Prioritization or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love My Life

Coming into Spring, the buzz around here was all about his/my/our plethora of activities and interests and a bit of stress over it all: How will we find time to do all these things? How do we decide what is important? Should we make a schedule of hobbies? Do we have the luxury of sometimes doing nothing?

Immediately, the idea of scheduling all our free time was chucked out the window. I place value on having down time, and the notion of that being a luxury is laughable in my world. No one ever has enough time to do ALL the things he or she likes to do or is interested in. Given those three absolutes, all that remained was how to loosely prioritize hobbies and interests.

Having recently started working full time after not working at all for three months, I had no sense of prioritization or time management, so this was all OH SO VERY important to me. I was running around like crazy thinking I could do everything I was doing, plus more, plus work 40 hours and still enjoy it all. I'm pretty sure that many people do this with varying degrees of success for many years, but that's not my style.

I imagined prioritization being something like a long list and flowchart of all my interests and hobbies that I would rank like sports teams by a complex set of rules and criteria. (Seriously.) Prioritization started to become a new hobby, and I hadn't even done anything with it yet!

In researching different prioritization techniques - for this blog post, I swear! - I came across a website offering tips for businesses about prioritizing projects. The very first criterion offered was Strategic Value: Is it important to our organization's overall strategies?

A lightbulb went off.

I still have the same exhaustive list of hobbies and interests and always will - but more important than that, I now have a growing idea of what our organization's overall strategies are. Simply put, I started thinking about what general things are important to me and which things on that daunting list contribute most to my core values. Having my "schedule" flow naturally from my soul seems to have freed up a lot of time that I suspect I was wasting on overthinking it all.

What is most valuable to you?