Month: February 2011

You’ll never complete every item on your To Do list.  Your list grows quickly, and there are only so many hours in a day.

The secret to living a fulfilled life is to make your time count. Make the best of the time you have by learning to prioritize.

How to Prioritize

I previously wrote about The Power of Planning, and why following your own plan is important. I first make a plan for the week, and then each day create a To Do list for today.  I work from my weekly plan and include anything else that comes up for my attention. I prioritize my To Do list using the following 5 categories. These are listed in no particular order.

1. If I don’t do this, there could be dire consequences. Examples: buy gift for daughter’s birthday (tomorrow), file taxes (due today), refill empty birth-control prescription (or postpone date night 🙂 ).

2. I promised someone that I’d do this. If I’ve made an agreement with someone that I’ll get this done, then I want to get it done. Keeping my agreements with myself and others is a big part of my definition of personal integrity and self-esteem. Examples: I said I’d phone you this week, I promised myself I’d go to the gym today, I said I’d do the weekly shop,and I promised all of us that I’d be prepared for the meeting on Wednesday night.

3. If I do this, there may be big benefits. The lottery hucksters tell us, “If you don’t play, you can’t win.” Examples: If the deadline for applying for that perfect job is today, get your application in! Buy your plane tickets by today and get a whopping discount.

4. This is my work. I get paid to score Leadership Development Profiles, so it’s important to me to get them finished and returned on time. Examples: answer emails from prospective clients, arrive promptly for meetings and coaching sessions, follow through with what I say I’ll do (see number 2, above).

5. If I do this, I’ll feel good about myself. For me, this category puts fun into a ho-hum To Do list. Passionate involvement, deeply felt causes, or personal development projects all find a place at the table. Currently, I’m working on unfinished projects, and every time I complete one more, I feel GREAT!! I put two or three of them on my To Do list each week.

What will you achieve this week?

Related Reading

The Power of Planning: If you don’t already have a strong plan, make one now!

Eat that Frog: get the most important things done first

Rewrite your future: what you decide and choose today determines your future

I’m a great believer in the power of planning. If you aren’t working to your own plan, then almost anyone can hijack your attention and efforts to their cause. It’s not that you can’t have flexibility; you definitely can! But flexibility should come within your own plan for your life.

If you don’t have a plan, now is the time to make one!

If you aren’t sure where to start with your planning, here are some ideas that work for me.

Goals in roles.

We each wear quite a few hats in our lives; each of these is a role. Our goals can be chunked into goals by roles. For example, some of  my roles are wife, business owner (coach and consultant, which might be two separate roles), blogger and friend. When I think about what’s important to me, I consider each role. I might ask myself, ‘In order to be a better blogger, what do I want to achieve this week?’ This technique helps me to be sure I consider all the roles that are important to me, and lowers the chance of overlooking something that matters.

Steps toward a longer term goal.

What’s the most important goal you have right now? New job? Living somewhere different? Becoming self-employed? If you already have a big goal, break the journey down into manageable steps that you can work on today, or this week. For example, if you want to change jobs, what are 2 things you can do this week to get closer to this goal? What one thing can you do today? Put those actions into your plan.

Unfinished business.

When things are left unfinished or unresolved, they can become stressors. Unfinished business can affect your health, your sleep and your reputation with yourself. For example, I have an overdue commitment to finish transcribing a certain Scottish census from 1871. In this case, the problem is that I made a commitment to someone to do this task. As the weeks go by and I don’t complete it, my reputation with myself suffers. When I think about it, I groan inside, miserable that I haven’t done what I said I’d do, or renegotiated it. (In fact, I’ll do something about that today!)

Too many things to do.

Sometimes I’m simply overloaded with things to do. If I’ve any hope of getting beyond this feeling, I need to schedule them into my diary and then be quite disciplined about getting them done. I find that sometimes just getting them all down in a list of things to do, and then plugging away at the list item by item helps me feel I’m more on top of things. Or, I can ask for help (the list is evidence!) The cost of not doing this is loss of sleep, arguments with my husband and a general feeling of overwhelm.

I  encourage you to look at what’s the most important thing this week. What role needs attention? What long-term goal needs some forward motion? Is there any unfinished business eating away at you? Are you feeling overloaded?

You can do something about it. In fact, only you can do something about it, and you can start right now. What will you do today?

If you’d like to hear more detail about how I do any one of these types of planning, please leave a comment asking about it.

Related Reading

Rewrite your future – what you decide and choose today writes your future

Eat that frog – get the most important things done first

Consistency is underrated – one thing you can do to make a huge difference in your life

Karma is the law of consequences: what you do today has consequences tomorrow. Karma has nothing to say about blame, or about what you ‘deserve’. It’s simply that what your life is like today is a result of decisions and choices you made in the past. Of course, you can’t change the past, but you CAN change your future, by changing the choices and decisions you make TODAY.

If your life continues as it is today, what does the future promise? Look down the road to the probable outcomes and consequences of what you decide and choose today. This question is valid in your personal life, family life, career, relationships, education, personal development. In fact, it’s valid in any aspect of life that I can think of.

If you continue doing what you’re doing today, what future are you writing? If it’s not the future you really want, the time is NOW to decide how to change your ways today to write the future you want tomorrow.

Make sense?

What you have to do is take action!!

I wrote that awhile back and it’s been languishing in draft mode. Today I had a serious talk with myself about my blog, and pointed out to myself that although I say my blog is a high priority in my life, I don’t ACT as if it is. So here I am today, basically pulling myself up by the scruff of my shirt, shouting in my face, ‘Hey!! Expect more from yourself!’

If I continue this road of not writing for weeks, what sort of future am I creating? (Not to mention what sort of reputation am I building with myself. We won’t even go there!) If I keep not writing, here’s my future: full of regret that I didn’t do anything to help when I could have, unlikely I’ll have written that book, not a single person would have hired me to work with them on anything, one more abandoned blog site in the blog-o-sphere (with my name all over it, so my grandchildren can see me NOT doing what I said was important), self-confidence low because I don’t finish what I start (or do what I say I’m going to do), lots of fun missed out on, too much television watched, and so on.

What I needed to do was get leverage on myself. It’s easy to list the benefits of blogging. I can even see the benefits of not blogging. But what are the costs associated with each? The costs of blogging are website maintenance (which can be non-trivial), time spent finding out what people are wanting to read about, time spent in improving my writing skills, and also time spent improving my time management skills. So, now what are the costs associated with NOT blogging? All those listed in the paragraph above. That’s where my leverage lies!

In a nutshell: I don’t want the future that not-blogging ensures I’ll get more than I don’t want the future that blogging will bring. Get it? The cost to me of not blogging is high in terms of the future I create.

So here’s a blog entry. May you find that it relates to something you’ve been thinking about.