Look here to see what you ACTUALLY value
If you want to know what you really value in life, don’t look at your mood board or your to-do list. Look at your calendar, your camera roll, and your phone log. The latter stems from action — the things you’ve actually prioritized. The former stems from words — the story you tell yourself about what you will prioritize … someday.
The gap between what we say we’ll make time for and what we currently spend time on creates dissonance. The natural instinct is to try to close this gap by becoming more efficient and disciplined, using the latest productivity hacks to fast-forward past our to-do list in hopes of making our someday today. Then the next batch of emails and projects show up, and we’re back where we started: behind.
The real task at hand
The challenge here is making peace with the fact that the best we can do is not everything, but the things that really matter to us. In other words, living according to our values.
This emphasis on prioritizing is why I run my life on my calendar. It forces me to get real about my finitude. Having to assign a date and time to an event means that I can’t be doing other events then, which gets me closer to the reality that I won’t have time for all the things I’d ideally like to do in life. This naturally leads to the urge to do the things that I really care about.
Turning this into practice
I’ve been experimenting with a three-step process for making this process easier:
I write down my top 3 priorities for the week
Then I look through my big list of tasks and pick the ones that match those priorities, along with the requisite life stuff (eg. oil change or cleaning)
Then I schedule the tasks in my calendar, reserving time for sleep, socializing, and buffers for transitioning between things.
After step 3, my calendar is full, yet my list of unassigned tasks is not. This scenario would usually cause overwhelm or tension. But because I know that I’ve made time for the things I really care about that week, it becomes easier to look at my remaining tasks and think, “I won’t accomplish you this week, and that’s OK.”
What technique do you use to make sure you spend time on things really matter to you?
I explore this concept further in this video