One of the most difficult things about life, especially as its complexity grows, is prioritizing and figuring out what is important in the moment.
Think about that task list and how to assess what’s the most important thing to work on of the thousand other things on the To Do list. Fucking difficult. There’s the Eisenhow Matrix which has been used to illustrate the difference between important, urgent, not important, and not urgent. But it’s just a mental model.
I find this to be especially difficult in balancing the To Do List of your personal life with that of work. Figuring out how to prioritize mental health, relationships, physical health, and the demands of others on your time, are really complicated and it doesn’t seem to stop. Every day this skill gets tested from the moment we awake.
With children this skill seems to become honed even further. The working parent of young children likely has very little time for frivolity. It might even be an interesting exercise to pretend you’re a parent. A lot of productivity advice would tell you to look at your To Do List each day and determine what the most impactful thing to get done that day would be.
In today’s world of instant communication, there are so many more relationships that people maintain than they did 100 years ago. Between texting, email, and social, you can quickly get lost in the unimportant, and worse, fall onto someone else’s timetable. Don’t look at your phone first thing in the morning!
Email, texts, calls are all people inserting themselves onto your To Do List. A successful friend of mine would always say to people who are putting stuff on his To Do List, “Am I on your timetable?”
I absolutely love that. It’s a constant effort to stay on your own time table, figure out what’s important, and prioritize it ruthlessly.
Good luck.