What the EF? How to Support Planning & Prioritization

When someone struggles with planning and prioritization, it's easy to assume they just aren't trying hard enough, don't care, or need to be more organized. But for many people with ADHD, these skills rely on executive functioning processes that simply don't happen automatically.

Planning and prioritization require us to hold multiple pieces of information in mind, estimate time, anticipate future needs, organize tasks into a logical sequence, determine what matters most, and decide where to begin. That's a tremendous amount of mental work happening behind the scenes.  Those who seem to “just know” how to do this, may not even realize how many mental processes they have running at one time.  But, for those of us who struggle with executive functioning, these invisible steps feel like huge roadblocks, whether we can even fully identify and understand what exactly the barrier is.  

The good news is that planning and prioritization can be supported. The goal isn't to do everything for someone else, but rather to reduce unnecessary cognitive load while helping them strengthen their skills in these areas.