- In this episode, we will be looking at how to prioritise your tasks and gain clarity of mind that will allow you to move forward.
Before we start though: have you been actioning the word NO from last week’s episode? I started with NO for good reason – it’s going to stop you sliding down whatever slippery slope you are on. Whatever time-consuming rabbit holes you have found yourself in. This week’s topic is prioritising because saying NO to the wrong things means that you can start saying YES to the right – Saying NO liberates you from non-essential commitments and makes much more room for you to say yes to what is meaningful and important to you. It opens up free time by giving you choices. NO being one that will stop the influx of new commitments, MAYBE which will buy you time to think about a commitment and YES which comes from knowing that commitment is something that furthers your end goals something you really want to do or perhaps just something that pays the bills.
But how can you decide what’s important and what is not?
I nearly called this episode WHITE NOISE AND HOW TO NAVIGATE THROUGH IT as that’s often how I feel when I get bogged down in my THINGS TO DO list – It’s a foggy buzzy place where I can get lost and sometimes I find myself obsessing over things which when all are said and done, are just not important.
That fog, no matter how driven you are, can drop down and, in productivity terms at least, hide from you what is important, and cause you to slow down and meander into a rhythm of unproductiveness.
About a year ago I picked up 6 retro VHS camcorders from a college that was getting rid of them. I had them sent to me and all in it was about £200. Great deal and I had a plan for them. I was going to give them to fellow filmmaker friends with a challenge, I’d give them a camcorder and a single tape which costs about £2, the means to capture from them which was another £10 and I was going to ask them all to make a short film to a deadline with a prize of keeping the camcorder and something more for the winner – It would be fun right? Wrong. I ended up chewing over how I would do this for months, and it was always on my mind. I had a Ton of other far more important things to do, fight contracts that required constant attention, relationships, I had just got a puppy, I had my own films I was trying to develop and a load of house-related problems and personal matters that needed my time and time. When I stopped for a moment and looked at what I had on my todo list it was probably 6 months later and I was drowning.
Within two minutes of assessing what I had to do, I realised I had to dump this camcorder idea. As I stopped and took stock I realised it was a total waste of time and money. I mean if I’d been a millionaire playboy with plenty of free time maybe I could have done it with my friends one weekend, but I’m no millionaire. By simply eliminating this task not doing it I was able to:
Save a load of time. This project wouldn’t have taken 5 minutes. It would have taken weeks and possibly months of time I didn’t have.
Free up my mind for more important things.
Getting what’s on your mind and onto paper, or on to a whiteboard as that’s my preferred medium, allows you to honestly assess what is important and what was not. My time con
