A major key to managing your time is deciding what is important to you. If you don’t decide what’s important to you, almost anything can (and will!) compete for your time and attention—and thereby dissipate your day, your week, your year, your career, and your life. Once you decide what’s important to you, you can then become a consultant to yourself to determine what it actually takes to maintain or achieve what you’ve designated as important. (If it seems the pieces are starting to fit together, read on. If not, read on anyway; they will.)
There is no inherent problem in our desire to escalate our goals, as long as we enjoy the struggle along the way.
–Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Getting real about what you want means being honest with yourself. It also means taking the time and trouble to compose a list of priorities, and it means reviewing your list often until your priorities sink in. (I know you’ve encountered this type of advice before, but if you had followed it well, you probably wouldn’t have bought this book! Call it a hunch. . . .)
Chronos Says If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there. It’s like the guy who jumped on his horse and ran off in all directions.
What was important to Thomas Jefferson? Here are Jefferson’s Ten Rules:
The great paradox about priorities is that if you have too many of them, then by definition they can’t all be priorities. Do you have 15 or 18 things that you list as top priorities in your life? If so, you’d better look again, because no one has time to pay homage to 15–18 top priorities. Life doesn’t work that way.
To help you identify what your priorities are, let’s look at the concerns that traditionally have served as top priorities for many people. I’m not saying that your list has to match this one—it probably won’t—but this is a starting point:
Let’s tackle each of these (suggested) priority areas one by one, with some concrete examples. Keep in mind that you may have others, not listed here, that are appropriate for you.
For most people, the family is Numero Uno. If you’re married and you love your spouse, being with your spouse is easily a top priority. If you have children and you love them, same situation. If you’re single, your priority may be to find a spouse and to raise a family someday, or to treat the people closest to you like a chosen family. If you’re in school, it may be to spend time with your nuclear family: your mom and dad, and your brothers and sisters.
A Stitch in Time As with all the priorities to be discussed, you want to attach goals—specific, action-oriented steps with timelines—to your priorities to reinforce them. Write them down.
If family is a top priority, then one of your goals may be to listen to your spouse in earnest for at least 35 minutes three times per week. (Won’t he or she be pleased as punch if you listen at all—never mind three times a week!)
Likewise, there are a variety of other goals you can choose to support this priority. Here is a quick list of other possible goals related to family:
Many of the goals that support your family priority are related to other priorities, such as wealth, intellectual growth, and so forth. Actually, that’s understandable; it’s wonderfully efficient when you set goals that address more than one priority.
If you want to do something about society’s woes (besides yelling at your TV set), participate in your community—help it be the best it can be. You might get involved with religious, social, fraternal, or community groups. You might choose to run for local office—not for purposes of ego gratification, but to give something of value back to the community. Here are some possible goals that may support your social priorities:
Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat! You may have surmised that it takes time and energy to support your priorities. Hold that thought. If your goal is to win back your time, why would you want suggestions for new stuff that you’re not currently undertaking? The answer: Tasks in support of your priorities do indeed help you win back your time. It’s less of a mystery than it might seem.
Chronos Says The few things that you’ll do in support of your priorities will take far less time than all the things you do now in support of who-knows-what. And they’ll have the added benefit of moving you closer to your goals. That’s time well spent!
When you have 15–18 “priorities,” you’re involved in many tasks, some personally rewarding, some not. There is an inherent efficiency in identifying your priorities and establishing some goals to support those priorities.
It’s true. Even I, yours truly, have been duped. After a decade and a half of staying in top shape, surrounding myself with others who were doing the same, and reading articles that reinforced my beliefs about fitness, I thought all of society was also focused on health and well-being. Then I came across a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association that says the number of overweight Americans gained steadily in the past decade.
Depending on what study you read, between one-third and one-half of people over age 20 tip the scales in the wrong direction. “On average, adults weigh 8 pounds more than they did a decade ago,” say Dr. Robert Kuczmarski and colleagues at the National Center for Health Statistics in Hyattsville, Maryland. “Comparisons . . . indicate dramatic increases in the prevalence of overweight people,” Kuczmarski says. By some reports, America is the most obese nation on earth. Tsk, tsk.
Time Out! Check with your doctor before you start any exercise or diet program, of course—especially if you haven’t been exerting yourself much. You’ll get two benefits: (1) valuable (maybe life-saving) guidance, and (2) a kick out of the look on the doctor’s face.
Dr. F. Xavier Pi-Sunyer, of St. Lukes-Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York City, observes that “while our caloric intake increases, our caloric expenditure decreases.” He also takes a dim view of duff-sitting: “Sedentariness has become a way of life.” (Slow and short, but a way of life.)
Couch potatoes, beware! This area—you guessed it—is another gold mine of worthy places to put time and energy. There are dozens of possible goals you could have in support of your health and well-being priority. Here’s a quick list; though not all will be for everyone, consider them in the light of your situation and lifestyle:
The great thing about having well-being as a priority is that it gives you a license to engage in social and personal behaviors that you might not have otherwise. Picking up a piece of litter in a neighbor’s yard, for example, is good for you, is good for the neighbor, and is good for the community. I know a man who carefully tucks a $5 bill into the last 50 pages of classic novels on the shelves at the local library. He wants to anonymously reward people, albeit in a small way, who read such books. If you’re thinking, “Yeah right, five bucks down the drain. . . ,” perhaps you’re simply not ready for this level of well-being.
