Do you say you’ll prioritise something and then do other things instead?

Work Smart Not Hard Tip No. 11 in a series written for Indie Cambs

I was talking to someone – as I do – about why they were always getting side tracked, not doing what they said they wanted to do and letting other things that weren’t really important to them get in the way.

It turned out they had “too many conflicting priorities”.

Home, business, family, health, friends, community projects were all fighting for attention.

No wonder they kept going round in circles.

There can only be one priority.

“The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. It meant the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for the next five hundred years. Only in the 1900s did we pluralize the term and start talking about priorities. Illogically, we reasoned that by changing the word we could bend reality.” ~ Greg McKeown Essentialism

Running a small business usually means having to do a million things at once but as we all know that can often lead to real frustration, with everything taking longer than it should and often not done as well as we’d like.

One of the best tips to overcome this is to take a breath, dump everything on a to-list in no particular order and decide on THE priority. Do that one thing, throw the first list away and start again. The next priority may be something that wasn’t on the original list. Don’t try to prioritise everything and expect things to wait in the right order until you get to them, or you’ll just beat yourself up for not doing everything.

Will this take me closer to my goal or further away?

If you’re having trouble deciding on your priority, maybe it’s because you haven’t defined your overriding goal. When you know what you really want, everything you do will either take you closer to achieving that or lead you further away. Asking that question each time you need to prioritise usually makes your next action clearer.

A surprising number of people have trouble deciding what it is they really want.

There are lots of reasons for this:

As soon as we have the thought about what we want, many of us simultaneously tell ourselves that it’s impossible, or that it’s a selfish or unworthy goal. We end up never really believing that we can have what we want, or that somehow, the success we’ve achieved was a fluke because it happened by accident.

“Desire is the starting point of all achievement. Not a hope, not a wish, but a keen pulsating desire which transcends everything.” – Napoleon Hill

If you’re going round in circles it may be because you haven’t found that keen pulsating desire for what you want to achieve. If you’re wishing and hoping for things to change while you’re doing the same things and expecting different results, it may be time for a re-think.

What would make it really easy to see your priority?

If you’d like to talk this through, get in touch!