Written and verified by the psychologist GetPersonalGrowth.
Last update: 15 November 2021
Learning to prioritize goes beyond proper time management. Setting priorities means organizing your life, clarifying values, remembering what is important and what is best to postpone or even let go. Our priorities must always be in tune with our goals, which must be like a beacon that illuminates and inspires our way.
It must be said that, despite the amount of resources we have at our disposal, we continue to keep this task among the outstanding issues. In general, the human being tends to get lost in that daily vortex that surrounds him. Indeed, constant overstimulation nowadays makes it even more difficult for us to set the right priorities. We receive constant requests and information and our attention, like a badly trained muscle, is dragged away making us forget our goals., our aim.
Don't put your heart into so many things.
-Epitteto-
The need to prioritize goes beyond mere personal productivity. We are faced with a multilevel and transversal ability that affects every area of ​​our life. Because those who recognize and remember what is really important build better relationships, live better in the workplace and enjoy more emotional development.
Learning to prioritize, the eternally outstanding question
Why do some of us find it so difficult to learn to prioritize? The answer is simple: because we live worried. Our mind often goes much faster than life because it feels overwhelmed, under pressure. We want to achieve everything, satisfy everyone, solve everything. When we close our eyes in the evening, we do so with the unpleasant feeling that the next day we will wake up with a long list of pending tasks.
As the list gets longer, anxiety and stress try to take over. And when this happens, everything becomes intricate and unstable, until we completely lose sight of any proposed goal. Learning to prioritize involves, above all, minimizing. We must learn to economize the efforts to guide ourselves towards defined goals ... and this can only be achieved through a relaxed mind that knows how to focus on what is important.
All this in turn leads to a precise conclusion: learning to manage time and priorities well is not a goal that can be achieved through a simple tool. It is not enough to draw up the famous list of "life goals". Learning to prioritize goes hand in hand with personal development. It involves creating a more focused mind that is able to recognize opportunities. It means using emotions to your advantage to foment motivation.
It also requires another essential thing: a good dose of courage and management skills. Those with which to decide what is most convenient for us at any time and what is best to leave aside.
Clarify goals, reduce complexity, set priorities
Those who fail to clarify their priorities will gradually take charge of those of others. It's very simple: not having clearly defined your goals with which to find motivation every day, you come to consider those of others more relevant. Such a mechanism is a real problem and a way to ruin the castle of one's self-esteem.
So let's see what steps we should take to approach this field of personal development.
If we don't make our goals clear, someone will do it for us
If we want to learn how to prioritize, the first step can only be to clarify the goals. To do this, it is not enough to ask ourselves what is most important to us, because the most likely thing is that the trinomial family, health and economic well-being will emerge.
We have to go further. Let us ask ourselves the following:
- What do I want for myself in this life?
- What am I passionate about?
- How would I like to see myself in 5 years?
- What things really define me that others don't see or don't care about?
Prioritization has a price, sometimes we have to leave some things behind
Prioritizing means choosing between different elements to keep one. It involves ascending a goal on our task list. It also means knowing how to distinguish between urgent and important. Even more, and perhaps what can be more tiring, learning to prioritize very often forces us to leave some things (and people) behind.
We must be absolutely prepared for this, because even if prioritizing sometimes comes at a cost, we will achieve happiness, boosting self-esteem and achieving our vital goals.
Reduce complexity
Complexity lives in our mind and also in our life. When we suffer from anxiety, our priorities are confused and our present equates to confused and varied thoughts, worries and fears. When we fill our schedules with occupations, appointments, commitments, tasks and obligations, we do the same. Complexity dominates us and takes us away from our real priorities.
A great way to solve this problem is to work on your inner and outer balance every day. Practices like the mindfulness they can help us relax the mind. Furthermore, with regards to our external daily life, nothing better than applying what is known as minimalism.
This philosophy of life is based on the mantra "identify the essential and eliminate all the rest". It means taking a step towards that territory in which to shape a lifestyle in which to value what inspires us, what makes us feel good, which enriches us emotionally. Everything else is considered superfluous ...
If we want to learn to establish our priorities, we must be able to create a more aware reality, with clear objectives that always accompany us.. Only in this way will we be able to build our roads and know what to do for us at any time and which direction is the most favorable.
