The Truth About "Managing Priorities"
Or, in true Halloween season style, it's time to write your obituary
When I asked my Instagram followers what they wanted a newsletter on this week, managing priorities came out as a big topic. When we only have limited time and attention, how do we decide where to put our energy? This is something that I, a woman who finds saying no incredibly difficult and never wants to feel like she’s missed out on anything, find hard. And yet, in the past few years I’ve had to learn a lot about it. So I want to use this newsletter to share with you what I’ve learned but I also want to tell you, you’re not going to like any of it. Consider yourself warned.
Early on in my coach training, we were taken through a visualisation set around the idea of our 100th birthday. We had to imagine we’d reached a full century of life and were celebrating it by gathering together everyone whose life we’d ever influenced for one giant party. We’d sit in the middle of the party (because I guess at 80, dancing on tables is ruled out) and listen to the conversation going on around us - what did people remember us for? How had we impacted them?
A version of this exercise that I often give to clients is, write your obituary. Morbid, yes, but it’s always fascinating to see what the results are. Often people return with a piece of writing that in no way reflects their current life. Perhaps they work 80 hours a week but have written about how much they enjoyed holidays with their families, or they’ve talked of the amazing invention that has changed the world but in reality they’re stuck procrastinating over ideas rather than doing them. Sometimes a client brings in a “jokey” obituary that is really just a list of their failings, and we’ll both sit in silence as I let it sink in that unless something changes this won’t be a joke.
Whatever comes back though, one thing is always true - when we get to the end of our life, we really understand what we mean by the word priority. Your priorities are the things that when you look back at your life, you’re proud to have put them first. Anything else is just another note on the to-do list.
The last three years have been a crash-course in priorities for me. First there was Covid and the sudden collapse of my working life at the exact moment I was starting a new relationship. In a bizarre way, lockdown allowed me to indulge a change of priorities in a way that we don’t often get to. Rather than worry that I was too busy being in love to concentrate on work, I got to hunker down with my then-partner as per order of the government and just enjoy it. And when work started to come back to me, I was far enough down in my savings to know that now was the time to focus on that instead. There’s nothing like a crisis to force a priority.
Speaking of which, in November 2020 my body forced its own crisis when I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. Suddenly my previous attitude to life - cramming as much in as possible and only stopping when I got ill - was thrown out and I had to find a new way of being. I simply didn’t have the energy to take on everything, I couldn’t say “yes” to every offer and idea because my body wouldn’t let me. It made me wake up to how I’d been living my life up until that point - a person who said yes to everything but never really committed to anything.
And this is the one thing I’ve noticed about anyone who struggles with priorities, it’s not that you don’t know what to do, it’s that you want to do everything and you just can’t.
When I do speaking events (my favourite thing, by the way so if you’re ever looking for a speaker for an event, let me know), someone always asks about how to find a work-life balance, particularly when you have children. And I always tell them about a very big-name woman I interviewed many years ago who sat her children down at the beginning of the school year and asked them, “what can I not miss?” They’d work through the schedule of after-school activities, sporting events, plays etc and together they’d pick out the things they knew they wanted her there for. Those events were a priority, they were unmissable. She had missed meetings with world leaders for those events. She had driven through the night to make sure she was there. And she had also missed a lot of smaller things because on those occasions, work had been her priority.
She taught me the first rule of priorities:
You don’t have priorities, you have choices and consequences.
Very often the thing that makes deciding on your priorities hard is that they’re in competition with each other. Do I plonk my kids in front of the telly so I can get on with some work on my day off and deal with the subsequent mum-guilt at a later date, or do I set my out of office and just accept that I’m going to come back to a manic inbox? Do I go to that lecture I really want to attend or do I cancel it so I can have dinner with a friend who’s going through a hard time? Do I take time off my career to travel now or do I push as far as I can while I’ve got the energy and travel later?
The thing about all these questions is that there isn’t really a right answer, there’s just a choice. All you can do is a make a decision and then live with the consequences. The key, however, is not to catastrophise those consequences when they happen. Every decision you make will have consequences, some of those will be good and some will be bad. (And I say this as someone currently looking at a £50k bill based on a recent choice which hasn’t worked out so well.) You are not going to be able to have a perfect run of positive consequences, so part of being able to prioritise is knowing to learn from mistakes and move on when it goes wrong. (And also knowing to celebrate when it goes right).
When I tell this story at talks, I’ll see some people nodding but most look a bit confused / pissed off. How are they supposed to know what really matters to their kids? What if their kids change their minds? Or as a family, they pick the wrong event? What if they’re not there the one time something goes wrong and their child really needs them?
This attitude is often applied to work too. One of my favourite games to play with coaching clients is to ask them to write down everything they do at work and then simply stop doing a third of it. Draw a line through a third of your to-do list and just… don’t do it. For most people this is impossible. Not because they want to do everything on the list but because they don’t want to cross off “the wrong thing”. Which brings me to the second thing I know about priorities.
Sometimes, you’re going to back the wrong horse.
You’re going to say no to a party that everyone will be talking about for years after. You’ll focus on getting your book proposal out to an agent rather than marketing the paid work you do and then spend weeks sitting around anxiously watching your bank balance tick down. You’ll go on a date with the man who makes you laugh on a dating app, rather than spend time working on yourself, only to be ghosted. And, if the experience of my friends with children is anything to go by, you’ll try and make it to every school production only to have your children tell you they hate you because you were five minutes early to pick them up from a friend’s house.
If you’re going to start actually managing your priorities, you have to accept you’re going to get things wrong. And that’s where my final point comes in:
Guilt is the enemy of priority management, and self-compassion is its champion.
If we accept that we don’t have priorities, but just choices and consequences, and if we accept that sometimes we’ll get those choices wrong, then it follows that we also need to know how to manage ourselves when the shit hits the fan. Typically we put off prioritising one thing over another because we fear a sense of guilt will come from our choice. Perhaps we’ll have to let someone down or we won’t be able to do every single thing we think we ought to do. Sometimes this guilt really unhelpfully deepens into shame - we think our priorities make us a bad person. I see this most often when I ask people about how they prioritise themselves, they don’t. They think carving out time for themselves or putting themselves in front of someone else makes them selfish. As though that one priority, out of all the others, is the one that determines who they really are as a person.
When we treat our choices with self-compassion, we allow for that space to sometimes get things wrong. We put in buffers to help us, we reach out to friends for support and we acknowledge our own weaknesses. All of which makes us much more human and fundamentally allows us to be kinder to ourselves and others. You might prioritise the wrong thing and that might have consequences. All you can do in that situation is learn from it, forgive yourself and try again.
No single choice you make will ever define who you are. Not making decisions about your priorities, however, will come to define you.
It will define you as someone who is constantly stressed, someone who is unavailable to the people they love because as much as they try to be available they’re always worrying about something else, someone who tries everything and commits to nothing. It will define you as a chronic people pleaser or a highly anxious procrastinator. It will stop you making deeper connections with the people you love and have you looking back at your life wondering where all your time, energy and money went. It will paralyse you and move you in a direction you don’t want to go at the same time.
To counteract all of this, to create a life you love, you don’t have to manage your priorities at all. You just have to choose them.
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I had a brief encounter with life-coaches, years ago, and I am disappointed nobody brought up the obituary exercise.