Balancing Your Priorities
Get your priorities straight.
If it’s not getting done, it’s not a priority.
Prioritize ruthlessly.
If you’ve kept up with productivity advice for any amount of time, chances are you’ve run into advice like this. Yet, when you feel like you’re being pulled in a million different directions by your career, your friends and family and your personal needs, it’s easier said than done.
The majority of advice suggests that we’re doing too much. We have too many projects. Therefore, we should only focus on one thing. Place all of our attention on that task and go for it and only it.
Unfortunately, for polymaths (or jacks-of-all-trades, renaissance people, multipotentiates — whatever term you prefer) who constantly have multiple irons in the fire, this kind of narrowing down sounds like an absolute nightmare. And for anyone holding major responsibilities in multiple areas of their lives (e.g. a working parent, a working student or someone with a full-time job and a side hustle), it sounds downright impossible.
The good news is that you don’t have to narrow all your focus down to one priority and block out everything else. Instead, think of your priorities as a series of gearshifts. You can always “shift up” the work in one area while “shifting down” in another in order to make…
