I’m a project manager in real life and find myself structuring my life based on what I’ve learned working as a project manager. One of the keys to achieving goals is to set priorities. “There’s not enough hours in a day”, is a cliché for a reason. Most people don’t take the time to sit down and write down their priorities for there personal life. As my regular readers know, I’m a big fan of creating lists. Setting priorities is as simple as putting the items on this list into an order of importance. What’s not simple is the reality that many of these items influence others on the list. Here are some tips to help get you started:
- Write your list down. The first step doesn’t require any thinking beyond dumping your brain onto paper (or computer). List every broad category you think plays a role in your life and don’t worry about the order or ranking yet. My broad categories are family, work, exercise, investing and blogging.
- Rank the broad categories. Do the best you can without giving it too much deep thought. At this point you are only just beginning to organize your thoughts and don’t want to get overwhelmed and stop the process.
- Create sub-categories. Starting at with the top ranked broad category, do another brain dump of what might fit into each category. Again, don’t worry about the order yet, just be sure to list every part of each category you can think of.
- Rank the sub-categories. Now that all of the broad categories have the pieces that make them complete listed they need to be ranked.
- Find the dependencies. Steps 1-4 look so simple, but once you start putting all the pieces together you find a lot of what you do overlaps with other categories. I personally rank my immediate family at the top followed by exercise, investing, work and blogging. The issue is that to best satisfy my top ranking of family I need to work and invest to contribute money and exercise to maintain my health and sanity. Blogging helps with all of the above, but to a much lesser degree. This is why you have to step back and really rank the sub-categories in between other broader categories. To assume one full broad category will all come together as a whole is naive and will lead to straying from your plan.
- Finalize the order of the plan. Finalize might be too strong of a word because when first doing this you’ll see that what you thought was a priority now might not be later and you’ll have to review your plan and reorganize. That’s fine. Don’t think you’ve failed, just adjust and start over.
- Don’t underestimate bad habits. A friend of mine is overweight and used to be in debt. We sat down together and prioritized a plan to get her out of debt. She stuck with the plan and now only owes money on her house and car. She has no credit card debt for the first time in more than 10 years. This is completely due to prioritizing debt reduction at the top of her list. She found she has a problem with her heart due to her obesity and we made a plan for her to exercise and eat better. She stuck with it for no more than two weeks because she refuses to prioritize her health. Her life is filled with bad habits relating to her health and until she decides to stick with the plan as she did with her debt she will not see a change in her weight and overall health. When building your plan consider if you are willing to give up bad habits.
- Review your progress. Reassessing your plan and progress is a key to continuing to improve your chances of achieving your goals and making your life easier. Soon you will realize there are enough hours in the day to be happy.
While this is fresh in your mind, I suggest taking the time to write your own list of priorities and start working towards your goals in an organized manner.
Technorati Tags: investing, stocks, priorities