Prioritizing Your Life 101
How to set yourself up for success
When living your life trying to fulfill obligations and commitments, it can be difficult to prioritize what is truly important. Without priorities, everything becomes essential and urgent, or nothing does. Learning to prioritize is an essential life skill that everyone needs to learn, regardless of your age or what you’ve already accomplished in life.
Without priorities, life becomes a series of reactions amid aimless wandering. With a focus on what’s important, though, you can achieve your goals and live the life you want.
For active prioritization to help your life, you need to envision what you want and where you want to go. Without clear specific goals, it’s difficult to know how to get there. Vision, therefore, becomes an essential first step to prioritizing.
A popular way of prioritize your daily and weekly tasks is to rank each regarding urgency and importance. These are two separate qualities that are important to understand. Urgency means how quickly it needs to get done, while importance is what is meaningful for your happiness.
Here’s how tasks might look using these categories:
Important and urgent tasks are meaningful to you and have time constraints that require immediate action. These types of activities are often unexpected, which contributes to the urgency factor. Without proper planning, though, lots of things can end up in this category.
Not important but urgent tasks are usually the mundane tasks that keep life moving forward. Emails, meetings, and appointments that represent obligations end up here. Having a lot in this category means your life may be running you instead of you running your life.
Tasks that are not important or urgent are ones you can consider eliminating from your life. If your job or personal obligations fall primarily in this category, it may be time to reevaluate how you are spending your time and what’s important for you moving forward.
Not urgent but important tasks represent areas where you should be dedicating your time and prioritizing tasks best. These represent tasks that say you are in charge of your life and doing things that matter to you.
Being clear about your goals and values will help you spend more time in this last category and remove the clutter in your life that’s standing between you and successfully achieving your goals. And understanding how to categorize your activities can help you recognize how you’re spending your time and whether or not doing so is in your best interest.
Remember that everything you choose to say yes to is a potential opportunity for you to say no to something else. Saying no to unnecessary obligations in your life gives you more time for those things that are important to you (https://theunreliablemind.substack.com/p/yikes-i-did-it-again). Saying yes to what matters means you are spending your time on things that are a real priority for you.
It’s important that your priorities are not just for your long-term goals but also for the day-to-day activities that drive your life. It can be hard to avoid distraction, but being clear about what’s most important each and every day will help you achieve your dreams without feeling like you’re losing your mind in the process.
Reflect often on areas where your activities are not matching up with your outlined priorities, and make adjustments to eliminate distractions in your life.
By choosing your priorities, you are designing your future, your vision for yourself. If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will do it for you, and that’s a recipe for disaster. If you want to start living the life you want; if you want to achieve the goals that will foster a sense or accomplishment and change your life, make yourself and your tasks most important things in your life.
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If you liked this content, check out my article entitled, “Building Better Habits: The Foundation of Self-Discipline” at: https://www.theunreliablemind.com/blog/link-between-better-habits-and-self-discipline
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