To Achieve Your Goal– Prioritize
“If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will”
Day by day, people find it difficult to set out their priorities, it might be because of work overload for some and they never set out the time to prioritize their activities or work while some never or do not know how to prioritize their work or activities.
One of the things I have get to realize in life is no matter how good you can be in your craft when you don’t prioritize your work, problem is inevitable. Moreover, I often see many people every day falling into this trap of working and getting to a dead end as a result of wanting to do all things that comes their way.
A colleague of mine who works as a secretary will often complain about how tired he is and how he needs to leave the job for a better one. However, one thing he falls short of is that he has never for once sat down to prioritize his activities for the day and when he comes to the office he is always doing one thing or the other even when he is not needed.
In his book essentialism, the disciplined pursuit of less Greg Mckeown pointed out how we can set our priorities right to live our best life. Few of the things he pointed out is that an essentialist get to the following;
1. Explore and evaluate: How can we discern the trivial many from the vital few by seeing and doing what really matters to us and protecting our assets “SLEEP” and this involves asking ourselves tough questions like how will this work or activity benefit me in any way, Is it going to be positive or negative for my health. By asking ourselves the tough and right questions, we get to choose what we want and what we don’t either.
2. Eliminate: How we can cut out the trivial many by gaining clarity of what really matters and setting our boundaries meaning it is not enough to simply determine which activities and effort don’t make the highest contribution, we still have to actively eliminate those that do not.
3. Execute: How to make doing the vital few things almost effortless by gaining the unfair advantage. In other words, once we have figured out which activities and efforts to keep, the ones that make our highest level of contribution we need a system to make executing our intentions as effortless as possible.
Priority is about creating a system for handling our lives. This is not a process you undertake once a year, once a month, or even once a week. It is a discipline you apply each and every time you are faced with a decision about whether to say yes or whether to politely decline. It is a method for making a tough trade-off between lots of good things and a few really great things. It is about learning how to do less but better so that you can achieve the highest possible return on every precious moment of our lives.
Lack of prioritizing our work on the other hand often leads to frustration because our expectation from the work doesn’t merge with the reality of where the work is and we end up giving up on the work. In addition, lack of prioritizing can lead to one entering into the dip where you end up being confused and feeling stuck.
Priority is something that should be part of our lives and we must find a way to make it a routine in our daily activity to achieve and live our best moment.
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