Keys to Prioritizing

Prioritizing goals can be confusing if you think in terms of "which is more important?" The reason is that all of your goals will be important at one time or another, or they wouldn't be goals. So asking which is more important is like asking whether it's more important to breathe or eat-at this moment, breathing is more important. But eventually, all the air in the world won't matter if you don't get some food.  Therefore abandon the idea of prioritizing by "importance." Instead,  think in terms of timing- "which will I focus on more right now?"

One of the problems that occurs when you don't prioritize is that you can easily be distracted by the tyranny of the urgent.  Urgent activities are everywhere and if we haven't prioritized, it is easy to allow ourselves to divert our attention to them.  When we do that, we lose our focus on what is really important to our success.

Think about the last time you took a vacation (if you can remember back that far).  Think about how much you got done the one or two days before you left.  You were probably very productive.  One of the reasons is that you were focused on your priorities.  You didn't get sidetracked by things that weren't important.

However sometimes, even when one goal is clearly more important than another, timing will sometimes dictate that the less important goal take precedence at this time. For example, just because health and family might be one person's most important priorities in life, that doesn't mean that working late might not occasionally be the most intelligent use of an evening, even if it precludes being home for dinner or going to the gym. This is especially true when you are under a deadline for having a project completed. 

Assuming that all the Goals you've created or adopted are essentially of equal importance, over the long run at least. Don't worry if one goal is truly more important. The point is not to prioritize the goal, but to prioritize what you're going to do right now.  What you are doing right now is what is going to eventually move you toward the completion of the goal or project.  

On any given day, or week, you can choose to focus on some goals more than others. The goal that receives the most attention can and probably will change frequently. This flexible approach is very workable if you don't set too many goals or tasks to come due at the same time.

Someone might ask which goal is more important:

      "To strengthen my relationship with my spouse"

      or

      "To earn a promotion at work"

Both of these may be very important, but clearly, one may need more attention at any given time. This flexibility allows you to have fun and set many diverse goals (travel, savings, relationships, and health, for instance), keep track of them, focusing on certain ones now, and shifting focus to others as needed-without having to make an artificial decision about their order of importance. You can even set a very long range goal with a start date that doesn't even begin for several years, but at least it will be there to look at whenever you are reviewing your goals and thinking about the future.

The important thing is to have goals that are important to you.  These need to be your goals, not someone elses.  Psychologists tell us "that we move towards our most predominate thought".  In other words, you are what you think. Since that is the case, focus on what you want to be, do or achieve and not on where you are right now-except to learn from it.