Clarify Your Priorities

Managing one’s time and effort to achieve Sustainable Ambition can be the biggest challenge and often needs to become an ongoing practice.

And determining one’s priorities is critical to this task and to focusing your attention. But, how does one even determine a true, essential priority?

Here’s a place to start:

  • First, if you haven’t yet, get clarity on your purpose and your values (find an exercise in our Mid-Career Itch Toolkit). These provide a foundation for guiding your prioritization decisions. Know how and where you want to be impacting your work and life, what’s important to you, and what you want to commit to.

  • Next, be clear on what you are looking to achieve. What is your vision for this year? What do you want to manifest in your personal and professional life within 1, 3, or 5 years? Pick the time horizon that feels appropriate to you and for your planning. (If interested, read more here on creating a Decade by Decade Horizon Map.)

  • Based on the above as framing, as Jenny Blake recommends, do a mind map of activities that truly matter and will make a difference in helping you reach your personal picture of success within the year. Consider these vectors: Career, Family & Friends, Relationships (e.g., Partner, Significant Other), Health, Fun & Recreation, Money, Personal Growth, and Physical Environment. Take what you’ve brainstormed and prioritize them within each bucket asking, “If I focused here vs. this other activity, would it make a more significant impact (positive or negative) towards my vision or goals?” Put the activities in order based on the level of positive impact (or avoidance of downside risk) each will have. Also select actions that you are willing to cut from your list in this review. Then, put those aside for now.

  • Shift gears and do an analysis of the hours you have in a week, that’s 168 hours. Start by subtracting the number of hours you plan to sleep. Then, determine how many hours you have available on a workday and on a weekend to dedicate to activities. Against each type of day, plan out the remaining hours you want to allocate to Career, Family & Friends, Relationships (e.g., Partner, Significant Other), Health, Fun & Recreation, Money, Personal Growth, and your Physical Environment. Also calculate the percent of time you will put against each on the type of day, weekday and weekend. Finish by doing a gut check—do you feel your allocation of hours is in alignment with your vision, purpose, and values?

  • Now, go back to your vision for the year. Think about what you might want to achieve over the next four quarters. Then, look back at your Mind Map and the ordered activities. Given what you want to achieve by quarter, how might you plan out your activities across the different buckets (i.e., Career, Family & Friends, and so on)? Broadly you can start to create a time map for the year that will help you achieve your overall vision. Consider, are you clear on where you are focusing your time and effort across the different periods of time? Do you have a period where you might need to lean into one area and lean out of another? It’s hard to be at 100 percent committed in all areas of your life at all times. So be clear on what choices you will make to focus your time and effort.

  • Then, pull back out your hours analysis. Now it’s time to get realistic. Based on how you want to allocate your hours, what will you keep on your priority list for each quarter and what might you cross off in this second review? What might you delay? Really challenge yourself to focus and be ruthless with what you keep on your list. According to Charlie Gilkey, author of “Start Finishing: How to Go from Idea to Done,” it’s best if you focus on no more than five projects at a time and complete those before moving on to others. When reviewing, challenge yourself to identify at least one activity you will make a choice to prioritize and say Yes to and at least one you will deprioritize and say No to.

  • Do a final review using these prompts to further hone your priority list by quarter, focusing in on the closest in quarter:

    • From “The One Thing” by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan: “What is the ONE thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?” What’s the one thing that will have the most impact? What’s the worst that can happen if you cross something off your list?

    • From “Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less,” by Greg McKeown: Ask, “Which problem do I want to solve?”

    • From “15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management- The Productivity Habits of 7 Billionaires, 13 Olympic Athletes, 29 Straight-A Students, and 239 Entrepreneurs” by Kevin Kruse: “Delegate most tasks.” What can you get off your plate? What should you let your team members own? What are the activities only you can do?

  • An additional tip to keep you focused on your priorities, visualize them using whatever tool works best for you. It could be a project management tool like Asana, Trello, or Notion. It could be simply creating a document you post in front of you on your desk. Or, it could be a note on your phone you review daily. The point, to keep your priorities clear, get them visually in front of you every day.

  • For added reinforcement, communicate your priorities and values to those who have a stake in them. In doing so, it deepens your commitment, while also managing expectations. Let relevant work associates, family, and friends know your priorities. It will help them better understand why you are allocating your time in certain ways, avoiding disappointment or frustration, and they can also hold you accountable to your own stated desires around what you want to prioritize.

Now remember, setting priorities is not a one and done exercise.

Beyond daily, weekly, monthly prioritization of tasks, you’ll want to revisit your broader prioritization review at least every quarter and annually. Creating balance between work and life is not something you achieve and leave on autopilot. Consider if you were to walk on a tightrope; as you walk from one end to the other, you’ll make constant adjustments to keep yourself in balance and not fall off. That’s the reality we need to accept about work-life integration. It’s something we need to constantly re-evaluate and make adjustments, as needed, along the way. Consider in addition to doing a broad re-prioritization review:

  • Periodically conduct a time audit and track where you are putting your time. Evaluate if you are putting your hours against the priorities you intended. There are some CEO’s who have their assistants code their time and do such an analysis quarterly to ensure they are putting time against their allotted priorities. You can do the same using a time tracking app.

  • In your reevaluation, let it be okay to shift priorities, give yourself more time, or drop things. Ask yourself: what can I renegotiate—with myself, my work, my partner, my children, my friends, my family?

If you want to go deeper, here are a few resources or books to consider:

Determining priorities is hard work.

For ambitious individuals and those who want to have a rich professional and personal life, it’s not easy to say no to people, projects, commitments, or activities. Yet, it’s critical. To get what you want in life, you need to prioritize. You need to focus. You need to pace yourself and know your essential priorities in the current moment.

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Sustainable Ambition™ is about crafting a fulfilling career to support your life from decade to decade.

It is centered around articulating your personal definition of success and achieving that without burnout while honoring your personal aspirations and ambitions as they ebb and flow over time. The end game—more fulfillment and ease in your professional and personal life, while still being ambitious.

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Right Effort, Sustainable AmbitionKathy Oneto