Our Top 127 Priorities 👀
Does the phrase “Our Top Priorities” make sense?
A priority is defined as “the fact or condition of being regarded or treated as more important.” If we have many (many) things being treated as more important, is anything really important?
One of the most common crazy-making scenarios I see with clients are “competing priorities” or “having to balance multiple priorities”.
When we work to understand what’s really most important, they struggle to name the MOST important things on a long list. It’s also difficult to share a cohesive point-of-view about how these intersecting priorities relate to one another.
Too many unrelated but urgent super-important responsibilities all at once is simply overwhelming.
Yes, most of us need to take care of more than one thing.We have many responsibilities. But when we don’t figure out how they all fit into our capacity, we run into trouble.
For example, your family and your health can both be priorities. In an ideal world, maybe these are combined? Your family loves to run marathons together? But most likely, at any moment, we need to choose what is the priority - or in other words how we are specifically investing time.
Perhaps on weekends, your family is your priority and you’ve committed to spending time with them over brunch and all-day Uno tournaments but on the mornings before work, you prioritize your health with a morning walk while your kids pack their lunches and your partner takes them to school.
Yes, we may have multiple projects we are involved with at work, but at any given moment we can only give our time to one thing.
When we’ve created Top 10 Priorities at work - we probably aren’t making much progress on any of them. And we are feeling overburdened or stretched and frustrated that we aren’t seeing change.
We need to understand how our responsibilities intersect with the things we care most about in our lives -- and how that aligns to our personal capacity.
There’s only so much time in each day so how do you really want to spend it? What’s most important in your life?
Becoming more practiced at prioritizing helps us make hard decisions that ultimately allow us to succeed. We can focus and deliver on what is absolutely most important without being diluted by distractions.
It's easy to say “my life is more complicated than that.”
To which I ask, “Are you feeling satisfied with your life? Or are you just super busy?”
As a coach, I work with clients everyday to:
⌛️ Get clear about their priorities at work and at home
⌛️ Define and share those priorities with managers / stakeholders
⌛️ Make promises that deliver and take care of what’s most important. Promises have deadlines and owners.
⌛️ Manage the breakdowns that inevitably occur in life so we can keep moving forward
⌛️ Coach generative and creative solutions to help you succeed
Remember:
It's okay if we aren't sure what's most important.
We're living and working in a culture that generally believes "more is better", so prioritizing isn't always a practiced skill. But it can be.
Experiment with how you best find focus
We might not know exactly what will work, but I think most people agree that just "working more" doesn't win in the long run.
You have the ability to find a successful solution that's perfect for you.
Once you start considering what's important to you, your team, and your family, the answers can come quickly and priorities become more obvious. You can find the path that delivers results you want.