Why You Need to Set Priorities for Personal Happiness and Professional Success
Setting priorities for personal happiness and professional success is a must. If you want to enjoy your life and achieve the career dreams that are placed deep in your heart, you need to start prioritizing yourself.
How do you decide what to do first when you get up in the morning and at the end of the day? Does it feel like you’ve done a whole lot of busy activities, but yet, when you look at your list, you haven’t accomplished anything? Do you feel this is costing you a lot?
What are the activities you should be working on that is getting in the way of your success, and what’s the answer to this problem?
Well, you learn how to set priorities for yourself! The most successful people do not have secrets to getting things done; they’ve just mastered how to prioritize themselves and their business to generate professional success!
Sounds easy, right? Well, if it were, you wouldn’t be spending all this time trying to figure it out on your own!
Therefore, let’s talk about how to generate professional success for yourself!
Setting Priorities When Everything Seems to Be Urgent
Stephen Pressfield said “I’m keenly aware of the Principle of Priority, which states (a) you must know the difference between what is urgent and what is important, and (b) you must do what’s important first. What’s important is the work.”
In this day and age, life is SO busy, and it feels impossible to know what we need to do first and what can wait, and that creates exhaustion. We tell ourselves we need to have an empty inbox, be caught up with everyone on our social media friends list, answering every text message, or even sweeping our floors every night. But do we REALLY need to do these urgently?
We need to figure out what is the MOST important thing on our to-do list and to kick needing to get everything done to the curb! To do this, let’s look at some helpful strategies.
Do High Priority Tasks First
How do you decide where you spend your time and energy?
Figuring out how to set priorities for personal happiness and professional success is a key skill to generate the amazing life you’ve longed for.
Are you doing things for yourself or only for other people? Are you trying to impress other people? Everyone wants to feel loved and wanted so when we receive a text, email, or social media engagement, we want to respond as quickly as possible, and eventually, it becomes an obsession.
The truth is, we really don’t need to always reply quickly; in fact, we should prioritize first and then respond after more important tasks are taken care of.
If you feel a strong urge to reply ASAP, think about why you feel that need. Are you putting what you want to do ahead of what you NEED to do? It’s a mistake.
You must learn to set priorities, for personal happiness and for professional success. This often means deferring what you’d like to do in favor of what needs to be done to create the life you want to live.
Determine High Priority Tasks
Remember what Stephen Pressfield said, “important” and “urgent” are two different things.
Your true priorities are those things that are most important, not necessarily those that are the most urgent. “Urgent + important” priorities are where you must first focus your attention. Then move on to your important priorities. As for “not important” priorities; well, those aren’t priorities at all!
For professional success, you have clients to attend to via texts and emails, etc. and work that pays the bills, and most times, those are top your top priorities. Some things have to be done today, and others can wait; that’s the difference between urgent and important priorities.
For professional success, attend to your important professional priorities. For personal happiness, attend to your important personal priorities.
Make make time to do things you love to do, such as writing that book you have always dreamed about, taking that interior design course you’ve wanted to take, or going on a trip with the family. Those goals are fundamental because if they’re not attended to, they can get lost in the “false priorities” pile and will never happen, which you could very much regret.
Will Doing This Help Me Reach My Professional or Personal Goals?
A great question to ask yourself when prioritizing, is, “Will this help me reach my dreams and goals?” If something is REALLY important to you, it should fit into your goals and aspirations and have some meaning,.
Stop doing things just for attention or to please others; it’s a waste of your time and focus. Make sure to always ask yourself the question, “Will this help me reach my goals” when deciding what’s truly important.
Create a To-Do List
Every day and every week, BEFORE you start any work or tasks, make an effort to label your to-do-list and priorities by categorizing what’s urgent and important, what is important and what can wait until later.
Highlight what’s most important in the color “Red,” what’s important in the color “Orange” and what can wait until later “Grey,” for example. You’ll be able to see where things belong, and it will be easier to do the crucial tasks first.
Make a Commitment
Once you’ve determined and marked down which tasks are in which categories, it’s time to DO them! Set a daily alarm that tells you which top priority tasks to do first and then do them! This way, you’ll never forget to do the jobs you thought weren’t as important.
Unless it’s an emergency or life or death, obviously that is the HIGHEST priority and focused on first, always. But, if it isn’t, focus on your top priority tasks first and then get the other ones done when you have more time. Train yourself to ignore the less important tasks until it’s time to tackle them.
Prioritize Your Business Tasks to See Growth
There are so many things we need to do in our day, but once we prioritize what’s really important and genuinely needs to get done, we will be happier in life and succeed more in our career. Also, we will drive ourselves a little less crazy!
Share in the comments below: What is ONE way you can change how you prioritize your task-list?
About the Author ...
Kelli Gibbs is a best-selling author, certified life coach, and inspirational speaker. Born and raised in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, she graduated from Herzing University with a B.S in Healthcare Management, before going on to become the founder of Channel U LLC.
She is the author of No Wrong Way To Be A Woman, a self-help, and part motivational book which aims to inspire women throughout the world to achieve their own goals and realize their dreams.
In her free time, she likes traveling and generally spending time with her family and loving life.
To connect with Kelli, please visit her website at kelligibbs.com or follow her on Facebook at Channel U LLC.
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