By: Sonya Fehér
Prioritizing your priorities means more than just making a list; it’s about aligning your actions with your goals. Here are five steps to help you prioritize what’s important to you.
1. Assess What You’re Prioritizing
Step one is to track your time to see how you’re actually spending it. To do this, you might like to fill out a time log for a day or a week so you can get a detailed picture of how you’re spending your time. Or you might just create a rough sketch. This doesn’t have to be minute by minute. The goal is to see in broad strokes how you’re spending your days.
If you break your day or week down into the hours you spend doing something, you’ll find what you’re actually prioritizing. This list will likely include some things you feel good about spending your time on and some time that just feels wasted.
2. Create A Priorities List
Next, consider your life aspirations, big and small. This can include bucket list goals and daily habits you’d like to cultivate. What makes a day feel well spent? What would you like to be working towards? When you consider the time log or sketch you made of how you’re currently spending your time, consider what you wish was on there instead.
3. Determine What You Want To Prioritize
Once you’ve considered what you want to spend less time on or eliminate from your schedule altogether and what you want to make any or more time for, you can determine what you want to prioritize now.
While some items on your list may be a daily habit, others may be a larger goal that needs incremental time spent to accomplish it or a large block of time all at once. For instance, if you’re trying to establish a regular exercise routine, the tasks will be different than if you want to take a month-long RV trip across the country.
Pick something you’d like to prioritize. The time it will take might be a month, till the end of the year, or something that’s part of a five-year or longer plan.
Write down the steps it will take to achieve that goal.
4. Block Out Time
Make an appointment with yourself or anyone else you might need to help you complete the tasks or accomplish your goals. Show up for that appointment in the way you would a commitment to another person, whether lunch with a friend or a teeth cleaning. If something
comes up in the time you had scheduled to work on your priorities, be sure to reschedule your appointment to another time or day. Don’t let it fall off your calendar.
For many of these priorities, you won’t be scheduling just one time. You’ll need to schedule time for each step, maybe multiple times in the short term or a daily block of time for as long as you’re maintaining the habit or behavior.
5. Prioritize Your Priorities
Making your priorities a priority means that you actually spend time on what’s important to you rather than simply thinking about it. You identify what you want and the steps needed to get there, you block out the time to do it, and then actually do it.
Prioritizing your priorities means taking action. Make the commitment to spend time on what truly matters to you.
If you’d like a free copy of my time decluttering and organizing kit, email me at sonya@spacewiseorganizing.com and I’ll send it your way. And, if you’d like advice about organizing a particular area of your home or life, email me for a chance to have it featured in a future article. I’d love to help!
By: Sonya Fehér Organizer, Coach, Author, & Speaker https://spacewiseorganizing.com
May 17, 2024
