What Matters Most: How to Find—and Defend—Your Priorities

"Prioritise what matters. You can't be everywhere, do everything, and have everything!"

That’s a quote from Oprah Winfrey, and it captures the essence of this week’s question. 

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Script | 391

Hello, and welcome to episode 391 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. 

You arrive at your desk, open up your Teams messages or email, and your screen fills with line after line of unread (and read) messages. One message grabs your attention, it’s from your boss and you feel compelled to open it. 

And from that one action, your whole day is destroyed. 

And while I am sure that message from your boss was important and potentially urgent, but did it really warrant destroying your day? 

That scenario is happening every day to millions of people, and it makes deciding what your priorities are for the day practically impossible. 

So, what can you do to ensure you are acting on your priorities and not being distracted by what appears to be both urgent and important? Giving some reflection, putting aside that so-called urgent message might actually be the best thing you can do. 

So, with that said, let me read out this week’s question (The Mystery Podcast Voice is on holiday this week). 

This week’s question comes from Michael. Michael asks, hi Carl, I really struggle to decide what I should be working on each day. My work is very dynamic; a lot can be thrown at me each day, and whenever I plan my week or day, none of it ever gets done. What’s the best way to prioritise? 

Hi Michael, thank you for your question.

In many ways, what you describe is what I see as the curse of the modern world. The incredible advances in technology have enabled us to do seemingly impossible things, yet they have also sped everything up. 

I remember just twenty-three years ago when I worked in a Law office in the UK, and if we received a letter (remember them?) from another lawyer, we effectively had around twenty-four hours to compose our response—even if what was being asked was urgent. 

We relied on the postal service, and no matter how fast we responded to that letter, it would not leave our office until 4:00 pm at the earliest on that day. 

And if we missed the 4:00 pm deadline, tough. It would have to wait until 4:00 pm the next day—which incidentally gave us a wonderful excuse for anything arriving late. 

The expectations from the “other side”, as we called them, were that they would receive the reply two days later. 

Today, just twenty-three years later, those two days seem to have fallen to just two minutes. What went wrong? 

The problem is that no matter how well planned our days and weeks may be, owing to others’ expectations, we are “expected” to respond within hours, sometimes minutes, not days. This has blurred the line between what we know is important and what is simply urgent noise. 

This is why it’s more critical today to be absolutely clear about what is important to you. And I emphasise the words “to you”. 

What’s important to you is not necessarily important to another person. When someone requires you to do something for them urgently, it’s urgent to them, not necessarily to you. 

You may have twenty similar urgent requests waiting for you. You are expected to decide what is the most urgent. That’s an almost impossible decision to make—if you don’t know what’s important to you.

So, the important place to start, Michael, is to establish your areas of focus. These are the things that are important to you, and they are based on eight areas:

Family and relationships

Health and fitness

Finances

Career and business

Lifestyle and life experiences

Self development

Spirituality

And your life’s purpose. 

The first step is to define what each one means to you and then pull out what action steps you need to take to keep everything in balance. 

These are the higher-level priorities in your life. 

There’s a little more to it than that, and if you want to learn more about developing your areas of focus, you can download my free Areas of Focus Workbook from my website; the link is in the show notes. 

Next, what is your core work? This is the work you are employed to do. 

Now, most people can describe their jobs. For example, I’m an architect, a doctor, a nurse, a bricklayer, a teacher, or a TV presenter.

Yet, there’s another step here. What does doing what you do look like at a task level? 

I know what architects do—they design buildings—but I don’t know what they do at a task level. 

I’ve seen building blueprints, so I guess they create those, but I don’t know how they do that. Is it with a pencil and a ruler, or is it done on a computer? 

Those tasks that you identify as being critical to the work you are employed to do will always form your priorities each day when at work. 

After all, if you are not doing the work you were hired to do, you’re not likely to be in your job for very long. 

Now this makes your life a little easier. Once you know what you need to do each day, or week, for your job, you will also be able to make a reasonably accurate estimate how long each of those tasks will take you. 

This will tell you how much time you need to perform your work each week. 

Now, you can only work with averages here. There are some external factors that could throw off your timings. Things such as poor sleep or a crisis at work. 

Yet, on the whole, you’ll find you manage to get all the essential work done each week. 

Now the clever part is to protect time for doing your most important work. 

I’ve found that if you can dedicate two hours each morning to your critical work for the day, you will be on top by the end of the week. 

From a professional perspective, if you are writing off two hours a day for doing your most important work, that still leaves you with around six hours to deal with anything else. 

I grew up on a farm. It was an arable farm with some animals. Each harvest time, when it was time to combine the corn fields, my father would never entertain the thought of meeting with the bank manager, tax inspector or representatives from the seed company. 

And to make things more complicated, my father farmed in the UK, which has notoriously unpredictable weather. When the corn was ready and the weather was dry, it was out! Out! Out! 

I remember my mother frequently calling dentists, doctors, the bank, and anyone else my father was scheduled to see to cancel appointments. 

Harvesting the crops was core work. Nothing got in the way of bringing the barley and wheat in. 

And that’s the approach you need to have with your core work. No matter who requests your time, when it’s time to get on with your core work, it’s no. No, No. Come back in an hour and I’ll be able to help you. 

Now, I began by telling you to establish your areas of focus. Because these are the higher-level areas of your life, it’s important to adopt the same approach to protecting time for the things that matter.

For example, I have many clients who prioritise being home in time for dinner with their spouse or partner and kids. This means if the family sits down for dinner at seven and it takes thirty minutes to get home, then no matter what, you leave the office at 6:00 to 6:15 pm. 

It’s a non-negotiable.

The good thing about this kind of constraint is that it invokes Parkinson’s Law, that is where the work will fill up the time available. 

If I have thirty minutes to finish writing this script, I’m certain I will do it. Similarly, if I had ninety minutes it would take me precisely ninety minutes. It’s a weird law that works. 

The sense of time pressure focuses your brain to filter out what would usually distracts you. 

When it comes to priorities, knowing what is most important to you makes deciding what to work on first much easier. 

Now, imagine you had ten pieces of work to complete, all equally important, urgent, and connected to your core work. How would you decide?

Well, your only option is to follow the principle of first in, first out. Begin with the oldest one and work from there. 

Incidentally, I suggest you do the same with your actionable email. Begin by replying to the oldest first. In Outlook and Apple Mail, you can reverse the order of messages in each folder. By default, these will show you the newest at the top. Change that to show you the oldest first. 

That might be a little uncomfortable at first because it will remind you how far behind you are with your email. But stick with it. You will soon find that your response times to emails speed up without any extra effort. 

Another level you may wish to add here is to create some “if this… Then that” rules. 

For example, if there are certain people whom you know you must respond to immediately, then apply a rule. “If I get a request from X, then I will prioritise that request”

However, be careful with that one. It’s easy to take the easy way out and add bosses, supervisors and pretty much anyone to this list. 

For me, there are only two people: my wife and my mother, I would do that for. That’s because my Family and relationships are the most important area for me. (And because my father doesn’t have a phone, hahaha) 

At a work level, I will prioritise anything related to money or lost passwords. I know how concerned people are about money—they bought the wrong course, or a refund needs processing. 

Beyond that, any other request will have to wait its turn. 

I know this will be difficult for some of you at first. It certainly was for me. But I can promise you that if you work at it and drill down into learning what is important to you, you will find making these decisions easy. 

I hope that has helped, Michael. Thank you for your question, and thank you to you too for listening. 

It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.