Sometimes setting priorities is easy. You have fixed deadlines for projects, and the logical order of the work is based on necessary dates of completion. Other tasks have to be completed in a particular order, or build upon steps that need to be achieved first.
Other times, you’re faced with tougher decisions as to what projects or next steps to tackle first, and what to defer. This is a good time to sit back and think about what your motivation for each project is, why it’s important to you, and how that influences where it should fall into your list of priorities. If you know why you’re doing the things you do, it’s easier to prioritize them.
As a general rule, my personal hierarchy of priorities is as follows:
- Things required for survival
- Commitments to others
- Things I want for myself
Your buckets may vary. You don’t have you use mine, and you don’t have to have only three. Figure out what works best for you.
For example, I write for three reasons: to make money, to communicate with other people (including educating and entertaining them), and for the fun of it. The first one is purely survival; I have bills to pay. I may be burning and yearning to work on an unsold short story, or some fun game material for my group, but I can’t take care of others or pursue my wants if I’m not first meeting my needs.
Those three buckets have a lot of wiggle room in how they can be defined. School work is survival; I not only have deadlines and scheduled class time, I have to prioritize enough time to do quality work as it affects my grades, which in turn affects my financial aid. Likewise, not everything in my outreach and advocacy work falls into the “commitment to others” bucket; my ability to continue doing these works relies on my dependability and level of dedication, so there is a sort of “survival” element there as well.
Obviously the adage that all work and no play makes Berin a dull boy factors in here. I can’t work all the time (assuming there was always enough work to keep me occupied), any more than I could sit around reading books, playing games, or watching TV all the time. Balance is everything. You have to make room for some of each, or you will end up miserable. You can’t always focus on the practical, you can’t always live for other people, and you can’t always live only for yourself, but you can’t not have some degree of all of those things.
Therein lies to the key to using motivations to set priorities. It’s not just about what to do first; it’s about finding the right ratios of projects and tasks to keep your sanity, maintain your energy and enthusiasm, keep you relaxed and refreshed, and prevent you from burning out either on one thing or entirely.
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time! Eat the Elephant is an irregular column on productivity and project management. You can read more articles in the series here, or subscribe to the RSS feed for the series here.
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