When Everything Looks Like A Fire: False Urgency & ADHD

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You sit down to plan your day, and suddenly everything on the list feels urgent. The email, the presentation, the idea that just popped into your head, the task that has been sitting there for three weeks but somehow feels absolutely critical right now.

If you have an ADHD brain, this experience is incredibly common and completely understandable. Our brains fire urgency signals for almost everything because filtering and ranking competing demands in real time is one of the harder things our executive function is asked to do. The result is a kind of internal noise where everything seems equally important, and figuring out where to actually start feels nearly impossible.

Woman with ADHD experiencing false urgency, working on laptop and phone

Today, we’re exploring how to sort through that noise using a surprisingly perfect framework borrowed from an unexpected place: fire lookouts.

Listen to the episode above or stream it on your favorite podcasting app. Prefer to read? No problem! Keep scrolling for a summary of key takeaways.

In episode 355, you will discover:

  • Why ADHD brains genuinely struggle to distinguish between real priorities and false urgency
  • The fascinating fire lookout phenomenon that maps almost perfectly onto the experience of ADHD prioritization
  • Four practical checkpoints for telling real smoke in your own daily task list
  • How to use these checkpoints in the moment to clarify what matters most.

Why Everything Looks Like a Fire When You Have ADHD

Here’s the situation. The majority of the people reading this post are high-achieving, busy-awesome ADHD brains with a lot going on. You have big goals, real responsibilities, and a brain that generates ideas at an impressive pace.

On any given day, you probably find yourself staring at a list of tasks where every single one of them seems equally urgent and equally important, and you genuinely cannot figure out where to start or what actually matters most right now.

Want more ADHD-friendly approaches to prioritization? Check out these episodes:

But today I want to talk about priorities from a slightly different angle that is so slippery, and that we haven’t considered before. Specifically, we’re exploring what happens in the moment, when you are already in the thick of it and everything feels like a fire you need to put out right now.

Because having a prioritization system is one thing, and knowing how to use it when your nervous system is already in high gear is another thing entirely.

And that’s where fire lookouts come in.

What Fire Lookouts Can Teach Us About ADHD False Urgency

Now stick with me here, because I promise this is going somewhere useful. So last week, I was on a group coaching call and one of my clients shared this fascinating fact about fire lookouts, and I have been thinking about it since. I even said on the call, “oh, that’s definitely becoming a podcast episode.” And here it is.

Fire lookouts are the people stationed in those tall towers you sometimes see in national parks and forested areas. Their job is to scan enormous stretches of land from a high vantage point and watch for any sign of smoke. When they spot something, they report it immediately so crews can respond and get ahead of any potential fire before it spreads.

And here’s what my client shared that was so fascinating to me. In the spring, certain trees like cedars, pines, and oaks release massive amounts of pollen into the air. When the wind picks up and shakes those trees, the pollen rises in these large, billowing plumes that can look almost identical to smoke columns.

Same rising shape, same drifting behavior, same hazy appearance from a distance. And fire lookouts have to know the difference, because one of them is a genuine emergency and one of them is just April doing its thing.

What I love about this is how perfectly it maps onto the experience of trying to prioritize with an ADHD brain. Because we are essentially doing the same job as a fire lookout every single day.

We are scanning our environment, our inboxes, our task lists, our conversations, and trying to figure out what is real smoke and what is a pollen plume. What actually needs our attention right now, and what just looks urgent because of the conditions around it.

So today I want to share four ways that fire lookouts distinguish real smoke from pollen plumes, and what we can learn from each of them when it comes to sorting true priorities from false urgency in our own lives.

Four Checkpoints for Spotting False Urgency With Your ADHD Brain

Checkpoint One: Source and Pattern

The first thing fire lookouts do when they spot a potential plume is look for its source and watch how it behaves over time. Real wildfire smoke tends to build steadily and continuously from a single point. It rises in a cohesive column, gets thicker and denser as time goes on, and stays anchored to that same spot.

Pollen plumes, on the other hand, tend to appear in bursts. A big billow rises up, then disperses, then rises again when the next gust of wind moves through. It comes and goes with the conditions rather than building from a consistent source.

We can ask ourselves the same two questions when something on our list suddenly feels urgent.

