Does your day reflect your priority?

Totally realistic, just like all of my grand plans.

Ever since I read the book The ONE Thing by Gary Keller, I’ve been haunted by his assertion that the idea of “priorities” is a distortion of the word “priority.”

The nature of a priority is that you can only have one.

That sounds really nice in theory, but today I have to write a blog post, attend four meetings, get my car registered, water the plants in my garden, make a dump run, and…well, that’s all I’ve got in my short-term memory. Oh yeah, I also have daily routines like checking in with my clients, updating my financial records, and so on.

That’s a full day, and I didn’t even include my supposed “priority.” I can get away with this because nobody else will notice if I don’t do it. For awhile, I might not even notice—it will take weeks or months or even years for it to become a problem.

At first glance, there’s no room for my priority. But I might be able to squeeze it in. If I want to get all this other stuff done, too, careful scheduling is a necessity. I don’t have room to be spontaneous. I have to plan ahead to make sure that everything fits.

On the other hand, there might really be no room in my schedule. If I acknowledge what I really want my priority to be, I am probably going to have to give something else to make room.

That’s where there are some tough choices to be made. These choices can cause us to question our very identity and values. They can challenge our place in the community or the world. They might require us to compromise in ways that make us uncomfortable. They might force us to acknowledge that our priority never was our priority in the first place.

For example, raising a child is a full-time job. It’s basically impossible to work a full-time job on top of that. Therefore, if both of a child’s parents are working full time, they are essentially outsourcing the raising of the child to a third party. It becomes someone else’s full-time job. If your priority is your children, working full time might not be in alignment with that.

Another example: I said a year ago that I wanted to start a YouTube channel. I have not published a single YouTube video in that time. When I thought all the way through it, I realized that it would take at least seven hours to plan, shoot, and edit each video. I ultimately decided that I wasn’t willing to invest that seven hours a week, at least not right now. Other activities are taking precedence. A YouTube channel is clearly not my priority, even though I thought I wanted it to be.

I planted a vegetable garden without thinking much about what the long-term commitment would be. Well, it hasn’t rained much in Maine this spring. That’s a lot of time standing out there with a hose in my hand. Had I really considered what I would be giving up in order to do that? No. And that’s okay, but it’s worth acknowledging.

Periodically, I have to evaluate my existence and determine whether it lines up with my priority. If my day doesn’t reflect my priority, I have to make a change. I might schedule time first thing each morning to work on whatever the scary thing is that will help me move forward with my most important project. I might cut out something that is draining my energy and preventing clarity (or maybe it’s just taking up too much time).

Alternatively, I might change my mind about what my priority actually is. As difficult as it may be, I might have to let go of something I thought I wanted in order to make room for what I truly want. There’s no wrong answer here, only the responsibility to be true to myself. That, in a way, is my real priority.

Does your day reflect your priority? Are you clear on what it is in the first place? How might you change your life in order to strengthen the relationship between what you want most and how you spend your time?