as a pair of funnels labelled NOT IMPORTANT and IMPORTANT.

On the non-ADHD side, the NOT IMPORTANT funnel is full and doing its job, catching almost everything. A single item — obligation — drops through into the IMPORTANT bucket below, which holds a manageable handful: routine, errand, deadline, leaving on time.

On the ADHD side, the NOT IMPORTANT funnel is nearly empty. Almost nothing gets filtered out. The IMPORTANT bucket below is overflowing, and the labels around it aren’t tasks at all: thought, question, fun, idea, deadline, sound, curiosity, impulse, people watching, and a stray “what’s that thing outside?”

A sound and a deadline, weighted the same

The detail worth sitting with is what shares that bucket. A deadline is in there. So is a sound. So is a passing curiosity about something outside the window. They’re not ranked against each other, because the thing that does the ranking isn’t catching much.

That’s why advice to “just focus on what matters” lands so badly. It assumes the sorting already happened and you picked wrong. The comic says the sorting is what’s missing — and when everything is flagged important, the flag stops carrying information at all.