The first is: where is this coming from? Can I trace it back to one of my big-picture priorities for this season?

This is why I spend time with my one-on-one clients and inside We’re Busy Being Awesome helping everyone get really clear on their three to five main areas of focus for the current season.

Because when you have that clarity, you have a source point to check against. If a task is building steadily from one of those priorities, that’s a signal worth paying attention to. If you genuinely cannot connect it to any of your big-picture goals, it’s worth pausing before you dive in.

The second question is: what is the pattern? Has this felt urgent for a while and kept building, or did it seem to blow in out of nowhere?

Tasks and projects tied to real priorities tend to have that steady, building quality. The urgency grows as the deadline approaches or the goal gets closer. False urgency often behaves more like pollen, appearing suddenly and feeling absolutely critical, then fading, then spiking again depending on whatever triggered it in the moment. If you notice something has that stop-and-start, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t quality, that’s useful information.

You can even ask yourself: what is the wind right now? What conditions in this moment are making this feel so urgent? Sometimes just naming that is enough to take some of the charge out of it.

Checkpoint Two: Color and Density

The second thing fire lookouts pay attention to is the color and density of what they’re seeing. Real smoke tends to get more opaque as a fire builds. The column gets darker, thicker, harder to see through. Pollen plumes, by contrast, tend to stay translucent and hazy. The longer you watch them, the more diffuse and dusty they appear.

We have a version of this with our own priorities, and I think it’s one of the most useful gut checks available to us when navigating ADHD overwhelm in the moment.

When something is a genuine priority, the urgency tends to get clearer and more concrete as time passes. The closer a real deadline gets, the more obvious it becomes that this is where your attention belongs. There is a solidity to it.

You might not love that the presentation is due tomorrow, but you cannot argue with the fact that it is due tomorrow, and that clarity cuts right through any competing noise.

False urgency often has the opposite quality. It arrives with this intense, almost overwhelming sense that it needs to happen immediately, but when you slow down and ask yourself why, the answer gets hazier rather than clearer.

The urgency feels real, but the reason behind it is hard to pin down. It’s more of a vague pressure than a concrete deadline or consequence. And often, if you give it even a few hours, it starts to dissipate on its own. What felt absolutely critical at nine in the morning has dissolved into background noise by noon.

So when you feel that urgency spike, one question worth asking is: is this getting clearer or hazier the more I look at it? Genuine priorities tend to sharpen under scrutiny. They have weight and specificity to them.

If the urgency is real, you will be able to articulate why pretty readily. And if it starts to feel more translucent the longer you examine it, that is good information too.

Checkpoint Three: Know Your Sources

The third thing fire lookouts do is factor in the context of where a potential plume is coming from. They are not just looking at the smoke itself in isolation. They are asking: is this coming from a known lightning strike area? Is it near a cluster of oak trees in peak pollen season? Is there a dusty road running through that part of the forest? Because the source matters enormously when it comes to reading what you are actually seeing.

We can build exactly this kind of contextual awareness around our own lives.

Some sources in your world are what I think of as lightning strike areas. These are the people, the projects, and the situations that, in your experience, reliably signal genuine priorities.

  • Maybe you have a manager who is genuinely good at flagging what actually matters and does not tend to manufacture urgency around things that can wait.
  • Maybe there is a client whose requests consistently turn out to be time-sensitive in ways that are real and consequential.

When something comes in from one of those sources, you have good reason to take the signal seriously.

And then there are your high-pollen trees. These are the sources that, with all due respect and no judgment, tend to generate a lot of plumes.

  • Maybe it is a colleague who presents every new idea as fully confirmed and immediately urgent, and you have learned through experience that things shift significantly once the details come in.
  • Maybe it is a particular corner of the internet that reliably makes you feel like you need to overhaul your entire approach to something right now.
  • Maybe it is a certain type of task that always feels more pressing than it turns out to be once you actually sit down with it.

We all have high-pollen trees in our life, and that’s okay. What we want to work toward is building in a little more pause before we redirect our energy in that direction. It is about recognizing the pattern so that we can make a more intentional choice rather than a reactive one.

Take a little time to think about your own landscape here. Who and what in your life tends to signal real smoke? And who and what tends to release a lot of pollen in the spring? The more clearly you can map that terrain, the faster you will be able to read the signals when you are in the middle of a busy day and your brain is already working hard.

