Why people can’t prioritise effectively—Courage

Despite the fact that there are many books, blog posts and resources available about prioritisation, many people continue to get it so wrong.

Whether you evaluate your priorities as Urgent vs Important or Impact vs Effort or use a scoring model—there is typically one element missing: courage.

So what do we do?

The world we live in is full of distractions. Every device we own is vying for our attention, we get invited to meetings we may not need to attend and we receive emails that we most likely don’t need to read.

We try to do it all. We pretend we’re prioritising. We spend our time trying to please others while holding on to our belief that we’re being effective. We create to-do lists that keep rolling over to the next day and when we cross off a bunch of items on that list we think we’ve been successful.

The reality is, you haven’t.

The most common answer I’ve heard for having not done something, or succeeded is time. You had time, but at some point—consciously or unconsciously—you decided to prioritise something else. We say things to ourselves like:

I won’t start that now as it’s too hard, but I can do these two things in 30 mins instead.

Doing the right thing

Time management is not just about getting more done, it’s about getting the right things done and ignoring everything else.

It takes courage to put your ideas out there, courage to say no, courage to ignore everything else in the world you deem less important and courage to stay focused until it’s done.

How do you prioritise?

Be honest with yourself, do you choose to only spend time on the most important things?

Do you have the courage to make the difficult decisions about priorities and stay focused until it is done?

It’s not the prioritisation framework that’s the problem, it’s you!