I’ve been reading up on research on how to manage priorities.  I’ve found some useful ideas so I’m going to share some of them below, but I also think that there are some specific considerations for parents of neurodiverse children which don’t even figure in many experts’ thinking.  That bit will be the second part of this blog.

Managing competing priorities (in work): a couple of approaches from experts

Find somewhere in our week where we look at everything we have to do and come up with a plan about how to prioritise things to get it done. According to Max, here we need to look at:

• identifying our top priorities to get them done. For this we’ll need to consider deadlines, the cost of delaying, and why they are important to us in the first place.  Having a smaller number of priorities in a day will allow us to achieve them.
• We also need to look at what we are avoiding. Once we recognise where our avoidance is and why we are doing this, we can begin to move through it
• Finally we rank our priorities, schedule them, if we can, and consider how we talk to others about these actions.

According to Cal Newport many of us do ‘pseudo-productivity’ – where visible activity is used as a measure of “productive effort”. But simply ‘doing stuff’ doesn’t make us productive.  Newport suggests that to work better we can give ourselves permission to slow down and:

• Do fewer things
• Work at a more natural pace
• Value quality over quantity.

Whilst his main focus is ‘knowledge’ based jobs, the principle of ‘doing fewer things’ could feasibly apply more broadly.  Essentially, Newport suggests, if we try to reduce our obligations we can focus more easily on what matters most.  Reducing obligations could apply in our job (although obviously might not always be possible) or outside of a job.  Or it could mean not trying to do so many things at once, but focusing on one or two to take forward so we can concentrate on them and get them done well.  Or it could mean taking a pause before agreeing to a new commitment.  Alternatively, it could mean setting different kinds of boundaries and expectations around your work.  For Newport this means focusing in on one big thing and limiting the small things that might distract us.  Newport sees that our brain is drawn like a magpie to distractions.  For Newport these distractions are the enemy of being able to concentrate and get things done.  If we push these small things to the edges of our working day, then we’ll accomplish more (he thinks).

My take as a mum who works and has the primary childcare role:

1. Key experts in managing priorities – I’m thinking here specifically of Cal Newport, Harry Max whom I’ve mentioned – don’t talk about life outside work. Newport has even been panned for uncritically using examples of men who are supported to prioritise by secretaries and wives taking care of swathes of domestic and house-based duties so the man can do his ‘deep work’.
2. What happens when you have distractions that you can’t just shoo away? For example, you know your child needs you to advocate for them and be there for them.  I’ve had this discussion with parents that ‘there are things that I need to allow to interrupt my working day because my child is my priority’.  A lot of the prioritisation literature is from the vantage point of ‘the organisation’, so work is the focus and the family isn’t really considered.  The problem with this approach is that when we allow family to ‘interrupt’ or cut through work we feel guilty – our attention ‘should’ be at work and it is pulled elsewhere.  Hessing (1994) suggests – while men are expected to prioritise work, women are expected to split themselves between employed work and work at home.  She calls it women’s dual labour load.  This is not to say that men don’t perform this ‘home’ work too – just that in our society, women still do more of it (see work by Pregnant then Screwed) and they are expected to do it, even after lockdown and increasing possibilities of flexible working (see here research by Professor Heejung Chung).  Whilst women are split between work and home, they are expected to excel in both domains and the impact of them being split from this duality is not acknowledged.  Hessing points out that women are more likely to be overloaded because of this ‘double day’.  Furthermore, she points out that ‘home’ and ‘work’ are considered to be separate domains and women’s dual work is assumed seen as taking place within (but not across) these separate domains.  Whilst Hessing’s article is over 30 years old, I think her idea about expecting people to do separate work in separate domains still holds true – look at how some organisations are now super-concerned about making sure people physically work from the office, despite evidence that people are more productive working from home.  Finally, if you are a carer or parent of a neurodiverse child you don’t just have a ‘dual labour load’ you have a ‘dual labour load plus’ made up of tasks like organising and going to appointments, going to school to have meetings or collect children early, or work from home if they won’t go into school, anticipating and planning for trips and activities, administration around diagnoses, EHCPs, etc..  Knowing firstly that as working carers we are inevitably going to be (over?)overloaded, and secondly that whilst it is a social norm, it’s not possible to definitively separate out ‘work’ and ‘life’, weirdly, helps us.  It can give us permission to not personalise the difficulty we have juggling everything.  We’re ensnared in a social contradiction here of having to do everything that we can’t possibly deliver.  I think knowing this can also give us permission to not put so much pressure on ourselves, maybe even give us permission to ask for/build in some flexibility if we can.  Maybe working slower and identifying and zooming in to key priorities can help us?!