Checkpoint Four: Check With Another Lookout

The fourth thing fire lookouts do is check with each other. These towers are not operating in isolation. They are part of a network, scanning the same landscape from different vantage points. When one lookout spots something that might be smoke, they communicate with the other towers.

If multiple lookouts can see the same column rising from the same location, that triangulation gives them much greater confidence that what they are seeing is real. And if only one tower can see it, that is useful information too. It means keeping an eye on it before escalating.

We can do exactly the same thing with our priorities.

Having even one person in your life who knows your big-picture goals, understands the landscape of your work, and can offer a grounded outside perspective is genuinely one of the most powerful tools available to us. Because when we are already in the thick of it, already feeling that urgency spike, our view from inside the experience is limited. We are too close to it. Another lookout can see things we cannot see from where we are standing.

This might be a trusted colleague who knows your current projects well. It might be a partner or a close friend who understands what you are working toward this season. For me personally, I check in regularly with my one-on-one coach and my VA when something feels urgent in my business, because they both know the moving parts well enough to help me triangulate.

Sometimes one conversation is all it takes to confirm that yes, this is smoke worth responding to. And sometimes that outside perspective is exactly what helps me see that what felt like a five-alarm fire is actually just a very enthusiastic oak tree in April.

This is also, honestly, one of the things I love most about my small group coaching program for ADHD brains, We’re Busy Being Awesome. Inside the program, we spend real time at the start getting clear on your big-picture priorities for the season, so that every lookout in your group, including me, actually knows your landscape.

We know what your lightning strike areas are. We know what your big-picture goals are. We know what a real fire looks like for you specifically, versus what tends to be a pollen plume in your particular world.

And then throughout the program, you have that informed outside perspective available to you on an ongoing basis. When something feels urgent and you cannot tell if it is real smoke or not, you have a group of people who know your goals well enough to help you think it through. You have coaching calls where we can work through exactly this kind of in-the-moment triage together.

And you have a community of high-achieving ADHD brains who are doing this same work alongside you, which means you are not just getting my perspective as your coach, you are getting the collective wisdom of a group that genuinely understands what it is like to be you.

That combination of clarity, community, and ongoing support is what makes the difference between knowing a framework intellectually and actually being able to use it on a random Thursday when your nervous system is already in high gear and everything looks like it is on fire.

We are currently enrolling for our summer cohort, which begins June 4th. If you want to learn more and find out whether it might be a good fit for where you are right now, head to imbusybeingawesome.com/group or tap through the link in the show notes. I would love to see you inside.

Your Weekly Challenge

All right, here is your weekly challenge, and I love this one because it is genuinely low-lift and you can use it immediately.

The next time you feel that sense of urgency spike, whether you are in the middle of planning your day or already deep in it and starting to feel that familiar pressure that everything needs to happen right now, I want to invite you to pause for just a moment and run through one or two of the four checkpoints we talked about today. As a quick reminder, those are:

  • Source and pattern: Can you trace this back to one of your big-picture priorities, and has it been building steadily or did it blow in with the wind?
  • Color and density: Is the urgency getting clearer and more concrete the more you look at it, or is it starting to feel hazy and hard to pin down?
  • Know your sources: Is this coming from a lightning strike area in your life, or from one of your high-pollen trees?
  • Check with another lookout: Is there someone who knows your goals and your landscape well enough to help you triangulate?

You do not need all four every time. Sometimes just the first question is enough. Other times you might need a second checkpoint. And if you have a trusted lookout in your life, that quick check-in might be all it takes to cut through the noise entirely.

The goal is simply to build in that small moment of pause between the urgency spike and the reaction. Because that pause is where the clarity lives.

Resources From This Episode:

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Paula Engebretson - ADHD Coach and Pdacster

About Paula Engebretson

ADHD COACH | PODCASTER

I spent the first 31 years of my life thinking I just needed to “try harder” while dealing with crushing self-doubt, perfectionism, and imposter syndrome. Then I was diagnosed with ADHD.

Finally understanding the missing puzzle piece, I discovered how to work with my brain, build upon my strengths, and take back control of my life.

Now I help others with ADHD do the same. Learn more.

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