Your True Priorities Are Reflected by How You Spend Time
How we spend our time tells everyone around us what matters most to us. Good intentions and values aside, if something is important, it deserves significant time. Our true priorities are reflected perfectly by how we spend our time.
The question is: Are you spending the most time on what you say matters most to you?
Why do so many leaders find themselves living their lives without time and priority congruence? The answer isn’t typically because they fail to know their priorities or lose track of how they spend their time. Rather, they believe they can play catch-up on their priorities, such as family time or exercise, after they achieve the everyday tasks required to complete their work.
They convince themselves that quality time on the weekend or at the upcoming vacation will better match their best intentions. Unfortunately, the opportunities to achieve harmony between time spent and priorities never fully materializes. They disappoint themselves and those around them with such false choices.
The best leaders maintain the discipline to put matters into perspective and commit to the time their highest priorities require. They create a distinct order of what matters most to them and spend their time accordingly. They don’t shirk their responsibilities to colleagues, but insist on reserving the time necessary to achieve their ultimate focus on what they say matters the most.
As famed consultant Stephen Covey liked to say, “The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.” Does your schedule reflect your true priorities? If not, it’s time for a new schedule.
Two books I've read lately on this topic that have greatly impacted my thinking, as I've struggled with prioritization while being new to the CEO role over the past year:
Essentialism, by Greg McKeown - the pursuit of less allows us to be more selective about what is essential; priority means one single focus - not five, just one; the pressure to do more is self-imposed, and we have the power to manage these limiting beliefs; we often delay things for the future, especially enjoying life, that could be attained now.
Four Thousand Weeks, by Oliver Burkeman - the average human has just 4,000 weeks in a lifespan, give or take; we often postpone things for the future instead of enjoying now; our extreme focus on getting the most out of our time can lead to more of a time sink (i.e., inbox zero counterintuitively means more emails); sometimes our extreme focus on being present leads to the lack of presence - just let it be.
I'm excited to hear that Scott Baker will be interviewing Oliver Burkeman in October. His 4K Week book is in my queue. I guess I'll have to move it up and read before 10/11. I recently picked up Tiago Forte's small little book on his PARA method. The method is simple and you can get the gist from watching YouTube videos (although the little book is wonderfully illustrated). PARA stands for Projects, Areas of Interest, Resources, and Archives. Specifically, his take on Projects is helping me prioritize. I have the tendency to have a lot of interests and start many personal projects (not so much a work) at the same time and make very little progress on any of them. Over the past two weeks, I go into my Projects folder - see the 10 to 15 things that are in there (sounds like a lot, but it's not when you know how Tiago defines a project) and instead of searching for the next best thing on the internet, I pick a project, think about what I can do to get it to the next step, then spend a block of time doing it. So far, I've spent less time surfing and more time being productive.