6 Tips to Prioritize when Everything Seems Important | Life Skills Everyone Needs to Know

Hey there, everybody, and welcome to this video on improving prioritization when everything seems important. This is part of the 52 Skills Everyone Needs series and I'm your host, Dr. Donnellice Snipes. The first thing that a lot of people need to do when they start prioritizing is dig themselves out of the hole that they're in. They've already taken on too much stuff and it's hard to figure out what, what they're dealing with because they've got so much stuff going on. What I encourage people to do is create a spreadsheet. And it can be columns, it can be four different pieces or five different pieces of paper, whatever you want to do. But in the first column or on the first sheet, you're going to just write down everything that you need to do, everything that is, quote, important. The second column or your second sheet of paper, you're going to title crisis due this week. These are things that need to be done this week and some of them will need to be done every week in order to prevent a crisis, in order to prevent something bad from happening. Included in this are going to be your activities of daily living, like doing laundry. You don't want to get to a point where you're going around sniffing stuff, trying to figure out if it's clean enough to wear for a third time. You want to make sure that you've got laundry scheduled in there. Eating, this is important. You've got to fuel your body. Sleeping, this is also important. And so many times when people start feeling overwhelmed and overburdened, sleeping is the first thing that goes, and it should be the last thing that goes. When you are well rested, your body's cleared out the adenosine, which helps you focus, it helps you concentrate, it helps you make better decisions, it improves your memory and your retention. It makes you oodles more efficient. It also improves your immune system and all kinds of other stuff. It keeps your body factory tuned up and running as well as it can. So sleep is important. And exercise. Not everybody's going to exercise every week, but there are a lot of us who have been exercising for years and we just don't feel quite right if we haven't got our gotten our workout in. Think about letting your car engine warm up or that's the best analogy I can make. Exercise helps a lot of us kind of clear out the fog and get it get started for the day because we exercise and it releases norepinephrine and dopamine. Other people exercise at the end of the day. To de stress. But it's something that needs to be in there to improve your health and well being. In this column, you're also going to include work tasks that have to be done this week, projects that have to be done this week. This is the end of the semester for me and I've got a lot of end of semester, end of term papers coming in that I need to get graded. Now, thankfully, they don't need to be done this week, they need to be done in the next two weeks. But I do have to get them done. I have a deadline and it is looming. So I need to make sure that I recognize that that exists. It's a hard deadline. And also included in column B are promises that you made to friends and family. And you may be thinking, well, that's not really a crisis. It can be. If you make promises and then you keep bailing on them, people are going to quit trusting you. It's going to cause, you know, friction in relationships. So it's important. If you promise that you are going to go to your kid's recital, if you promise that going to go to your brother's wedding, that you schedule that in, that is in column B, crisis. It is a commitment I made that I am going to stick to. Column C or your third sheet of paper. These are things that have to be done within the next two weeks or there's going to be a crisis. So these are things that you don't necessarily have to do this week. You can if you've got the time, but they do need to be done within the next two weeks. Column D or your fourth sheet of paper are things that have to be done this month, like paying bills or in April, paying taxes. There are some things that have to be done within the month. They don't necessarily have to be done this week or next, but they do have to be done. And then column E, these are things that you'd like to do. If they don't get done, you know, it's not necessarily going to make you the happiest in the world, but there are going to be no significant negative repercussions. Maybe you want to go hiking or you want to go rock climbing or you want to go kayaking. Okay, now you know the things that I want to do. But if they don't get done this month, okay, maybe next month. So these are things that you get to fit in once you start getting your time prioritized a little bit better at this point, you've either got a spreadsheet with Five columns or you've got five sheets of paper and from column A, the list of everything that you need to do. You're going to pull that stuff and you're going to drop it into whichever column is appropriate. Doesn't need to be done this week, in the next two weeks, this month, or is it something that doesn't have to be done? That way you can really see what is most pressing, what is most urgent. I encourage you to keep this spreadsheet or this system going even after you dig out of all of the stuff that you've got to do, because it really helps you visualize what's going on. And for people who are not super structured, this creates sort of your to do lists. That helps you recognize, you know, do I have a lot going on or only a little bit going on? Now, I hate putting in these PSAs, but it really does help if you remember to like subscribe