To start off super clear, I am not talking about the kinds of needs you might find at the base of Maslow’s hierarchy. The needs of humans are many and varied, but the base for everyone is safe food, clean water, and security. If those needs are not being met (and by security I mean things like clothing, housing, warmth, and actual bodily safety, but also mental and emotional safety) it is difficult to impossible to deal with the higher needs. And sadly too many people in our wealthy, priviledged country are struggling with these basic needs, which is worth at the very least acknowledging. The needs I am referring to in this post are the things that are necessary to those of us privledged enough to not have to worry about those three things.

That said…

There are three high level relations I make to nearly everything on my calendar and to-do list. They are:

• Needs
• Values
• Life Hubs

What are these and why are they important to me?

I have ADHD, and one of the issues many people with ADHD have is with executive dysfunction. Executive functions are those that are required in various areas of life. I think there are 31 different areas of executive functioning that are acknowledged by super nerdy scientists (I say that with love, you all rock), but there are 18 that are typically discussed. And I’m not going to list any of them except for the one that I am talking about right now, which is prioritization.

I struggle with task prioritization, particularly. So in order to keep myself from getting sucked into days long hyperfixations that don’t matter, I use this system to inform my task list and my schedule. This is the definitions that I use and how I apply them to my productivity system.

Life Hubs- the areas of your life.

I started working with these after seeing August Bradley’s Pillars, Pipelines, and Vaults, via WesleyAnna on YouTube. She calls them Life Hubs, and that made more sense to me than pillars, so that term stuck.

Life hubs are the areas of my life that require planning. For me these include home, my business, kids, critters (kids and critters can be grouped into home, I did it that way for a while, but I have enough going on with both that they earned their own hubs), fun, health, learning, spirituality, and relationships.

Needs- things that make you function youre best.

Where Life Hubs are the areas of your life that require planning, they aren’t necessarily the same as your needs. There may be overlap, but not always. Needs are what you need in your life to function at your best. I tend to think of them as things that make me feel dread when I think of them not being in my life, but the whole point of these categories is that they are personal. A collegue of mine ended up with only three needs because she was much stricter in her thinking- she also valued adaptability, so she could more easily picture depriving herself of health, nature, movement, etc and still being happy.

My needs are animals, family, knowledge, nature, peace, novelty, and authenticity.

Values- things you feel strongly about.

Some people refer to values as the icing on top of your needs. It’s not quite how I look at them, but it is one way to draw a line between values and needs. I see values as higher level concepts that are generally things that I don’t necessarily need myself, but that I think are important and look for in others and the world around me.

My values are integrity, courage, service, equity, wisdom, and compassion.

It is important to note that all three of these categories are constantly changing for all of us, they are not meant to be constant.

But why are they important???

I mentioned I have trouble prioritizing tasks, which is common among people with ADHD and, in my experience, women (especially mothers). We say yes to everything, and everything seems to hold equal weight. So we get overwhelmed and, more often than not, do little or nothing.

Life hubs alone helped me to prioritize my tasks to a point where I felt in control and capable. However, in a class recently with Denslow Brown, MCC, CPO-CD (those acronyms mean she’s a badass coach and organizer and has been for a long time, basically), co-founder of Coach Approach, a training program that teaches organizers how to better coach their clients (among other things), we did a needs and values assesment, which I thought fed directly into my entire system, and I have since added those two categories to my prioritization system.

But if you find all of it overwhelming (which is the enemy), start with just Life Hubs. Look at everything you do and everything you want to get done and come up with 5-7 categories for it, then see if it helps you with your planning. Maybe there are people out there who have zero problems prioritizing their tasks and you are one of them. If so, fantastic for you. But the rest of you, let me know how it goes!