2024 October 15 Prioritize for peace and joy

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website about reimagining your life. If you like what you hear today please leave a Like, subscribe, tell your friends, and send me a message! 

Thanks for joining me tonight to talk about priorities, both real and imagined. You often hear people talk about managing multiple priorities. Managing multiple priorities is really a myth created in the late 1970's when Alan Lakein introduced the ABC prioritization method. 

That was followed by the popularization of the Eisenhower Matrix, a tool for prioritizing tasks, in the 1980s after being featured in Stephen Covey's book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Indeed, prior to the 1940’s, the plural of the word priority didn’t even exist! Priority was a self-limiting term, as clearly only a single thing can be the most important thing.

So now that we know that it is a created concept, what does managing multiple priorities really mean? In the simplest sense, Managing Multiple Priorities, or MMP, is really Not Setting A Priority, NSAP. Since priority means the most important thing and that’s singular, what MMP means is you are trying to juggle multiple things without really going through the prioritization process.

It's far more productive to review and set your priorities, then focus on the true priority until some other task becomes the new priority. MMP is really a head game of telling yourself that something you deprioritized is still a top priority. But in reality, it’s one of life’s binary decisions: either something is the most important thing to focus on or it isn’t. It can’t be both at the same time.

By picking one priority and focusing on it until you reach the desired outcome, you will get more things, and more important things, completed. But what if you really do have multiple things that need some attention? 

Then you probably haven't broken down the goals to individual actionable steps, and your MMP is really trying to complete multiple not-SMART goals with no clear definition of how done is defined. If you feel two big tasks both need some attention, then truly define what specific action needs to be completed for each task and prioritize those specific actions. 

Then you can track and recognize your progress and keep making incremental progress on each task in a controlled fashion instead of always feeling you never get anything done.

The big risk of Managing Multiple Priorities is that none of the important tasks are ever brought to completion, and now most or even all your efforts are not only wasted, but you have distracted yourself from your vision, and brought disappointment into your life.

By not focusing on your true priorities you won’t have time to take advantage of the other opportunities that do align with your life vision. Managing multiple priorities is a modern false concept that hides the real issue, which is making difficult decisions to honestly set priorities and then following through on them.

But probably the biggest downside of trying to simultaneously push forward on multiple large tasks is this often leads to near instant feelings of overwhelm. Yesterday you didn’t have time to finish the one thing you were working on, and now you are trying to finish multiple important things. There seems to be no end!

The instant cure for overwhelm is to prioritize all the small next steps for each of the big projects, and then start addressing each next step in order of priority. Calmness will ensue. Also, think of some recent Managing Multiple Priorities situations you have been in. Were all the outcomes truly of equal priority? Was washing the kitchen floor really of equal importance to completing the mortgage application? Perhaps they were, but if each task had multiple steps, they likely would have been better served by defining intermediate goals, prioritizing those smaller steps, and then finishing each step based upon its real priority.

This isn’t to say that oftentimes there aren’t multiple things competing for your time. There probably are! But the reality is no matter how many things need to get done, at any one instant you are pretty much limited to actually working on only one thing at a time. 

Given that reality, it is generally better to step back, look at what the very next steps are that need to be completed in the competing tasks, and then prioritize those smaller tasks. The benefits of prioritizing each step are many. First off, as we said, trying to manage multiple priorities is probably the fastest way to feel overwhelmed, while prioritizing things is the fastest way to end overwhelm and regain your motivation. 

When you prioritize the smaller steps you can see the progress you are making which is self-motivating, plus you tend to waste less time because you are doing smaller bits of work on different tasks. The smaller steps allow for little breaks in time on any individual task, and gives your brain a chance to think out the best approach for the next item on your list.

When you prioritize your todo list, you have the opportunity to see if the task you thought was important is really aligned with your vision. If it is, great! If not, you should probably think about whether it’s truly important. So go forth, divide and conquer your ill-conceived todo list of mammoth tasks that are all listed as critical. Even if the tasks overall are truly important, if you break them down into next steps you will find ways to make steady progress on all of them, in a controlled way, another tool in your tool belt of bringing calm into your day and progress on the things that seemed insurmountable.

Your homework (always optional) is to think of all the things on your todo list right now, especially the big ones that perhaps have been nagging at you for some period of time. Now look at the descriptions and if they aren’t *actionable* steps, divide those big tasks down into multiple smaller actionable steps.

Extra points if you make a new little list of the actionable steps and check them off when they are done, no matter how small. Now you can be pleased with yourself at all the progress you have made when you realize how much closer those big items are to being done. Congratulations!

That’s it for the evening. Please remember the many wars currently active in the world.

 In Ukraine, the Middle East, Africa and everywhere there are disasters or suffering. If you are able and interested, the page of Ukraine donation links is still up at UKR7.com.

Also remember the damage and injury in the wake of the recent hurricanes in the Southeast US, the Caribbean and Mexico. Remember and pray for the aid workers from WCK who died. The link to World Central Kitchen, which is José Andrés’ group, to that page is WCK.org. They are totally humanitarian, providing meals for people in need.

Remember that one of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others. As always, be true to yourself and live your life aligned with your true goals and feelings.

As always, thank you for stopping by! If you found something interesting or useful please pass it along. Please subscribe and hit that Like button. If not, please drop me a comment as to what you would like to hear. Have a great week!

Remember to live the life you dreamed of because that is the path to true contentment. Love and encouragement to everyone and see you next week on 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com.