You can find lots of opinions on how to prioritize your to to list. Everyone from former presidents to modern day gurus have advice for this major dilemma. It’s no wonder there’s such a bank of ideas–trying to figure out what to do and in what order is one of the most frustrating parts of managing any project or breathing life into any vision. It can feel completely daunting and frankly a bit overwhelming looking at a lengthy list of tasks and trying to make heads or tails of what to take on first.
A popular theme is to focus on what’s most important rather than most urgent (back to that former president again!). But this begs the question–most important according to what? Or sometimes, according to whom? How can you rank things to their degrees of importance or urgency when you have no objective system of what makes a thing important? This can lead to complete frustration as you try to put a system to work and find yourself no much further ahead because it can be extremely difficult to tell the difference between the urgent and the important. Sometimes an important thing is really urgent! And of course we’ve all experienced the urgent thing that isn’t important at all. Without a scoring system to go by, we can end up feeling frustrated and going back to our bad habit of simply putting out fires and working from a reactive place. We can start to believe we can’t sort between urgent and important because they are just so darn similar at times. What can we do?
"It is our choices, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
J.K. Rowling
Values change everything
Given how much we’ve been talking about this lately, it should be no surprise that I’m recommending knowing your values as the missing piece to this puzzle. Let’s look at a scenario: someone fairly well known in your industry reaches out to you about speaking at an upcoming event they are hosting. Someone has dropped out and someone referred you as a possibility. This is a huge opportunity and will require quite a bit of work to prep for since this is a pretty big playing field. You have very little time to decide because they are already working under a tight deadline due to the unexpected drop and you know you probably aren’t the only one they called (or at least it won’t be long until they start reaching out to other people, many of whom would be chomping at the bit for a call like this). So you have a huge opportunity and very little time to decide–so how, in fact, do you decide? You could say yes and figure it out later but you also have some pretty major projects you are already committed to that you already know will move the needle.
Without values, these kinds of decisions are nearly impossible to figure out–saying no to what feels like a major opportunity is practically physically painful when you don’t have a solid, principle-based foundation. Sometimes saying yes has a huge payoff but we’ve all also had times when we invested a ton of time in an unclear opportunity only to see no payoff and end up way behind on the things we intentionally set out to do. Super frustrating.
Use your values in real life
Let’s see how values could help. When you’ve taken the time to think through and write out your values, you can run this decision through your values to see if it’s a fit. Maybe one of your values is no travel this year because you traveled a lot last year. And not only that, you also have a value of no more free work because your mortgage company stopped accepting “exposure” and wants an actual check. This is two strikes against this opportunity. That doesn’t make it an automatic no, but it should at least lower the level of urgency we feel so we can think through it more clearly. Without the pressure of urgency you take a clear look and the more you look at it, although YOU are a huge fan of this industry leader you realize your ICA probably doesn’t even know who she is. So you’d be traveling when you said you wouldn’t, working for free when you said you wouldn’t, and at the end of the day there really isn’t much pay off for you. Painful as it might be, you can say no knowing you did so based on your values.
What about using values to sort out our to do list? You’re staring down your impossibly long list, trying to figure out where to start. Take the time to connect each of your projects to your values–you should be able to see a clear connection of how your work is supported by your values. I promise you will find that you’ve put things on your list that don’t serve your values at all. In fact, I’ve found myself agonizing in guilt about a task and once I ran it through my values I realized it was completely opposed to what I want, value, and believe! I was just so caught up in the guilt of someone else wanting something from me (especially since it involved my kids–often a source of responding out of guilt instead of intention if I’m not careful!) that I really hadn’t even thought through whether this action was aligned with my values or not. Once you’ve eliminated tasks and projects that are not connected to your values, it will be much easier to start determining which ones are the most important by simply seeing how much they are connected to your values. Urgent is usually easier to determine because it will typically have a built in deadline. Important is subjective but becomes less so when you use a value-based lens to look through your to do list–is the task important to you based on what you believe?
"I know of no better way to start living intentionally than to know what I stand for and what I don’t."
If you haven’t written out your values, please do so. Trust me when I say that writing them down is so much more effective than just thinking you know what you believe. Some decisions will be so tough that you will be so glad you have a physical list of values to read through as you discern. And then take the time to connect your projects and your tasks to these values because if you can’t connect a goal or a project to a value you hold, you really ought to take some time to reflect on why you are working on it. It’s very easy to get caught up in other people’s goals and serve their purpose instead of being intentional with how we want to show up for life. And I know of no better way to start living intentionally than to know what I stand for and what I don’t. I can stand firm in my yeses and nos because I know they are based on my deepest beliefs and convictions. I feel less guilt working on projects (especially if it means missing out on something else) because I know I’ve been mindful of pursuing the work that is deeply connected to my core and my purpose. I hope you will do the same.