and share these videos. Subscribe. It really does help me a lot and I really do appreciate it. The second thing you want to do is figure out how to work smarter, not harder. If you're overwhelmed, which is probably why you're watching this video, then thinking about working harder is overwhelming. You're already working as hard as you can. You're already kind of exhausted, so you're like, I don't have any more to give. All right, well, let's figure out how to do it a little bit smarter. Shopping is one place that you can save a lot of time, which will free up time to get some of those must do's done. Use click and pull. Do your orders online, go to the store and pick it up. That saves you all the time of having to go through the store and pull stuff off the shelf, then wait in line at checkout and yada, yada, yada. So do the click and pull. It also keeps you from getting distracted by things that aren't on your list or things that you don't need, where you're like, oh, that looks interesting. I can lose a lot of time in the store if I go in there without a list especially. But even just going in there with a list, I get distracted easily. You can also have standing orders and a lot of stores will now maintain your online order and you can just reorder the whole thing again. If you typically need the same thing, bread, milk, eggs, whatever it is, then you have that standing order and you can just go in and edit it so you don't have to search and add it to your list every single time it Makes it a lot easier. Food. Now, I've said in many other videos, what you put in your body becomes the building blocks and the fuel to keep yourself going. It makes the neurotransmitters, it makes the hormones, it gives you energy. So if you eat crap, you're probably going to feel like crap. Food is important. Now. If you can afford fresh meal delivery, and that's your thing, there are a lot of places that you can subscribe. They'll deliver a box to your door that has food in it and instructions for how to put the food together to make a meal that can be a little pricey, but some people love it. Takeout, that's another thing that you can do, also can be a little pricey, but you can find healthy takeout options in the form of salads, wraps, whole wheat sandwiches, things like that. Frozen dinners are my least favorite on this list because they tend to be high in nitrates, nitrites, and highly processed foods, all of which contribute to inflammation systemically and can worsen depression and autoimmune issues and all that stuff. So frozen dinners are my least favorite. But if you need to, and you can find one that fits your dietary preferences, it might be something to have around for in a pinch. My preferred option is meal prep, and I spend a few hours one day a week, and I usually try to figure out, based on the weather, whether it's going to be Saturday or Sunday. And I make the majority of the things that I need to make ahead of time. My pasta, my rice, my beans, my lentils. I make all of those ahead of time. If I'm going to make a lentil loaf, I do that. If I'm going to make chili, I do that. That way I can divide everything up and pack my lunch ahead of time. You can also leave your, your grains and your beans and stuff in their own containers so you can mix and match as you see fit. If you want to have beans, one night, have beans and rice and another night have a bean burrito. You've got the beans and it's really easy just to quickly convert it to what you need. The beauty of it is all of the dishes that you use and when you make dinner tonight or lunch, look at how many dishes you make and how much of a mess you make every time you make a meal. Well, if you do meal prep one day a week, you're making that mess one day a week. So you save time because you don't have to clean that mess up every single night. All you have to do is get things out and put them together and then wash your cup, your plate, and your silverware. So that's a win win there. It also saves time because you don't have to spend 40 minutes waiting for the brown rice to cook. Three times a week, you've cooked it ahead of time. All you've got to do is warm it up really fast, which takes 10 minutes. Prioritize your health. An inefficient body machine is going to slow you down. Exercise, sleep, nutrition. If you don't want to put exercise in there, okay, you know, I get it. But sleep and nutrition are so important. If your body is sluggish, if you're not feeling well, it's going to be a lot harder, Take a lot more time, and you're going to be more error prone. And in everything that you do, recognize diminishing returns. I used to go over this a lot with my children. When you do something, when you start to the point that you get it pretty well done, think about learning something from the time you start learning it until you get to the point where you can get an A on a test. You know, there's a pretty steep learning curve there. But once you get to the point where you can get an A on the test, getting from scoring a 92 to scoring a 99 takes almost as much effort. So your learning curve or your returns really levels off. Instead of going up at like a 45 degree angle and it goes up and then it almost levels off. So you have to put in a lot more energy to get it from being very good to being excellent. Is it worth it? Is it whatever you're doing, is it worth it to get it excellent? And this can be in small things too. Like when I'm folding laundry, I start folding shirts and I fold over the the sleeves. They're not always going to be perfectly flat, but if it's a workout shirt and it's not perfectly pressed, big deal. I don't worry about getting everything perfectly folded every