If you are a working carer/parent and you would like some support to manage your priorities, please reach out to us at info@careforyoucoaching.co.uk.  We support you to support your families.

For working parents of neurodivergent children, focus at work can be demanding.  With appointments during the working day, being on tenterhooks for phone calls from the school, ongoing stress and worry, the mental load of life can leak into the working day.

Carson Tate, in Work Simply, says ‘attention is a finite and fleeting resource’.  Ideally, we will intentionally manage our attention to make the most of this resource.  When we are in stress mode, Tate explains, our attention is ‘involuntary’, it is directed towards whatever it is that threatens us.  This is different from voluntary attention, where we can choose how to direct our focus.  It can be very hard to shift away from ‘involuntary attention’, particularly if our stress dominates our lives.  However, there are some things we can do to support ‘voluntary attention’:

Transitioning into work:

• Put everything you need to think of somewhere before you start work (e.g. a list/ a journal). This way it is ‘out of your mind’ and you can be reassured it has a place until you have a time or break where you can come back to it.
• Static stretching: Greg Wells suggests that stretching a muscle and holding in it position for 20-30 seconds, while you are sitting or standing still, can help us decrease tension. Static stretching has a range of broad health benefits and is a way to help manage stress, here are a few examples: 1https://www.lifehack.org/797461/static-stretching

During your working day

• Group similar tasks together: this is called chunking. This helps to support our attention because it minimizes our cognitive transition between different kinds of tasks.  When we switch tasks it takes us time to ‘reset’ our attention.
• Be wary of Multitasking (or dual task interference – see David Rock’s Your Brain at Work). Rock’s research shows that when you try to do more than one task you don’t operate at the same energy level for both.  The more tasks you try to do, the more your performance level decreases for each of these tasks.  According to Glaveski (2020): ““Just quickly checking” anything, even for one-tenth of a second, can add up to a 40% productivity loss over the course of a day, and it can take us 23 minutes to get back into the zone after task switching.  Rather than sporadically checking things throughout the day, we should batch check email, instant messages, social media, and even text messages, at predetermined times.”  However, it’s important to mention a caveat here, as much of research on multitasking assumes “neurotypical” psychology and homogeneity in how distractions are processed and managed.  A study by Rutherford et al (2007) where a sample of autistic participants were required to divide their attention across two tasks, showed “smaller divided-attention costs than […] matched adults” in control test group (were individuals were matched for education level, age and IQ).  This is still an ongoing area of research.
• Avoid busyness: It can feel like the more you get done, the more productive you are being. However, particularly when you are stressed, ‘doing less’ is ultimately more effective.  As Alex Soojung-Kim Pang explains ‘you get more done when you work less’ because if you have focus, without distractions and other simultaneous tasks, you can get a lot more done, and you are a lot less likely to make mistakes.

Remember:

• Breaks: Tate says ‘physical movement is one of the most effective ways to reset and discharge negative energy’. We’ve looked at static stretching above.  Research from Kim et al (2017) suggests that taking breaks during your work time is beneficial (this is called internal recovery).  They qualify this by arguing that the kind of break you take is also important – relaxation and exercise being amongst the most effective to ‘reset and ‘restore’ energy.
• Work can be helpful as a kind of distraction if you re stressed: deep thinking can be a way of managing stress says Wells.  Thus, even if things are tough, you can give yourself permission to focus on work to support managing stress.

If you would like some support to improve focus Care For You Coaching supports parents and carers to support their families. If you’d like to talk, I’m here to listen, book a free (no obligation) initial consultation at: https://careforyoucoaching.co.uk/contact/, We will support you to support your loved ones.