Future You

I hope that by explaining how ADHD affects one’s ability to prioritize, you (or someone with ADHD that you’d like to understand better) come away with a better understanding of yourself or the ADHD person in your life.

Importance

Important means high-value and should-not-be-skipped. Maybe there are large consequences to not doing a thing, such as “I will be miserable and homeless if I do not fill out this form” or “I will be fired in 3 months if things keep going like this”, or “I will get cavities and a dentist bill I can’t afford if I don’t take care of my dental hygiene”

It’s stuff that is in Future You’s best interest, and ADHD interferes with your ability to see and value Future You.

Urgency

Do you like living in a clean house but struggle to maintain it? Cleaning like mad before a guest comes over is reacting to the now, not the nebulous future. Friend Visiting In 30 Minutes feels more real than You, Appreciating Your Clean Habitat Tomorrow. It makes the task feel urgent.

Urgency makes it easier for your brain to see and factor in Future You (albeit you in 30 minutes, embarrassed that your friend is seeing your messy house, rather than you in a month) when deciding how much motivation you’ll feel to start and finish cleaning.

It’s harder to value cleaning for the sake of a fuzzy and abstract Future You over doing something that is rewarding for Present You without the looming threat of your friend coming over.

Examples

Important and urgent are two completely separate concepts.

• important and urgent: your kid is sick and you need to pick them up from school
• important but not urgent: doing exercise
• not important, but urgent: responding to that chat notification that just popped up
• not important, not urgent: redecorating your bedroom

The “not important but urgent” category is where my time disappears. The “important but not urgent” category is long-term stuff I’m neglecting.

How this impairs

Neurotypical people have a much easier time turning the thought “it is important to start taxes early enough that they do not cause extreme stress for Future Me” into “I started taxes early enough to avoid extreme stress”. This usually isn’t a conscious process. It just happens, the same way you don’t think about shifting your weight, moving every muscle, and bending your knee when someone asks you to step forward.

If, one year, an NT person did start taxes so late they had extreme stress, their brain could efficiently use that as a learning experience so that their brain automatically produced the correct amount of motivation at the right time next year to avoid the extreme tax stress in the future.

A novelty-based nervous system

If you have trouble seeing and valuing Future You, then you are driven by the things you can see. Those are often:

• interest (rewarding while you do it, not just at the end when you’re done)
• challenge (ever done something out of spite because someone thought you couldn’t do it? Alternately, it’s tricky enough that it keeps you engaged)
• novelty
• urgency

Many times, neurotypical people try to convey “you should be doing this task” by stating or reiterating its importance. Since they don’t often get stuck between intention and doing, they assume that the problem here is that you are not aware of the importance. If they were made aware of the importance, their brain would use that information to recalibrate their vision of Future Them and start metaphorically walking.

If you can’t see Future You very well, hearing about the importance might not translate to motivation. You’ll need a different strategy that doesn’t depend on the assumption that awareness of importance creates follow-through.

Nearsightedness is morally neutral

“Are you saying I’m an asshole that only acts in my own self-interest???”

Nah. I find helping people really interesting. I will frequently drop whatever I am doing to help the person who most recently asked…but there’s often somebody else who needed me to finish something for a deadline in 2 weeks. I am being selfless to the person I dropped everything for, but kind of an asshole to the person who was counting on me for the 2 week project.

I am nearsighted to the future. I can be both kind to everyone in the now and a jerk to people in the future that I can’t see very well. Importance is completely separate from selfishness.

Working on it

Fundamentally, the problem is the wild difference between my intention to be nice to everybody (including people of the future) and my difficulty succeeding at being nice to people in the future (one of whom is me).

ADHD coping skills can involve creating your own interest, challenge, novelty or urgency when your natural motivation doesn’t match the importance of a task. Future Me is still pretty blurry, but I’m trying my best to make it easier for her because she’s worth it.