time. With work assignments, you can get a proposal that your boss wants and you can get it to where you're proud to hand it in. I'm not saying half ass it. Get it to the point where you're proud to hand it in, but at a certain point, you need to call it and go, are there little tweaks that I could make to make it just a little bit better? Well, maybe, but is it going to make any real difference in the long run? Those diminishing returns are huge. Time sucks. Hire others. When Financially feasible. There's a lot of stuff that there are other people that are capable of doing. You can hire handymen, you can hire lawn services. Now you may not be able to financially do it, which is why I say if financially feasible, it's important to consider whether it is beneficial for you to spend your time doing something else or doing that. Is it more cost cost beneficial for me to spend an hour at work or for me to spend an hour trying to figure out how install an ice machine. And I can tell you an hour at work is definitely more cost beneficial and stress beneficial. Synergize. You may have friends that can help you out, and you help them out. You use your skills to help them out. They'll help you out. Or maybe they want to go to a festival this weekend and you'd love to do it, but you've got so much to do and you're like, I would love to go with you, but if we're going to do that, I need your help getting some of these things done. Can you pick up my dry cleaning or go pick up my grocery order or whatever it is that you need to have done? Those types of synergies can be really beneficial, not only because it helps save you time so you can do something with that person. It benefits that person. They want to see you. They're probably happy to help. And they've done studies that have actually found that relationships are strengthened when you ask for help. You know, a lot of us think, well, if I do things for people, then it'll strengthen our relationship. Well, that's true, but a lot of people also like to be asked. They like to be able to help. It makes them feel needed and appreciated. So next time you're going, well, I don't really want to bother anybody. Consider maybe they'd like to help balance your budget and set up auto bill pay. It's important to have a balanced budget. You don't want to have a bill being auto paid and then end up with a negative account balance. That's really bad. However, if you're able to set it up where you know that your basic bills are getting paid every month, your electric, your water, your car insurance, whatever it is, then that will save you time from having to log in every single month and pay those manually. Now, you may still have to do some of them, like credit cards, because you may have a really bad month, one month, and have racked up some credit card bills and not be able to pay the whole thing off. So you need to be able to Log in for some of those. But if you're able to, to save enough money where you know you can pay your basic bills every month when they're due through autopay, that can save you a lot of time. Put a time tracker on your computer so you can see where you're losing time. It is really easy to get sidetracked on the computer and there are programs out there, time trackers that can show you what sites you spent the most time on. And that may not even be social media or news sites or something. I know I'll go into PubMed and I'll get sucked into PubMed reading different articles and I'll end up with literally 52 tabs open of different articles I want to read that had nothing to do with what I actually went there for. And it's really important for me to be disciplined, otherwise I lose a lot of time. And then I start feeling more overwhelmed because, because I'm like, oh, I've got all of these different presentations that I quote, need to do. Well, no I don't. Those are things I want to do, but they don't have to be done this week or next week. When I'm looking at my columns, I need to put those over into the would like to do pile. Figure out where you're spending your time. This can also help you figure out places where it's better that you just don't go during your workday. For example, delegate and I mentioned that earlier. Use that social capital to help you save time. If you've got a friend that is willing to help you out, maybe your kids go to the same school and they can pick your kids up great that way. Oh my gosh. Those lines to pick up your kids are forever long. We used to live in an area that we lived too close to the school to qualify for bus service. So we had to take our kids in and I would literally lose two or three hours a day to sitting in line waiting to pick up my child from school. Combine things, you know, once you have figured out, you know, what things can I do smarter? What things can you combine? Exercise can be accomplished while house cleaning. You can vigorously house clean. Some people wear a weighted vest when they house clean. There are things that you can do to make house cleaning more energy intensive. It's not the same as going to the gym, but you can get a good kind of low intensity cardio workout. Just really moving around and you'll feel it in your muscles the next day. Yard work, same way. And a lot of times you don't need the weighted vest for that. Dog walking. If you've got a dog, you can combine spending time with Fido and getting some exercise at the same time, maybe even doing it with a friend and their dog. Shopping, meals and exercise can all be done with friends, kids and dogs. When we are trying to manage our time, sometimes we do need to combine. We've got so much stuff on our plate, but we don't want to let these relationships