Establishing Priorities
A while ago, I sent you a newsletter about the importance of having purpose in your life and setting goals. Now I want to talk about something equally important; establishing priorities. In order to establish priorities, you need to have a purpose in mind. You need to know if the things you do on a daily basis are helping you achieve your goal. Are you spending time with activities that will further your purpose or are you wasting your time with trivial details that won’t help you fulfill it?
What matters isn’t the amount of time you work on something. If you aren’t advancing your goals, you’re wasting your time. You can be very busy, but if you aren’t connected to your purpose, you won’t get anywhere. You need to work wisely. You must know which activities are really helping you reach your goal.
We need self discipline to establish priorities. It’s very easy to get caught up in emergencies. There are many activities that solve immediate problems, but don’t help us change our life for the best. While we waste our time with them, we never go beyond our present situation. In order to establish priorities, we need to decide to spend more time with activities that will help us achieve our goal.
I’ll give you a personal example. I had this dream of writing a book for 20 years, but I never wrote it because I thought I had more important things to do. I was too busy with my own survival and was waiting for a lull in activity. I realized that my lack of time was a product of not living according to my goals. I discovered that if I didn’t write the book, my life didn’t make any sense. I had to put first things first. I finally decided to write the book. For 2 years, I wrote one or two pages every now and then, and at the end of 2005, I had only about 200 pages. I made an inventory of these 2 years and found out that I was kidding myself. I was writing one or two pages to relieve my consciousness while I tended to petty emergencies. Then I decided to write at least 1 chapter per week, and I did everything I could in order to finish a chapter in a day or two. I became irresponsible when it came to emergencies. I learned how to ignore things that seemed important in order to finish my goal. I was able to look at a pile of papers in my office and keep typing the book until I finished it.
You can tell when you’re not establishing your priorities by how many emergencies you have. When you don’t do the most important thing, emergencies are a constant. You run from one place to the other to put out the fire and you don’t have time for anything but putting out fire. You’re an unemployed firefighter. If you want to see the fire extinguished once and for all, you need to put first things first. You must be prepared to say no to the emergencies and stay focused on what will really further your purpose in life.
Plan to spend at least 80% of your time with activities that will advance your goal. Before every week and every day, ask yourself what you can do to bring you closer to your dreams. Have the courage to say no to the trivial. Don’t allow people to control your time. Resist the temptation to be caught up with emergencies. Start your day doing the things that will further your purpose.
A while ago, I sent you a newsletter about the importance of having purpose in your life and setting goals. Now I want to talk about something equally important; establishing priorities. In order to establish priorities, you need to have a purpose in mind. You need to know if the things you do on a daily basis are helping you achieve your goal. Are you spending time with activities that will further your purpose or are you wasting your time with trivial details that won’t help you fulfill it?
What matters isn’t the amount of time you work on something. If you aren’t advancing your goals, you’re wasting your time. You can be very busy, but if you aren’t connected to your purpose, you won’t get anywhere. You need to work wisely. You must know which activities are really helping you reach your goal.
We need self discipline to establish priorities. It’s very easy to get caught up in emergencies. There are many activities that solve immediate problems, but don’t help us change our life for the best. While we waste our time with them, we never go beyond our present situation. In order to establish priorities, we need to decide to spend more time with activities that will help us achieve our goal.
I’ll give you a personal example. I had this dream of writing a book for 20 years, but I never wrote it because I thought I had more important things to do. I was too busy with my own survival and was waiting for a lull in activity. I realized that my lack of time was a product of not living according to my goals. I discovered that if I didn’t write the book, my life didn’t make any sense. I had to put first things first. I finally decided to write the book. For 2 years, I wrote one or two pages every now and then, and at the end of 2005, I had only about 200 pages. I made an inventory of these 2 years and found out that I was kidding myself. I was writing one or two pages to relieve my consciousness while I tended to petty emergencies. Then I decided to write at least 1 chapter per week, and I did everything I could in order to finish a chapter in a day or two. I became irresponsible when it came to emergencies. I learned how to ignore things that seemed important in order to finish my goal. I was able to look at a pile of papers in my office and keep typing the book until I finished it.
You can tell when you’re not establishing your priorities by how many emergencies you have. When you don’t do the most important thing, emergencies are a constant. You run from one place to the other to put out the fire and you don’t have time for anything but putting out fire. You’re an unemployed firefighter. If you want to see the fire extinguished once and for all, you need to put first things first. You must be prepared to say no to the emergencies and stay focused on what will really further your purpose in life.
Plan to spend at least 80% of your time with activities that will advance your goal. Before every week and every day, ask yourself what you can do to bring you closer to your dreams. Have the courage to say no to the trivial. Don’t allow people to control your time. Resist the temptation to be caught up with emergencies. Start your day doing the things that will further your purpose.
© 2007 Claudio Vargas Silva
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