Not that long ago, I recommended picking a reasonable number of priorities and letting them guide your decisions.
But what if everything seems urgent?
Suppose you have decided that your priorities are blogging about the climate crisis, raising your children, looking for a new job, finishing the remodeling work you started on your kitchen, and following your doctor’s recommendation to exercise for 30 minutes at least five days a week. That’s a pretty good list.
But you’ve started to get concerned about the upcoming election, and you want to do something to make a difference. Recent news is compelling you to take some sort of action on systemic racism. You received an email from an organization that needs support to fight the coronavirus in the Navajo Nation. And one of your friends seems deeply depressed, which worries you.
It’s all so very urgent.
When it feels like the world’s on fire, where do you even start?
When faced with one urgent matter after another, it can be tempting to try to tackle them all… or to give up and watch Netflix.
Here are some alternative ways to prioritize when you’re feeling overwhelmed.
- Adjust your priorities — temporarily or more permanently. When you look at your list of current priorities, are there things you can delete or put off? If you’re unemployed, you almost certainly don’t want to remove your job search from your priority list. But if you are looking because want something different, maybe you can delay the job search for a while in favor of other priorities, such as reaching out to your friend more often.
- Separate your time priorities from your financial priorities. Do you have room in your budget for an additional financial contribution? Consider giving to a cause that moves you without including it among the priorities that demand your time and attention. To make it really easy, you can automate your giving if you plan on supporting the cause regularly.
- Make a one-time contribution. If you feel that you can’t ignore that urgent appeal, make a one-time donation. Then return to your previously chosen priorities. But by “contribution,” I don’t just mean monetary contributions. Maybe you can’t donate money, but you can take a day to make phone calls to get out the vote. One day of volunteering allows you to respond to an urgent appeal without overhauling your priorities.
- Make minimally disruptive changes to your life. Sometimes you can respond to something that moves you without needing to make room for it on your calendar or in your budget. If you’re concerned about racism, maybe you can commit to shopping at some black-owned businesses instead of a couple of chains you normally patronize. You might need to do some research first, but once you have, you can just adjust your shopping habits without changing your current list of priorities.
- Just say “no.” None of us can do everything. That’s hard to remember when we are faced with all of the problems that come to our attention each day. There are times when you will need to adjust or add to your priorities, at least temporarily. But most of the time you need to allow your priorities to focus your efforts. Otherwise you’ll spread yourself too thin.
It can be hard to stick to our priorities in the face of troubling news and worthy appeals. But if we combine a commitment to focusing on a few key things with a little flexibility and creativity, we can accomplish far more than we will if we try to take on everything.