Urgency and the challenge of knowing what comes first​

If your working day regularly feels like a dozen equally important things competing for your attention at once, you’re not imagining it, and you’re certainly not alone. That was the starting point for our recent webinar with career and mindset coach Annabella Smith, who joined us to explain the science behind ADHD and urgency, and to share a practical tool for telling the difference between what’s genuinely pressing and what just feels that way.

Annabella is an accredited coach, a late-diagnosed combined-type ADHDer, and the founder of Wired and Tired, a community for parents raising eurodivergent children. She brought both the research and her own lived experience to the session, which prompted a genuinely open conversation with attendees about their own patterns. Here’s what stood out.

1. It’s Not About Better Prioritisation

The session opened with a deliberate reframe. This wasn’t going to be a list of hacks, and it wasn’t going to end with “you just need to prioritise better.” For anyone with ADHD, that advice tends to land as another character judgement rather than a useful next step.

The more useful question, Annabella suggested, is why it’s so hard to tell the difference between what genuinely needs attention and what simply feels urgent in the moment. That distinction, and the brain science behind it, set up everything that followed​

2. Brain science behind the overwhelm

ADHD affects the connections between the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for planning, decision making and regulating attention, and the parts of the brain involved in motivation, reward and emotion. In practice, that means the systems that help most people decide what matters and then act on it don’t always fire when they’re needed.

A few things compound this:

• Dopamine and noradrenaline aren’t simply “deficient.” The signalling that helps activate motivation and alertness is inconsistent, which is why engagement with a task can depend so heavily on context rather than its actual importance.

• Attention gravitates toward novelty, not significance. A Teams notification can pull focus away from important work purely because it’s new or uncertain,
regardless of whether it matters.

• Working memory gets overloaded. Holding too much in mind at once creates mental noise, and letting anything go can feel risky, which is why nothing quite gets dropped, even when it should be.

• Time perception skews toward “now.” A deadline three weeks away struggles to compete with an email arriving this second, until, almost overnight, that
distant deadline is due tomorrow.

Put together, these four things create what Annabella called the overwhelm to firefighting cycle: everything feels important, decision fatigue sets in, attention goes to whatever is the loudest, genuinely important work keeps getting pushed back, and eventually it becomes urgent for real. At that point you’re firefighting, and the cycle starts again.

3. The glass or plastic ball tool

The most practical part of the session was a simple question to ask in the moment: is this a glass ball, or a plastic one?

Glass balls shatter if you drop them. These are the commitments with a real, meaningful consequence attached. Plastic balls bounce. Dropping them might be uncomfortable or inconvenient, but nothing actually breaks.

Crucially, plastic doesn’t mean unimportant. It means it can wait, be delegated, or be handled differently. And glass doesn’t automatically mean drop everything else. Sometimes the right response is to ask for help or renegotiate the deadline.

The exercise deliberately resists easy answers. A court filing deadline due today, an unread client email, prepping for tomorrow’s meeting, a colleague asking for five minutes: none of these are fixed as glass or plastic. As Annabella put it, the task itself doesn’t determine the answer; the actual consequence and context do. Attendees this live in the chat, and the same task kept splitting attendees between glass and plastic, depending entirely on what sat behind it.

One of the more useful reframes here: plastic balls can be very convincing. A ping that says “just checking you’ve seen my email” creates urgency through discomfort, not consequence, and that discomfort is worth naming for what it is before reacting to it.

4. Zooming out: Why you keep ending up in the fire

Glass versus plastic helps in the moment, but Annabella was clear that it isn’t a full fix for anyone whose diary is wall to wall glass. Where that’s the pattern, the more useful question isn’t “how do I cope with everything feeling urgent.” It’s “why do I keep ending up here?”

Many glass balls started out as plastic ones. A deadline screaming today wasn’t screaming three weeks ago. The underlying cause could be that the task was boring, unclear, underestimated, or that the workload was simply unrealistic to begin with, and each of those needs a genuinely different response, not a generic productivity fix.

Annabella’s framing here landed strongly with the group: become a detective, not a critic. Your patterns are data, not evidence that you’re failing. Once a pattern is visible, it becomes something to get curious about and experiment with, rather than something to feel bad about

5. There’s No One-Size-Fits-All Fix

What works for one person can be completely useless for another, and that’s not a contradiction. It’s the point. During the live discussion, one attendee described discovering she doesn’t build room for the unexpected into her schedule and struggles to say no to low-stakes requests that quietly drain her energy.

Another described relying on an external, visible system, moving everything out of her head and onto a spreadsheet, as the thing that keeps her organised, even though the same approach doesn’t work for everyone she supports.

The common thread wasn’t a shared solution. It was a shared process: notice the pattern, get curious about what’s actually behind it, try something, and adjust based on what happens.

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