Prioritizing Our Time

In our hectic and often overly scheduled world, how do we prioritize our activities to maximize our time? And then in turn, how do we use our time on what is most important? This is a common challenge of our day, yet we can learn to be equal to the task and maximize our time.

Most of us in our busy lives have more things expected of us than what we can possibly do. Thus, each day becomes challenging as we face choices of what we will and won’t do based on our limited time. To come out on top, we must learn to effectively prioritize and do those things that matter most.

An important part of effectively prioritizing is realizing that spending our time doing something that is good, is not always the best option. For example, it may be a good idea to work longer hours today to complete an important project. However it may be better to escape the stress of work life to clear your head and regroup before completing the project by taking a hike up your favorite trail, or perhaps the best option at the time is to hurry home and spend time with your child who is having a rough time adjusting to a new school year. Each of these options is good, but depending on the circumstances, one will be best and better than the other two.

Personally deciding what is most important to us in our lives will help us utilize our time wisely. Now, let me reiterate again, just because something is good, does not make it worth doing, as the number of good things we can do far exceeds our time available. For that reason, we have to determine those things that are better than good to ensure the most important things are commanding our attention. When viewing our limited time, deciding to do something good is usually not good enough.

Now, rather than spending our whole lives debating what our best choice is at any given time, there are certain steps we must take to make our decision making easy and almost automatic. These steps include developing a well defined personal mission statement and value system for our lives, and then setting and monitoring goals to achieve them. Our personal mission, values, and goals will help guide us as we face choices on how to spend our time. And having these items well defined in our lives will help clearly steer us to the best use of our time.

Truly learning to utilize our time effectively is a major challenge for all of us and often hinders our success and happiness in life. As each of us learns and works at overcoming this challenge by prioritizing our time effectively, we will maximize our full potential and live a rewarding life. Let’s decide now to strive to consistently make the best choices possible so that we can come out on top. We can do it!