ventures that does not help our goals and vision. They slow us down or distract us. You have the right to resist such distraction and stay focused. Prioritise your activities properly by making a list of those activities that will not help you achieve your goals. This will help you cut the unnecessary activities from your schedule and be more efficient.
Setting out your priorities and getting it right is a necessity. It is very important if you want to be successful in life. There is no negotiation about having priorities. Life must have priorities. You must have priorities. Even if you think you don’t have, you do. You have rank things according to how important they are to you. The only problem is you haven’t given it much thought, hence you are not focusing on achieving your goals.
In order to get your priorities right you must know what your priorities are? You must have a list and on this list you have things listed so you can rearrange the list in the order of their importance to you. What are your priorities in life? Do your daily actions prove these are your priorities, or do your daily actions show your “priorities” are really just nice ideas? There is a big difference between what is important and what is urgent.
The stuff that you devote most of your time on a daily basis is urgent. It must be done today. You cannot postpone them for tomorrow, or at least, it feels like that. The result? You clear out the important stuff to make time for the urgent. But you didn’t do that consciously. It just happened. You let the urgent stuff take control of your time and your life. People that are important in your life no longer have access to you. You are sensing something is wrong, but you are not sure what it is. Of course you have been trying hard. The urgent stuff multiplies themselves like rabbits. You kick off one and two more show up. Your life has become a common circle. You just go round and round without making any authentic progress.
You need to stop now. This has been going on for too long. It doesn’t have to be this way. There is another way to run your life. Cleaning out some of the “urgent” stuff and making space for the “important” stuff will allow you to live a life you love, a life that is closer to your dreams. You need the breath of fresh air. You need to start doing things differently. You need to invest your time wisely to get the most out of your invested time. Just like savings, you must find areas you can save time, leverage time and multiply time.
Come to think of it, you just live life to survive. You have not taken control of your life. You have never thought about what you spend your time doing. You get up, you go to work, you come home at the end of the day, you watch a little television, you go to sleep and the cycle repeats the following day. You’re just going through the motions never really thinking about what you do or how you do it or even why you do it.
Think about all the things you spend your time doing on an average day or even on the weekend. Why do you do those things? Are they real life priorities or do you just do them because that’s what you’ve always done? Also, do you always do something that’s taking a lot of your time without even realising it? Think about why you do that thing. It’s easy to get caught up in the rush just to accomplish all your daily life activities and to not really consider what you want to do or have in your life. Once you know what you want, then you can take the steps to achieve it.
To set your priorities you can use the following tips:
Take a break. Think about your life. Think about the entirety of your life. This should include these four categories: health, relationships, career and leisure. The four categories cover everything about your life there is. Write down the things that are truly important to you, the things that ten years from now will make you proud. Here you determine your goals. Some are long term and others are short term goals.
Cut down on the urgent stuff. Some “urgent” activities will just need to go. Maybe you can wait until later before playing with your smart phone. Some “urgent” activities will need to be delegated. Where you need to delegate, you have to delegate. There are certain things you employ people to do if you have the money rather than doing it and stressing out. When you do this, you have succeeded in gaining time and space. This is a breath of fresh air. You can’t do everything. You need to realise that there are only twenty four hours in a day. There are things you wanted to accomplish that you won’t be able to just yet. Schedule it for another day and don’t sweat it.
Learn How to Balance. There is nothing wrong with having several goals and priorities. Learning how to balance them all is just a part of life. If you pay too much attention to one priority, your others may begin to suffer. Strive to be aware of your priorities at all times. Balance is the key to anything you are doing. When setting up your priorities the main point to consider is that you have limited time and you must use it as efficiently as possible. What is important to understand is that by making a list of all your priorities, you will be better able to strike a balance between your different goals in life while maximising your efforts in each endeavour.
Get Organised. By getting organised, you can eventually learn how you can do more with less time, which will allow you complete more of your task.
Start doing the important stuff. What is it that you want? Health? Love? Put in your scheduled activities that match your priorities. A more feasible, sustainable way is to start by doing something that is in the vicinity of where you are but in the direction of where you want to go. Don’t just jump to your dream right away, because sooner or later you might be finding out that you are biting off more than you can chew. And your dream will spit you out. You will stop exercising. You will stop acting on the important things that will put value to your life. You will get discouraged. And that’s not what you are aiming for. Change is a gradual process and that is okay.
