Raise your hand if you like the word ‘priorities’. Merriam-Webster dictionary defines priorities as “something given or meriting attention before competing alternatives”. I don’t know about you, but I have about a bazillion “competing alternatives” coming at me every day. Like right now, for instance, I have a super-whiny, annoying, and impossible to ignore little dog trying to get my attention. He pulls out this high-pitched whine that is like nails on a chalkboard. It seems that when I am at my desk, he realizes I’m a captive audience and demands that I play with him. I’ll talk more about interruptions a little later.
Why are priorities important? Well, it seems obvious right? But I’ll say it out loud: because we have things that need to be done; often, a LOT of things that need to be done. We need to be able to see the fruits of our labor and the results of our time spent. We manage our households, work tasks, personal relationships, schedules. All. The. Things. It’s the hard truth that we only have so many hours in a day. That’s one area we all get the same, no exceptions. When we say ‘yes’ to one thing, we’re also saying ‘no’ to another. To do the things that really matter, we must first identify what’s most important and then create strategies or methods to get those things done. We must learn time management. Ugh.
Prioritization is really about a mindset. I’m not going to talk much about how to identify the things that are important. That’s another conversation entirely. I’m focusing this post from the point of knowing what’s important. One strategy I highly recommend, to help manage thought churn and be more productive is this: ‘Everything else can wait.’ I tend to get caught up in the many tasks that are spinning around in my head and can easily lose focus on what I’m doing now, allowing my mind to wander to the other things that I’m not getting done. Do a quick Google search on ‘Should I try to multitask?’ and you will find many articles on why multi-tasking is not productive. Multi-tasking was the buzzword in my workplace for years. I became resentful of the word and what it implied, and tended to feel less competent because I never mastered it. Needless to say, I love these articles justifying why I came to despise the concept. Instead, I try to focus on one thing. Crazy concept, right? To get something done quickly and efficiently, I focus on blocking out the distractions of all the other things that need to be done, in order to complete the task at hand. In this case I’ve already decided this task is the most important one right now, and acknowledged why, and determined that I have time to work on it.
Now, that is not to say that interruptions won’t happen, and adjustments won’t need to be made. Managing interruptions is no small task. That is also a conversation for another post. I try different strategies to prevent and quickly deal with interruptions so you can get back to your primary task. But for what’s within my control, everything else can wait.
