Friday, July 3, 2009

Prioritize

This week I cleared my schedule of all social functions so that I could address the backlog of work and projects that I have. However on any given day I found I was at a bit of a loss as to where to start and often felt demotivated to even start since it seemed overwhelming.

It's not that they aren't important, they problem is they are all important. And that is the fundimental problem right there. I had neglected to prioritize all my various goals and tasks. So everything is more or less of equal importance and the list is truly overwhelming because no matter how much I could possibly do, it would barely make a dent in the list. It hardly seemed to matter.

Once the time is taken to prioritize, things suddenly become a lot clearer. Even if you can only get to one or two items on your list, you know that those are the items that will have the greatest positive impact on your life. Therefore your feeling of accomplishment is much greater and you're not concerning yourself with not having gotten to more trival tasks.

Now this might seem obvious, and it is but have you taken the time to prioritize your goals? Stop for a minute and think about it. If you could only accomplish one life goal which would it be? If the answer isn't immediately clear then you need to clarify that. Rank them in order from more to least important. Sometimes it may be a real toss-up between two competing interests. In this case it might be helpful to write out all the pros for each and weigh them. If your still stuck, just go with your initial gut instinct - Then stick to it. You won't do yourself any favours if you're flip-floping on priorities. If circumstances change you can reevaluate at that point.

Once your have your goals prioritized then act accordingly. Send the majority of the time and effort on your top priority, some time on your secondary priority and occasionally work on lower priorities - probably when your stuck waiting for something to happen in your higher priorities.