How to prioritize life. How to prioritize correctly

It is vitally important for each person to be able to correctly place accents both in work and in personal life. Priority goals and objectives are those things without which life becomes dull, gray and meaningless. Unfortunately, in the flow of everyday affairs, it is sometimes extremely difficult to place such accents. We're just running through own desires, aspirations, goals, not noticing or not wanting to notice how your own subconscious screams in all ears: “Pay attention! Don't pass by! Wait, you!” And we are in a hurry, in a hurry to do what we promised someone, to do what we were forced from outside. Correct this situation will help correct prioritization.

Make time for yourself

There is one very simple and interesting exercise to get out of the routine and see life from a new angle. Every day for a week, whether you're at work or at home, give yourself one minute. Set a timer and think about what you can do in this minute that will change your inner and external state for the better? What action can bring some warmth and comfort into your life? Perhaps you will drink a glass of water, or perhaps open a window or go outside. These are the little things we usually don't pay attention to: Fresh air, drink more fluids - it seems that all these prescriptions are for impressionable girls, and not for adults. However, it is health is one of the most important priorities in the life of every person.

Next week, try to increase this time, set the time for 5-10 minutes a day and pay attention to yourself. You will notice that you will try to spend this time on things that you previously did not have enough time for, which seemed unimportant, but now significantly improve your mental and physical condition.

Wash the car, read a fairy tale to your child at night, lie in the bathroom with pleasure, read your favorite book. If you summarize these activities, you will see that they revolve around several major areas in your life. Family, health, education, self-improvement, financial well-being, love, new experiences, friends - these are the "pieces of the pie" called "life".

In the stream of everyday affairs, worries and responsibilities at work and at home, we often forget about these priorities, content with miserable crumbs of satisfaction from fulfilling parental or socially imposed prescriptions. And what is the result? And in the end, "excruciatingly painful for the aimlessly lived life." In order to avoid this, it is enough to start living proactively. Avoid the aimlessness of existence. If you are already “going with the flow of life”, then go with a specific goal, for example, how japanese samurai who have chosen the path of service.

Easy prioritization and harmony in the soul is determined by mental purity or the absence of mental debris. What is mental trash? This: negative emotions, psychological complexes, emotional trauma, limiting beliefs, negative attitudes, addictions and other rubbish. Freedom from this rubbish gives energy, determination and clarity of thought, which is critically needed both for setting priorities and in modern life at all. .

Priorities: 5 Ways to Better Emphasize Your Life

It may seem strange, but for each person, priorities are something peculiar only to him, unique. This is due to the different alignment of values ​​in each of us. For someone, the well-being of the family is important, someone puts their whole soul into friendship, and for someone, work comes first. But we can all balance our lives so that values, priorities and responsibilities are in harmony (by the way, it allows you to see how harmoniously you are moving through life). And you need to start with balance today, in which it is correct to place accents using methods of prioritization.

The ancient Indian poet Kapidasa said that one of our days contains all the beauty of the world. And indeed it is. If you want to make your life more balanced, balance your day with these simple tools.

• 1. The easiest way

Make a to-do list for the day and think about which one is the most important? Which task from this list, if completed, will give you the greatest sense of satisfaction? Next to this case, put the letter A. You may have more than one such case on your list, so rank them in order of importance, indicating them with numbers, for example: A1, A2, etc. Throughout the day, follow the received sequence of cases (without fanaticism, of course). Sum up in the evening. Try to use this prioritization method whenever you are feeling tired and frustrated.

• 2. Role based approach to prioritization

Make a to-do list for the day. On another sheet of paper, write down all your significant, priority ones for you personally. social roles, for example: “I am a friend”, “I am a mother”, “I am a daughter”, etc. After that, divide your cases into the received segments and arrange them within each of them in order of importance. Throughout the day, consistently perform the most important things from each segment, gradually descending to more and more low levels importance.

You need to start, of course, with the most priority segment for you. As you complete tasks, pay attention to your internal state. You need to track how correctly you have prioritized. Perhaps, while performing some action, you will notice that at this moment your “soul hurts” for something else, or maybe, on the contrary, the day will pass like clockwork. Pay attention to such subtleties, draw conclusions and, when making a list of tasks for the next day, shift priorities in favor of those that turned out to be most important to you. Prioritization is a purely individual matter.

