Week 9: Priority Management
KEY POINTS:
1. In today's society, we think we need to work harder, put in more hours, and get less sleep to be successful. However, this is leading to us to become sick, die earlier from lifestyle-related diseases, and be unhappy.
2. Remember that more isn’t better - better is better.
3. The key is to switch from time management to priority management. Time management is living by your calendar. Priority management is getting the most important things you need to do every day done.
“The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.”
Achieving your dreams means knowing the difference between “important” and “urgent,” because that allows you to set the right priorities and allocate your time and resources well.
Here’s the difference:
Important activities have an outcome that leads to us achieving our goals, whether these are professional or personal.
Urgent activities demand immediate attention, and are usually associated with achieving someone else's goals. They are often the ones we concentrate on and they demand attention because the consequences of not dealing with them are immediate.
By doing your best to shift from time management (living by the calendar) to priority management (doing the most important things well), you can create a wave of focus and wellness.
We need to identify the most important things we need to do in our lives, be they personal, professional, health-related, or work-related, and schedule them during the times of the day when we have the most energy. Don’t just schedule meetings—schedule everything important to you. Schedule workouts. Schedule a monthly dinner out with your spouse. Schedule playtime with your kids. Do it so those activities don’t get lost. Let your priorities dictate how you live your life. As you live your day, so you live your life. If you are scheduling the urgent things and never getting to the important things, that’s a recipe for short-term frustration and long-term unhappiness.
Don’t just get busy to be busy, and make sure that your activities are consistent with your dreams, goals, and objectives. Whenever possible, you want your actions to map to your ambitions.
Below are steps you can follow to switch from time management to priority management.
Step 1: The Time Check
List all of your roles and responsibilities and write down how much time you spend on each one. Rank them from most to least important to you. Do you feel that you are currently spending enough time on the things that are important to you?
Step 2: Build Your Ideal Day
Construct your ideal day. Allocate your time to the most important priorities. Do not be afraid to communicate your commitment to your priorities to the people around you and keep these decisions in mind as you go about your daily life. Using the time check in step 1, identify whether you’re allocating sufficient time to the most important priorities.
Also be prepared to defend your dedicated on-task time. To do this, you might have to break away from the belief that you have to respond to every email, voice mail, text message, and so forth, on the same day you receive it. Some messages can go unanswered; others should be blocked entirely. Do whatever you have to do to keep such distractions from stealing your time.
Step 3: Build Your Ideal Week
You can also begin to construct your ideal week. Look for blocks of time that you can dedicate to certain tasks. For example, one complete day can be dedicated to strategic planning, or mornings can be dedicated to working out.
Step 4: Post-Assessment
Revisit your ideal day and week that you’ve created. How does this differ from your current reality? What tactics do you need to execute to bring your life into alignment with your dreams, goals, objectives, and priorities?
This week’s exercise is based on the 4 steps outlined above. See pages 38 - 43 of The Focus Effect Workbook or click Here to download the exercise. By ranking our responsibilities, we can build our ideal day based on these priorities. From there, we can extrapolate that and build our ideal week. Lastly, we can compare our ideal days and weeks to what our life currently looks like, and strategize ways that we can bring our current reality closer to our ideal one.
Watch Greg and Bruce discuss the importance of priority management here.
The information and advice provided in this program is intended to assist you with improving your performance, as well as your general health. It is not intended and should not be used in place of advice from your own physician or for treatment or diagnosis of any specific health issue. By participating in this program you acknowledge that undertaking any new health, diet and/or exercise regime involves certain inherent risks, that you assume such risks, and that you release Wells Performance Inc. from any responsibility or claim relating to such participation.