I’m guessing that accumulating outrageous wealth isn’t one of your priorities, so I won’t spend too much time on this one . . . just kidding. Far be it from me to say that accumulating wealth is evil. The Bible says “the love of money is the root of all evil.” It doesn’t say that money per se is the root of all evil. You can accumulate as much wealth as you want, as long as you don’t love your money more than you love people or your country.
There are all kinds of wealth: intellectual wealth, spiritual wealth, and so forth. These are about to be covered in subsequent pages, so let’s confine the focus to economic wealth. Here are examples of goals you could choose in support of this priority:
The not-so-funny thing about amassing wealth is that for most people it’s a long-term affair. Only a tiny, tiny fraction of the population ever wins the lottery. (If you’ve ever thought you stand a better chance of getting struck by lightning, you’re probably right.)
Chronos Says Wealth, like happiness and fitness, is a habit. You get wealthy by developing habits of wealth. If you’re on your way to wealth, it’s probably those darn habits of yours.
You add to your net worth a little at a time. Gradually, inexorably, the wealth begins to build. Fortune and Forbes articles on wealthy Americans reveal that the majority got wealthy slowly. The book The Millionaire Next Door confirms that wealthy people developed a habit, early on, of living within their means—and one day found their nest egg had grown to a sizable sum. Wow, what a country! What a way to win back your time—by developing habits of wealth, breaking the cycle of deficit-spending, and amassing a sum that lets you to do what you want in life!
Beyond what’s already been discussed, the pursuit of career growth per se may be one of your priorities. If you’ve invested years in getting to be where you are, and if you like what you do, you may naturally look forward to rising within your industry or profession.
Independent of the monetary rewards, there’s a high level of inner satisfaction among those who are highly learned and well-respected in their chosen fields. For goals you can choose in support of your career-growth priority, try these on for size:
As society grows more complex (and, by now, you know it will), it will benefit you to become more of a specialist in your chosen field. Perhaps you could focus on biology—more specifically, marine biology, then marine biology restricted to a certain class of species, then marine biology in certain species restricted to the Hudson Bay. If you’re among a handful of specialists in your niche, then wealth tends to follow.
One caveat: It only pays to specialize if you know your specialty is marketable and has long-term prospects (as some of my friends know from bitter academic experience).
If you’re worried that becoming too specialized will restrict your intellectual diversity, fear not. What often happens is that once you decide on pursuing a highly narrow field and concentration, it actually expands. You begin to see things within your narrow focus that you couldn’t have seen before making the choice.
A Stitch in Time The more specialized you become, the more potentially valuable you become to those who need your expertise.
When Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was in his 80s (quite aged for his day), he was asked why he was reading the voluminous book, Plutarch’s Lives. He responded, “To improve my mind.” Rumor has it that the pursuit of intellectual growth—independent of career growth—is a worthy priority. Certainly education and intellectual development—for its own sake, and for that of your children—rank at the top of any list of priorities you may devise. In support of this priority, here’s a smorgasbord of possible goals:
As more people go online and Internet technology marches forward, it will become progressively easier to enhance intellectual growth. (Wait a minute: People used to say that about television in the ’40s, didn’t they? Uh-oh. . . .) It’s worth a warning: Watch out. You can get hooked on the Internet far worse than you can get hooked on television. You can be sitting at your monitor at 7:00 p.m., look up, and notice it’s 12:30 a.m.
Next time someone tells you to “get real,” consider this reality you’ve already experienced: There are far more worthy and stimulating issues competing for your time and attention than you will ever be able to pursue. It takes strength to stay within the confines of a few pre-identified focus areas—while, of course, occasionally allowing yourself to freewheel all over creation. (You are, after all, only human, aren’t you?)
Time Out As with life priorities, you need some parameters before sitting down and simply freewheeling on the Net. Otherwise, rather than winning back your time, you’ll watch it dissipate among an infinite number of seemingly intellectual pursuits.
This is a vital subject that’s ticklish to handle. I’ve known lots of folks who are sensitive about religion, sometimes taking offense where none was intended. I’m not assuming that your spiritual tradition is the same as mine, nor am I prescribing my own practices.
Spirituality is a wellspring of the quality in life. The time that makes up an enjoyable and worthwhile life is well worth winning back.
Spiritual growth doesn’t mean going to church every Sunday, although it certainly can involve that. Your spiritual growth can occur anywhere at any time. If you choose to seek active spiritual growth as a priority, goals like these can support your choice:
Okay, you already know many possible starting points.
That’s seven possible priority areas we’ve looked at so far—and even they’re not the be-all and end-all. You may have some that don’t fit within these categories at all. That’s fine, as long as you recognize what they are and choose goals that involve specific action steps and timelines in support of your priorities.
To support the priorities you choose, here are some basic action steps:
Maybe what this country really needs is a good portable priority list. At any rate, you can have one. If you have several fonts in your printer, print out your list in a reduced point size (or simply hand-print it in miniature) so that it’s small enough to carry in your wallet or purse. Then review your list of priorities at least once a day. With so many other things competing for your time and attention, it’s easy to lose sight of your priorities by 10:00 in the morning. It’s not excessive to read your priority list several times a day.
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