How do I prioritize when everything feels important? 

First off, the things that are important rarely get prioritized over what feels urgent. So the things that are important, need to be planned ahead of time, before they either fall off your radar, get shuffled to the end of the line, or become urgent themselves.

When people ask us how they should be planning and prioritizing their week, there are really 3 things that seem to help everyone no matter what their style. If you do none of them, start with one, if you do 2 of them, think about adding in the third.

1) Plan your week

Some people do it on Friday, some people do it on Sunday, some people on Monday morning. I plan my week on Friday mornings. My weekends are unpredictable and Monday is a heavy coaching day so if I don’t plan on Fridays it’s not going to happen. I’ve learned the hard way that starting Monday without a good idea of the week ahead leaves me feeling undone.

I like to use a planner because I’m a sucker for planners but the truth is that any piece of paper, printout etc will do. You can write it or have it as a doc. The main thing is that it’s not just your digital calendar because your digital calendar only tells you where you need to be and it’s far too easy to ignore the stuff that isn’t a meeting (no accountability) and then not track that you skipped the time you scheduled to do something.

2) Check in with your plan daily

You already went to the trouble of planning your week. It’s great to look at the week as a whole but looking at your plan daily is where the rubber really hits the road. Some of our clients have very detailed daily plans, some have very simple roadmaps.

I like to break down my daily plan into:

• appointments for the day
• commitments on timeblocks for completing a larger commitment
• to-do’s

Since my commitments track to my goals and are typically the most important things I need to get done personally and professionally, those get calendared. To-do’s I find a place for after that. Urgent tasks usually come out of nowhere and can’t be planned for, but if I have some notice I’ll add them and more importantly, I’m clear about what I’m bumping so I can find a new spot for it.

3) Assess how you did

When you check in daily, whether that’s the end of the current day or the start of a new day, note what didn’t happen and carry it over. Skipping this step is the downfall of most planning. It means if something is missed, it’s likely forgotten. If it’s truly important, you have to find another time to do it. However, urgent tasks take precedence and what I’ve learned as an accountability coach is that there are both things that are really urgent and things that aren’t really urgent but take up space because we perceive them to be or someone else wants us to prioritize them as urgent.

Planning is not the same as doing, so noticing if you are carrying over a lot from one day to the next, that tells you how good you are at prioritizing. Are you carrying over the important tasks? Are you being bombarded with urgent tasks? How can you protect your time to make sure that the important things happen?

When life gets really busy, assessing how your day went at the end of the day is incredibly helpful. It gives you time and space to think through when you are going to do things the next day like – pick up a gift, grab lunch, or make a call you wouldn’t have remembered if you hadn’t been looking at the day ahead. It also means your brain knows you are prepared, is able to pick up on anything that you might have missed, and makes for a better night’s sleep. I like this closing out ritual for my day. I made my list for tomorrow, I’m ready to shut down.

I know everyone is in different places with planning, but prioritizing and planning go hand in hand. The hardest thing is to run from meeting to meeting, fielding emails and texts in between, and hope that somehow between what everyone asks or needs from you, what is important to you will get done. Planning is a way of taking back your time and saying this is what I am prioritizing. This is what is important now.