What fills your day?
Time is one thing in life that will always remain constant. You can acquire more knowledge or more money, or you can save today’s money and use it tomorrow. But you only get 24 hours a day, and you can’t carry them over to tomorrow.
Most people would agree that there are not enough hours in a day. There are plenty of things I would like to do, books I want to read, projects that I want to work on, that I just don’t have the time to do. The challenge is figuring out how to make sure that you’re spending your time on the things that are important to you.
Know your priorities
If you don’t know what your priorities are, you won’t know how to prioritize your life. That sounds obvious, but it’s really hard to actually do. Many people don’t really know what their priorities are, let alone how to execute on them.
Do what’s important first
Something or someone will fill your day if you won’t. Personally, I hate the days where I feel like I didn’t get anything done that I wanted to get done because I was constantly reacting to things that came my way. Sometimes this is inevitable, but you can control it. For example, I expect that I should have at least half of my day available to do work (i.e. not stuck on meetings), so when a day is half full, I block out the rest of it so that no one can schedule me for a meeting. I do that because I need that time to accomplish what I feel is important and what people are expecting me to accomplish.
Live out your priorities
People are a priority to me, so if someone wants to go to lunch, I may or may not have time for that, but I usually go anyway and then find a way to everything else in around it. I have other friends who will go out of their way to make time to eat lunch when they’re really busy. That shows me something – that I’m valuable enough to be made a priority in their life. I love that.
My team is also a priority for me. This goes back to shunning meetings. I feel that in my current role, it’s more important for me to be with my team than to sit in a meeting with people from another team, so I block off my schedule and try to get out of meetings if I don’t feel that it’s valuable for me or the meeting organizer. (Sometimes people like to schedule 30 minute meetings for things that could be solved with a 10 minute hallway conversation.)
Own your life
I want to control my life and time as much as I can. I don’t want my life to control me because then I’m not able to do the things that I feel are important. The more proactive I am, the more likely I am to succeed at this.