Your Singular Priority

We all desire more time to do the things that matter most to us. It seems impossible to carve out time to get after those goals. Work, family commitments, housework and social events seem to take up every waking hour. It leaves very little time for us to dedicate to our personal development.

The trick is finding time for the activities you find meaningful and it’s all about maximizing our efficiency both at work and outside of work. If we can do that, we would be amazed to discover how much you can fit in an average day!

Most of us divide time into separate parts. There’s the time we devote to do the things we want to do — mostly work. After that’s done, we get to enjoy our “free time”, or that’s how the thinking goes.

The point is that the very concept of “free time” is false.

In reality, we’re already free to do whatever we want with our time. What we have are the hours of the day when we’re not sleeping. If we want to start getting the most out of our time, we should be thinking about all our waking hours.

One of the key points about time management is learning to prioritize and beat procrastination.

Prioritizing is not easy. Often there is an overwhelming of possibilities or that long to-do list we carry around in our head, and there are distractions at every turn. The more we attempt to get done, the easier it is to not do anything.

The human brain is not good at multitasking. It works best when we prioritize just one task.

Procrastination is closely related to poor prioritization.

Our brains aren’t really equipped to deal with multiple tasks at the same time. If we ask it to focus on several commitments, it will end up losing the focus entirely. The best the brain can do is rapidly switch from one task to the next. However, this solution can lead to tiredness and distraction. You probably know this from the last time you tried to do it.

Your best bet to try to get something important done is to tune out all distractions; what you need is concentration. This way, you’ll have a good few hours to focus on nothing but the task at hand.

We often talk about our priorities in the plural. After the 1900’s people stopped talking about “their priority” in the singular.

Setting one priority for the day ahead helps us focus on our most important commitments.

Getting down to the important things is all about making them our priority — singular. So take another look at that to-do list and ask yourself if it’s possible to edit it. You may just have a clearer sense of the task you need to start focusing on right now!