Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 28 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Prioritize your priority
— From Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown
In his wonderful book, Essentialism, Greg McKeown eschews the idea that “you can have it all,” because it is a damaging myth. “It results in stressed people trying to cram yet more activities into their already overscheduled lives.” I can definitely relate.
The word priority (meaning “the very first or prior thing”) appeared in our language around the 1400s and continued that way, in singular, for centuries. “Only in the 1900s did we pluralise the term and start talking about priorities. Illogically, we reasoned that by changing the word we could bend reality. Somehow we would now be able to have multiple ‘first’ things.”
The problem with this approach is that we have many competing things, all of them appearing to be the most important, and as we try to juggle them all at once, we give our control away. “When we don’t purposefully and deliberately choose where to focus our energies and time, other people – our bosses, our colleagues, our clients, and even our families – will choose for us, and before long we’ll have lost sight of everything that is meaningful and important.”
“We can either make our choices deliberately or allow other people’s agendas to control our lives.”
The key, however, is to be cognizant that prioritizing our priority (I just had to write that!) doesn’t mean just saying no. It entails “purposefully, deliberately and strategically eliminating the non-essentials, and not just getting rid of the obvious time wasters, but cutting out some really good opportunities as well.” There are always going to be trade-offs, and some decisions will be very hard to make and require lots of careful thinking, especially when the opportunity in front is very attractive.
Ask yourself, “Will this activity or effort make the highest possible contribution towards my goal?” Remember that when an opportunity presents itself, it’s either “Hell, yeah!” or “NO.”
ACTION
Scales of Justice
TODAY: Figure out what is your one priority. A very simple way to do this is to compare the items on your current list of priorities one at a time, as if you were putting them on the scales of justice, to see which one weighs more. Say you have 4 priorities: A, B, C and D.
- Take A and B and compare them: which one is more important? Let’s say A. Keep A as your priority so far and park B aside.
- Now take C and compare it to A: which one is more important? Let’s say C. Keep C, as it has become your priority so far, and park A aside.
- Now take D and compare it to C: which one is more important? Let’s say C. Park D aside.
With this method you have just determined that your priority is C. Period. Congratulations!
Now look at A, B and D and decide whether they make the highest possible contribution towards your goal. Yes? Great, schedule them in the order in which they’ll make the greatest contribution too. No? Then don’t do them if you can get away with that: delegate them, change them, get rid of them or further park them in your “that would be nice to do” list for a future. Or if you must absolutely work on them, do so only after you have done what you need to do today to advance C.
FUTURE: Question the validity of all you do so that you can focus on your priority. Look at your activities for the upcoming week or for the full month. Which ones contribute toward your goal? Keep them. Try to do away with the ones that don’t. Notice that I said, “try to” because in a week/month it’s going to be hard to focus solely on your goal and get rid of everything that doesn’t fit. We’ve all given control of our agenda to others, so it will take a bit of time to gain it back; but if you make a habit of questioning all actions and activities, in a very near future you’ll be focusing much more (if not completely) on your goal. Another great way to prioritize appears in this post: How to choose what is important? Principles of priority.
Know someone who’s trying to do it all and have it all, and is spread way to thin? Please share this post with that person via email, Facebook or Twitter, thank you!