How to Prioritize Your Time
“One can waste years this way, systematically postponing precisely the things one cares about the most.”
Do you find yourself struggling to find time for the things you know you want and need? This could be as aspirational as writing a book or as simple as relaxing for 30 minutes.
How does one best prioritize their time (and therefore, their energy and presence)? The first thing you can start with is actually recognizing that your time and life is important! This seems obvious, yet how many of us continue to ignore what’s truly special or important to us? Do we sit down and take stock of what we are doing with our time? What if we spent just a handful of minutes each week or month to ensure we are spending our time the way we really want to?
For those interested in this topic, I highly recommend the book Four Thousand Weeks, by Oliver Burkeman (all quotes in this post are from his book). He lays out the fact that the average Westerner has a short 4,000 weeks to live and he helps put prioritization into perspective. One thing he sees as a major issue in our society is this trap of trying to be more productive or efficient. He likens it to running an assembly line faster just so you can process more product. If we become more efficient with our time, does that extra time go towards meaningful and joyful things, or do we just fill it with more busyness?
“The problem with trying to make time for everything that feels important—or just for enough of what feels important—is that you definitely never will. The reason isn’t that you haven’t yet discovered the right time management tricks or supplied sufficient effort, or that you need to start getting up earlier, or that you’re generally useless. It’s that the underlying assumption is unwarranted: there’s no reason to believe you’ll ever feel ‘on top of things,’ or make time for everything that matters, simply by getting more done.”
And so rather than being bogged down by the busyness of life, I would encourage you to make a list of what’s important to you and start making cuts to the rest. This list has to be surprisingly low too…try to keep it to your top five. I don’t say this because I want you to skip out on your friends or other seemingly important tasks, but because I want you to use your energy towards what is aligned with your values and principles, and be realistic with these short lives we get to live.
“The noblest of human goals wasn’t to become godlike, but to be wholeheartedly human instead.”
We must be realistic when we are assessing change and recognizing that we really can’t do it all is a great place to start.
With you on the path,
Joe
