Priorities

You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage, pleasantly, smilingly, nonapologetically, to say no to other things. And the way you do that is by having a bigger yes burning inside. The enemy of the best is often the good.
Stephen Covey

Have you decided what your highest priorities are. Most of us act as if our highest priorites are to do whatever is the most urgent, or whatever other people are in a hurry for us to do. We often forget that what other people want for us is not always what we really want for ourselves. We seldom take the time to sit down and really think about what we want our lives to be like; about what is really important and valuable to us.

Once you have decided what your highest priorities are, it is a whole other task to actually act on them. You have to have the courage to disappoint the people around you by not giving in to their expectations and requests all the time. You have to be pleasant yet unapologetic. You have to be able to not automatically jump to deal with whatever seems urgent at the time, to stop and think about whether it is really important or whether it can wait until the more important things get taken care of.

Whenever you make a choice as to whether you should do something, you are comparing it against other things that you could possibly be doing at that time. You will choose whatever seems most important. If nothing is more important than watching TV, then you will watch TV. You have to have a burning yes, something that is really important to you, before you can say no to the television or any other of the things which seem attractive but leave you with a feeling of having wasted your time. You need to spend your valuable time doing not just a good thing but the best thing you could be doing, so you need to say no to things that are just good.

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