Setting Priorities: Find Out What’s Important to You!

Achieving a harmonious life requires allotting time to different tasks in a manner consistent with your priorities.  Setting priorities begins with determining which things are truly important to you because they align with your goals and values.  Our family, co-workers, friends, and others are constantly bombarding us with requests to engage in time-consuming activities. Our colleagues may want our assistance with a project.  Someone may ask you to donate time to professional or social organizations or to serve as speaker at professional events. You may have emails and phone calls coming in non-stop during the day.  We are constantly pulled in multiple directions and may feel overwhelmed and always short on time.  Some of these requests may be enjoyable activities that are consistent with our goals and values, but others may not.

What do I say “no” to?

You might have heard recommendations to just say “No” to some or many of these never-ending requests, but how do you decide which ones?  It’s simple.  You should say “No” to “invitations” to spend time doing things that are not aligned with your goals and values.

How do I determine what is important?

To determine what is important to you, consider the top things that you regularly do, or wish you had time to do, in your personal, family, work and social life.  List those activities and then rank them, giving a higher ranking to those that align with your values or goals in each of these categories. Activities that rank highest in each category are the ones to which you should dedicate your time.  Items that rank lower in your list are likely tasks that do not contribute to your development or that do not align with your values. These are the ones to which you should say “No.”  To help you with this assessment, download our “Establishing Priorities” worksheet at the following link:  Establishing Priorities Worksheet.  We hope this helps you determine which requests are worthwhile.  And which you can simply just skip!

While evaluating your priorities you may realize you want to consider an alternative work arrangement.  If this is you, please review our article on alternative work arrangements here: http://legallybalanced.com/how-to-request-an-alternative-work-arrangement/

We would love to hear from you.  Let us know what you think below.