dwindle. Therefore, in what way can I still spend time with my friend or my kids or my dogs and get the things done that I need to do? Phone calls can be made while driving. This is a great time to call your mom or your dad or your sister. Probably not the best time to be making work calls where you might have to pull over and write something down. But it's a great time to call and check in with people that you care about. Plan your routes to prevent unnecessary trips or mileage. We live not in the city, so getting from our house to where they're shopping takes about 25 minutes. If I had to make multiple trips into the city each week, that would be wasting almost an hour. That'd be wasting about 50 minutes in drive time. Just getting from my house to the city each way, that's a lot of time to waste each week. So I typically do all my errands on the same day, which allows me to drive into the city and then I can stop by the grocery, I can stop by Walmart, I can stop by wherever that I may need to go and you know, tractor, supply, co op, whatever. In order to save time and travel. It also saves money on gas because gas is expensive right now. Number three. So you've made your lists, you've started thinking about, okay, how can I get all these things done? Be smarter or combine things. Delegate when necessary. So now you're going to make a schedule. Go in, start out with this week. Block out time for things that repeat. Shopping. Maybe you do shopping every Saturday morning, so block that time out. Exercise. You do that every afternoon at 4pm from 4 to 5. Block that out. Laundry, sleep, house, cleaning. Block those times out. Then I encourage you, maybe you're blocking those other times out with a dark black box. I encourage you to use like a medium gray box for recreation and relaxation. Why? Well, because sometimes recreation and relaxation does need to get bumped because there is something else that's urgent that comes up. So this gives you a little bit of wiggle room. Now go back to your lists and rank your lists. In order of importance and intensity and plug it into your schedule Putting the most intensive things during your most productive hours I'm most productive between 6am and 11am I know that I'm a morning person, always have been. By the time we get around to two in the afternoon, you might as well forget it. I can do rote tasks, I can clean the house, but anything that requires mental focus? Not gonna happen. My son, on the other hand, is just the opposite. He doesn't even start kind of getting out of his haze until about 2 o'. Clock. Know when your most productive hours are and when to put which things where perceivers in terms of temperament may feel somewhat stifled by having this schedule. And I hear that and I am a judger. I'm a structured person, so I don't feel it the same way, but I know enough people who are perceivers. I get it. You only have to keep this tight of a leash on yourself until you're out of crisis mode and can accurately anticipate how much time things take and that accurate estimation is so important. Too often people either I mentioned before forget to factor in travel time or they grossly underestimate how long it's going to take to do something. So you need to really start getting a hang of how much time does this really take if I'm devoting my focus to it? Set time limits. Use timers. If you're going to make a phone call, for example, you may use a timer so you know that when 10 minutes is up, you're going to start wrapping up the conversation or however long you decide you want to talk. Alarms and push notifications to remind you to move to the next task can also be helpful. Some people will put in preemptive alarms or preparatory alarms so they know that okay, when this alarm goes off, I've got 30 minutes to wrap it up and then another alarm goes off 30 minutes later and that is your okay time to switch gears. Alarm number four this is a little bit of a Switching gears define your rich and meaningful life. You've started to plug things into your actual schedule. You've decided what is crisis that has to be done this week, has to be done by the end of next week, has to be done this, and you've started to try to figure out how to do it more efficiently. Now determine what is truly important to spend time on and this is key to figuring out and prioritizing what is truly important in life. Think about what people, things, activities and health behaviors are important for you to have a rich and meaningful life as you define it. And I've got other videos on the YouTube channel that talk about how to really go through this activity in depth. But it is important to figure out what is important to me to spend my time on. Some examples, I could work extra hours to get a promotion or I could do my job and do it well when I'm there. I'm not saying, you know, again, I'm not saying half asset, but I'm saying set some work life boundaries, do my job, do it well when it's there. Know that my inbox is always going to have something in it. Go home when work is over and spend time with my kids while they're still at home. You know, that's what I can. I need to choose between that. Am I going to forego spending time with my kids to work extra hours? Is getting that promotion more important or spending time with them? Got to make that decision. Another example, go on a date with somebody instead of going out with friends. You know, I've made plans to go out with my friends. I haven't seen them in a week or so. We were going to go out and do something, whatever it was. But then you get an opportunity to go on a date with somebody that you've wanted to go on a date with. What's more important, Spending time and