The Oxford English Dictionary defines prioritizing as designating or treating something as very important.
When you prioritize, you determine the order you need to complete tasks according to their relative importance.
Stephen R. Covey said that the key isn’t to prioritize what is on your schedule but to schedule your priorities.
We need to be able to differentiate between what is easy and what is important and work from there. When it comes to working, it is so much easier to take short cuts or to procrastinate, but we need to identify what is important and do it before it comes back to bite us. If we put off doing something just because doing something else may seem easier, deadlines will surprise you and you are left stressed and overwhelmed. Prioritizing will take a lot of stress off of you because everything that needs to be done, will have been done when it comes to crunch time.
Prioritizing, however, doesn’t only apply to your professional life, but your personal life as well.
We need to prioritize what is important to us; pursue our passions, spend time with our families and friends, do the tasks we have been putting off, and focus on personal growth.
If we make our well-being a priority, it will be so much easier to make a positive impact on other people. You cannot love other people if you don’t love yourself. If you take care of yourself and you focus on your well-being, you become more accepting and more open to helping people; you have more motivation, and you can achieve so much more.
Ali Washington said, “By taking care of myself, I have so much more to offer the world than when I am running on empty.”
Henry David Thoreau said, “It is not enough to be busy… The question is: what are we busy with.”
If you are doing something just for the sake of doing it, not because you want to or because it is important, it will never have any true meaning. If something isn’t important to you, then it will never be done in the way it should be and will never make the impact it needs to.
