Choosing Action Priorities
This post will be a little different – more of a peek into how I make decisions and set priorities within my life. All of this will be easier if you have a set of guiding principles but even if you don’t I think all of us have a sense that we have a number of areas in our lives we could put energy into, and burnout happens when we throw too much energy into one area and not enough into others. Then we feel bad about ourselves, beat ourselves up and layer shame onto our already extended precious selves.
Priority Areas
A google search for “what are major areas people focus on” yields 20 million results. There are listicles galore. This blog post will not be one of them. This post will aim to help you identify your major areas which are active right now, which are on a holding pattern (there will be three types of these) and which are in a ‘someday maybe’ zone, to quote David Allen of Getting Things Done fame. Then we will identify activities which support each area and categorize them into must-haves and nice-to-haves.
Lots of busy people suffer from task exhaustion and never ending todo lists. They struggle to find time for themselves and thus stay up late. They feel chronically ‘behind’ – whatever that means – and thus often find themselves buffering (great podcast episode by Brooke Castillo on this topic) with Netflix, social media, food, alcohol, online shopping etc. rather than moving forward with their top priority goals.
Common priority areas would be work, kids, relationships, personal wellbeing, finances, home and garden. Take a few moments and write down your top three areas, middle three areas and all of your someday maybes. My someday maybes include singing in a semi-professional choir, having an amazing garden, travelling to new locations, writing books etc. These are all big projects that I would like to do, but I don’t have time to allocate to them right now. My top priorities are personal wellbeing, creating content in this blog and parenting. My medium priorities at this time are finances, relationship with my spouse, relationships with friends.
Essential Activities
So now it’s time to determine your essential activities to support your top priorities.
- Blogging
- time on the calendar each day to write
- actually write
- consistently capture blogging ideas when they occur, e.g. on my phone and then refer back to them
- Personal Wellbeing
- 7-8 hours of sleep a night
- 15 minutes of meditation
- 15 minutes of loving movement
- 15 minutes of housework
- eating foods which nourish my body and stopping when I am full
- keeping alcohol consumption minimal <- I am still working on this definition
- Parenting
- cook and eat dinner together 3-4 times per week
- assess pantry and ensure grocery order put in weekly
- ensure kitchen clean daily
- assist with children’s housework e.g. laundry and rooms when needed
- make myself available before school and in evenings to help with problem solving and emotional regulation
- coach children to perform self care and set healthy boundaries and provide parental boundaries when they are struggling with adequate sleep, eating etc.
- be available and eager to provide academic support
- provide transportation to activities and social events
SMART (Specific/Measurable/Achievable/Realistic/Timely) goals are excellent to target in these must have activities – ideally you should be able to review at the end of the day and see which goals you accomplished. If you look at my activities up above, you can see that in the area of personal well-being, I have much more defined goals. This has been a major focus over the past year and it shows. Blogging, however, is a relatively newer endeavour and I don’t yet know what are the activities I need to do on a daily basis to support sustainable blogging. When I do, those activities will look much more like the ones in personal well-being.
Parenting is a little different. My kids are older teenagers and my active hands on parenting is winding down. This is what a priority area looks like when it is moving towards maintenance. I leave it as a top priority for now because I think it is so important and it does require some daily activities to run smoothly.
I should mention that you may be able to delegate some of these results. If a clean house is a top priority for you, maybe you can hire that done. If healthy meals are important, maybe you can use a meal prep service or hire a chef rather than spending your time on this, or winding up eating pizza again. Some actions can of course not be delegated, but it’s important to take a good look at what can be so you can ensure that your own energy is having the biggest impact possible.
Results
So how do you know if your actions are working? You have to define results for your priority areas. This may be fairly specific – such as in finances, you may set a goal of increasing your net worth or paying down debt by a specific amount each month. For relationship priorities, I don’t think any of us want such a measurable result, but you definitely need to spend time reflecting on the relationship and checking in on its status.
The point of all this work is to help you choose your next action when you have some unscheduled time so that you get closer to achieving your desired results. For most of us, this will be in the mornings or evenings, after the schedule of the work day, the feeding of ourselves and children and the necessary daily chores are complete. When deciding what to do next, we can consult our top priority list. Our brain suggests – “Check Facebook” – quick check? Not on the list. Our brain suggests – “Eat chocolate” – quick check? Doesn’t serve our health goals. If we use our pre-determined priorities to choose our unscheduled actions, we are guaranteed that our priority areas will move forward. And our priority areas of parenting might include choosing the action of “Watching a show with the kids” but we would be doing so in order to advance our overarching goal of developing and maintaining warm and attached relationships with our children rather than to check out. Note that checking out and watching a show might fit right into our personal wellness priority if we have reflected that the best way to meet our own needs is by taking this action. [Hint, usually you should go to sleep instead].
I would love to hear from you in the comments or feel free to reach out to me directly by email at info@daniellemichaelsmd.com with your top three priority areas right now.