How to prioritize with ADHD when everything feels equally important and urgent

AKA how to silence the eternal scream of “do everything now!”

If you’re looking for more ADHD support, join the waitlist for the Dopamine Den, a community for ADHDers to learn about effective ADHD strategies and systems, connect and body double with other ADHDers, and design a life that’s aligned with your brain’s needs.

Neurotypicals: "Just prioritize!"

ADHDers: “All 15 things feel equally important, so I shall sit like a frozen potato instead.”

There’s a special kind of fresh ADHD hell where we have too many things to do but no idea where to start, and every task feels equally urgent and important. Our brain keeps screaming do everything now but refuses to pick a direction, so we either freeze or hyperfocus on something inconsequential, like scrubbing the grout.

Despite how it might look to the uninformed, this is far from laziness, and it’s most definitely not a character flaw.

It’s a cocktail of cognitive overload driven by ADHD executive dysfunction: trouble filtering and sequencing what matters, decision fatigue from too many choices, time blindness that distorts urgency, and task transition and initiation challenges that make us feel like we’re wading through mud whenever we need to do something important.

So while a neurotypical brain might glance at a list, do a quick internal triage, then know what to work on first, ADHDers may look at the same list and see a flat wall of tasks with no obvious order, just a chaotic blur where everything looks equally urgent, important, and impossible.

Women with ADHD often get hit even harder with this

Women with ADHD can especially struggle with prioritization because society places disproportionate expectations on us to manage not only our own tasks but also the household, family care, and emotional labor for friends, family, and even colleagues.

This creates an overwhelming number of tasks to prioritize, many of which have no clear deadlines or metrics for completion, which makes it incredibly hard to figure out what truly needs our attention.

Plus, women with ADHD are more likely to mask our struggles from an early age to fit societal expectations of women and girls, which can program us to prioritize others' needs and expectations over our own. This makes it extra tough to say no to new commitments or deprioritize tasks that others deem important.

How to make prioritization easier with ADHD

So yeah, prioritizing with ADHD is hard for legit reasons, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. With the right support, you can create enough clarity to start moving.

But first: dump

Many ADHDers try to hold everything in our heads, but we often don’t receive clarity until after we process things externally, meaning talking or writing them out. So a helpful first step is getting every task, reminder, and open loop out of your head and into one place that you can see.

I know many ADHDers love good ol’ fashioned paper, but we also lose it, so I recommend having one digital dump that you can easily access from your phone or computer. The Notes app is just fine. I also like Todoist, Notion, or XTiles for this.

When you’re dumpin’ you have one rule: Don’t try to group or rank anything. The goal here isn’t to organize; it’s to clear mental clutter.

Once you’ve taken a dump (lol, sorry), try one or several of the following prioritization strategies depending on what feels most helpful in the moment.

Question approach

Sometimes it helps to pick a task and ask yourself a few questions to get a read on what matters. This doesn’t magically fix prioritization struggles, but it can give your brain something to push against when everything feels equally loud.

Try asking:

• Impact: "What impact will doing this make on me or my goals?"

• Time sensitivity: "How soon does this need to be done?"

• Dependencies: "Are other tasks blocked until I do this one?”

Sometimes this is enough to loosen the gridlock and create a bit of momentum. Sometimes it’s not!

Must, could, and should method

Another way to get clarity is by ranking tasks through the Must / Could / Should filter:

• Musts are the tasks with real, obvious consequences if you don’t do them. Think: missed deadlines, burned bridges, late fees.

• Coulds are meaningful but flexible. These are the things that would move your goals forward or make life easier, but nothing explodes if they wait.

• Shoulds are the ones that feel important because of outside pressure. Stuff like folding laundry perfectly or cleaning the baseboards. Things that might look good on paper but aren’t super important in terms of keeping you and your life afloat.

Anxiety cost framework

This framework helps you prioritize tasks based on two types of stress: the anxiety you feel about doing the task versus the anxiety of leaving it undone.

While a task might not be objectively urgent, if it creates high enough background stress when left incomplete (like an uncomfortable conversation or unpaid bill), it can drain your mental energy and block you from focusing on other work.

By prioritizing and tackling these mental bandwidth blockers first, you clear some of the psychological clutter that's preventing you from effectively prioritizing other responsibilities.

Energy-based prioritization

You can also try matching tasks to the kind of energy you have in the moment. Of course, this doesn’t always work because sometimes the important thing just has to get done, no matter what energy you’re working with.

But when that’s not the case, letting energy guide your choices means prioritizing what’s possible right now, so you can build momentum instead of freezing.

Use high-energy windows for complex or demanding work. Save lower-energy moments for repetitive or mindless tasks.

ADHD brains are rarely perfectly consistent, but we do run on cyclical patterns. Learning when you think clearly, crash, and get your second wind can make a huge difference in what gets done.

Context clustering method

While energy-based prioritization is about how much fuel you have, context clustering is about what type of fuel you have.

ADHDers struggle with transitions, which includes transitioning between different contexts. For instance, it can be extra tough to go from giving a presentation to answering emails, or from troubleshooting tech issues to writing something creative.

So sometimes it helps to group tasks by the mental mode they require. For example, "phone call mode," "creative mode," or "detail-oriented mode." Then tackle groups of similar tasks when you're in the corresponding headspace, rather than forcing yourself to switch contexts constantly.

Future self impact

ADHD brains have a hard time connecting with future consequences, but reframing tasks in terms of how they’ll affect future you helps shift the decision from abstract consequences to something more personal and immediate.

So you can try thinking about how much your future self will thank or curse you. Will Later-This-Week-You feel much more supported because you did this thing? Will Tomorrow-You be in a full-on panic if this doesn’t get done? Will Next-Week-You be fucked if you don’t do it?

Task lottery

Write down a handful of potential tasks on separate slips of paper. Toss them in a jar, bowl, hat, whatever. Then pull one. You have two choices: do it, or veto it and pull another.

Many times, you’ll feel a gut reaction—ugh no or okay fine. This can help you figure out what matters because it bypasses your internal debate team and taps into your intuitive yes/no system.

Bonus: It adds a tiny hit of novelty and surprise, which your dopamine-starved brain might respond to way faster than a perfectly sorted priority list.

When all else fails, do anything

When everything feels urgent, the noise won’t stop, and you feel frozen, just pick something—anything—that feels doable.

It doesn’t have to be the most efficient or important or urgent, just doable. The goal isn’t to be strategic; it’s to break inertia. Because once you get moving, it’s often much easier to decide what to do.

Wait, what about the Eisenhower Matrix??

Throw the Eisenhower Matrix in the garbage.

Just kidding. I know some people find it helpful, but since it’s based on prioritizing things by urgency and importance, it can be hard for ADHDers to use. (If you’re not familiar with the Eisenhower Matrix, you can see an example here)

As an alternative, some ADHDers benefit from swapping out the “urgent” and “important” categories for “impact” and “energy”:

• high energy and high impact

• high energy and low impact

• low energy and high impact

• low energy and low impact

Personally, I still find it confusing for prioritization, but that’s just me! Maybe you’ll find it really helpful.

If you’re looking for more ADHD support, join the waitlist for the Dopamine Den, a community for ADHDers to learn about effective ADHD strategies and systems, connect and body double with other ADHDers, and design a life that’s aligned with your brain’s needs.