The Next Most Important Thing

Often I feel overwhelmed by the list of things I want to get done.

But I’m just like most of us ambitious people who have more ideas than I’ll ever be able to action.

I need to remember this will always be the case, and realise this means that; I’ll never get to the bottom of the list. (Just thinking about that makes me wince!)

This shocking revelation highlights the importance of prioritising my (our) tasks and projects and just focusing on the highest priorities.

And that, is actually the hard part… proactively deciding what is most important. It might only take a few minutes to do this prioritisation, but it sure does hurt your head! (Most of us don’t want to accept that we won’t get those other things done.)

Then, the discipline is to actually work on the highest priority task until it’s done (or you’re waiting on others), before moving onto other things.

Usually our mind will fight us tooth and nail to get us to avoid this thing. Steven Pressfield calls this force “the resistance” and describes it in depth in his book, “Do The Work”. The thing is, there’s usually something difficult about that top priority task on our list. Maybe we don’t know what approach to take, it involves something we don’t like doing, or it’s so big we don’t know where to start. But having the discipline to do that thing is where the most progress happens.

So today, I’m reminding myself to;

• Accept that the do-to list will never be done,
• Deliberately decide what is most important, and
• Keep choosing to work on the next most important thing.

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