Prioritize What Matters in Your Life

We are all overwhelmed by demands from everyday life, whether it’s from others or from things we establish for ourselves. Constantly moving from one thing to another makes it difficult to make sense of what should be a priority in your life.

So, how can you break out of the daily grind and determine what really matters? It’s not going to happen overnight, but these ideas can help you start down a path toward mental clarity.

Take an Inventory

A great first step toward setting priorities is understanding what you do on a daily basis. Write down everything you do each day for an entire week — everything from eating breakfast, to going to the gym, to answering an email. It will seem tedious at first, but you’ll quickly get the hang of it and the data you receive is invaluable.

Once you have that picture, ask yourself what you should be doing more, what you should be doing less, and what’s missing entirely. The answers to these questions will help you set your personal priorities and come up with a plan for achieving them.

Reduce Distractions

Our brains are programmed to respond to sensory cues that we receive and, for better or worse, those cues come to us through our smartphones all day long.

Whenever you feel that buzz in our pockets or see something light up on the screen, do you drop what you are doing and look at it? If you are like most of us, the answer is yes. You can’t focus on the big picture when you are constantly distracted by small interruptions.

Change that behavior by disabling as many notifications on your phone as you can, or even turning it off completely if you are able to. This will eliminate many of the distractions that are coming in and allow you to focus on larger priorities, or take the time to determine what those priorities should be.