Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter
Prioritize
A client has a big, hot, important item on their to-do list, but then the phone rings or the e-mail comes in, someone gets sent home from school with a fever… life happens. The item doesn’t get done and things get stressful.
It’s a scenario I see frequently, and to help prevent it from happening I encourage people to take their scrawled to-do list and rewrite it in order of priority.
My clients hate this. You would think that I had asked them to list their children in order of preference, favorite child on top.
But if you can’t prioritize, you are fated to always be scrambling: lobbing back minor e-mails and phone calls, responding and reacting rather than directing and determining.
To become master of your to-do list you have to be able to acknowledge that some things (say, getting your holiday cards out by December 10) aren’t as important as others (like getting your daughter’s high-school application in on time).
We don’t like to prioritize because we feel we are giving short shrift to the things on the bottom of the list (like calling Time Warner to see if you can get a better deal).
But this isn’t true. In fact, when you are more methodical: I’m starting at the top of the list, maybe I can get to #5 by lunch, you are actually more efficient. When you spend less time fretting about what to do next, you might get to some of the lower items on the list.
Or, you might want to prioritize rereading Out of Chaos no.113 — and cross one thing off.