Recently, I heard a leader talking about the importance of prioritisation. With everyone I speak to having way more on their plate than they can possibly deal with right now, this really made me think. Here’s why.
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This leader’s perspective of prioritisation related to the goal they keep in mind every day. This goal is to keep their life balance right and make sure that family, friends and hobbies stay as a priority. Even though they love their job, work has the right focus in their lives. They are no less committed or dedicated to doing a great job but there is a clear balance.
As a result, they make sure that they’re crystal clear on the reasons why and how they do what they do to meet this goal. It serves as a compass that guides what they do and importantly, the decisions they make.
When we hold a goal like this, it can reverberate through our whole day and especially when things are constantly shifting. It makes us ask ourselves questions like, “is this my responsibility to deliver this or does it really belong to someone else?” or, “am I really needed in this meeting?” and ideally, “is this meeting really needed at all?”.
Having clear goals, like this leader has, helps us consider where our time is best spent on those issues where we’ll make the biggest difference, so we get better at delegating.
And, with this focus we get better at understanding what important tasks really look like and how much time we need to dedicate to them, so they don’t become urgent, firefighting activities. And we get better at spotting what urgent really looks like.
Having our goal front of mind can also help us set boundaries and keep them in place. Recognising what’s someone else’s urgent rather than yours and diplomatically declining to get drawn into it can be very useful in this situation.
It means that we spend quality time with our team, helping them to stay on track and supporting them with the priorities that they need to deliver.
And it stops us procrastinating on tasks; we can see where they fit and we know what needs to be done – and we get on with it.
None of this is easy. It takes practice to recognise what we can say no to or being clear on what’s urgent or important. It can take courage to make decisions on what our priorities are and not feel that we need to explain why we’ve made them.
It can feel brave to be different to others and to be prepared to have challenging conversations and make difficult decisions if you recognise that your employer doesn’t agree with this approach. But with time, experience and support, we can get better at it.
We will always be blind-sided by ‘stuff’ that comes from left-field so prioritisation is an ever-spinning plate, continuously keeping us on our toes. We’re constantly learning.
But when we have a clear goal in mind about how we want to live our lives, we are more likely to keep focused on what really matters to us. And, in the long-term, it means that organisations will benefit too as they’ll have employees focused on and in the right things and very likely, experiencing less stress.
So, none of us will need to compromise our wellbeing.
If you’d like to explore about how you could improve your balance I’d love to chat…