nurturing your relationships with people that already are important to you or going out on a date that may or may not work out? Although it's something that you've wanted for a while, you need to make that call and only you can make that call about which is more important in the long run. Reward yourself after completing each task. Mark it off your list. I know it sounds juvenile, but it really does help. It provides a feeling of empowerment and achievement when you can look back through and you can see those things marked off your list. You're like, score. I have a white port whiteboard on the refrigerator that I do that with. I'll make a list of all the things that need to be done over the weekend. And as I get them done, I'll smudge them off of the whiteboard. So hopefully by the end of the weekend, the whiteboard is clear. Reward yourself during relaxation and recreation time. If you got everything done on your list. If you didn't get everything done, you may have to forego that. Relaxation, recreation time. Want to do time, TV time, whatever it is, video game time, in order to continue to get your stuff done. This will encourage you to stay focused during the day. You recognize that there is A carrot at the end of the stick or a light at the end of the tunnel, whatever you want to call it, and it will help you stay a little bit more focused during the day if you know that the only way you get to enjoy that thing is if you get your stuff done and get a goal buddy to keep you motivated. Now, not everybody needs to work on time management. Some people are really good at it, but almost everybody is probably working on a goal at any point in time. So the two of you can keep each other motivated to keep moving forward towards your goals. And finally learn to say no. Or at the very least, compromise. If you get asked to do something, look at your schedule. Do you have any free slots? You know, once you dig yourself out of all the stuff that you've already agreed to do, hopefully you'll start seeing some little free spots come up there where you can start plugging in more. Want to's? Do you have any free slots in there? If not, is whatever this thing is that's come up, somebody's asking you to do, is this important enough to bump something else? And again, I really discourage you from bumping sleep. But is this important enough to bump something else? If you bump this, does this particular activity help you get closer to or further away from those things that are important in your rich and meaningful life? Maybe somebody invites you to go to a concert and you've got to think to yourself, is that more important at helping me have this rich and meaningful life? It sounds really fun right now, but is it more important than what I've already got on my schedule and let go of fomo? There's always going to be another concert, another party, another this, another that. There's always going to be stuff going on that you miss. Ultimately, you've got to ask yourself, am I missing out on the things that are important in my rich and meaningful life if I am distracted by all these other things? I found a quote online that I thought was very poignant. When you say no to something, you're only eliminating one option. When you say yes to something, you're eliminating every other option. So think about that. If you've got a slot, an open time slot in your schedule, and you say somebody asks you to do something and you say no, then that time slot is still open for any other possibility that comes along. But as soon as you say yes, that time slot gets blocked, and then nothing else that comes along can get in there. So choose your yeses and your nos wisely. If you do need to say no, because you don't have enough time. This goes back to what I talked about with Synergize. Sometimes you can say, you know, I really can't do that and get everything else done that I need to. However, I will do it, I will make time to help you move. If you can help me with these other things, can we Synergize? Can we work together so that compromise can be an alternative to a hard no? Sometimes you're just going to have to say a hard no, I've got this deadline, I just can't or I made this commitment that just can't be moved. Other times you can say no, but so do consider whether you have options. You only have a certain amount of time each day, each week, each year and in your life. Be mindful when you're making your decisions about what you're going to do. Eliminate any unnecessary things. Rank and prioritize what's left based on urgency and importance to you. Simplify, automate and combine as much as possible. Work smarter. Try to get things done as efficiently and effectively as possible. Delegate when you can and remember that life changes every moment. So each day look at your ranked list and be willing to bump things and move it around a little bit based on your rich and meaningful life. For example, if you wake up on Thursday morning and your kid is sick, typically you go to work. That is something that's important. That's one of those must dos. But staying home with your sick kid may be more important. So you may have to call in sick and bump work for that day. Same thing. If you're burned out, you wake up and you're just like, oh my gosh, I can't imagine. And assuming you have a sick day that you can use, you you decide to call in. Well, if you go to work when you're struggling with burnout, you're probably going to be relatively ineffective and inefficient. Is it better to take care of yourself so you can go in the day after and be more efficient and more productive? Only you can make that decision. But the take home is be willing to be flexible when necessary.