It happens that in the morning or during the day it is no longer possible to make a to-do list and rank it in order of importance. As life experience shows, the days when this happens cannot be called particularly successful. To get things back on track, you can use a tool like the Eisenhower square.

To do this, draw a square on any sheet of paper, which you divide by two vertical segments into four equal shares. Label the top two horizontal sections as "Important" and "Not Important", and label the two vertical sections as "Urgent" and "Not Urgent". Thus, you have four cells. If we mentally combine the vertical with the horizontal (as in chess), we get four categories of tasks: “Important and urgent”, “Important, but not urgent”, “Not important, but urgent”, “Not important and not urgent”. Whenever you take on a task, mark it in the appropriate box. The category “Important and urgent” is, as a rule, “burning” projects, tasks that had to be “performed yesterday”.

“Important but not urgent” are proactive tasks that are important for future well-being. “It doesn’t matter, but urgently” - all kinds of tasks that others are trying to “hang” on us. “It doesn’t matter and it’s not urgent” - an empty pastime, hanging out in social networks, smoking breaks, etc. Obviously, it would be good to completely exclude the last two categories from your life, and after clearing the rubble in the first category, pay maximum attention to the second segment.

This prioritization allows you to quickly put things in order during the day and not fall victim to a morning that did not work out.

• 4. GTD system ("Getting Things Done" or "How to put things in order")

Basically, the GTD system is wide range actions aimed at optimizing all tasks related to the life of a single person. But David Allen presented his own principle of prioritization in a very interesting way. Everything is very simple. First you need to "unload" all the cases and tasks from your head and write them down on paper. After this process is completed, you can start ranking. All cases are divided into four categories.

In order to correctly divide into segments, ask questions: “Can I do this business in one step? How long will it take? Maybe this is no longer needed? Can I delegate this matter to someone? etc. As a result, you will receive a clearly ordered list of tasks, half of which you can solve in the next fifteen minutes.

• 5. Prioritize Based on Goals

Describe your ideal day. Mark every detail: what kind of family do you have, what kind of relationship do you have, how much do you earn, where do you live, what do you think about, where do you go, what do you live? Dream big, let it be small school essay on the topic “When will my life be good?” After that, imagine yourself in this day, think about what advice you would give yourself? What aspects of life would you be asked to pay attention to so that your life becomes the way it is there in the future? Starting from this image of the future, make a list of things that would bring you closer to materializing it. Order it and start gradually implementing it.

All these prioritization methods do not require a lot of time. They demand attention and respect for themselves, and this is the most difficult task for many.

However, all efforts will pay off if one day you decide to live consciously and proactively, making time for the highest priority tasks and finding your own. native method setting priorities.

If the question of how to prioritize correctly is relevant for you, first of all you need to stop confusing yourself with several things at the same time, otherwise you risk losing a sense of control, and this is already fraught with deterioration in physical and mental health.

How to cope with all the accumulated cases in order to remain in emotional tone and do everything in time? Let's figure it out.

Priorities: how to set them and why it matters

Before you start prioritizing, you need to be able to take control of the current situation and time. To do this, you need to analyze all the events that occur in life.

Take a pen and notepad. Write down on paper all the things that you have done during the last week. How much time do you devote to each area?

If you can answer this question, you will immediately be able to understand how to prioritize your life.
Then think about whether you are satisfied with your pastime.

How much time do you devote to the most important areas of your life. It's about about career, self-development, health, love and family relationships.

Rate each area on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 means complete indifference and 10 means vital. Then evaluate progress in a particular area. Are you spending enough time on each of them?

Keep referring to the scale from 1 to 10.

After you have analyzed your life, pay special attention to those areas that have been rated from 8 to 10.

Make Lists

Knowing how to prioritize will help you complete a large list of important tasks. It is extremely important for you to find out what actions and actions in your life are not present. Read the list of questions below and write down the answers to them in a notebook:

What is of value to you this moment?
What area would you like to devote more time to?
What does not deserve such close attention in your life?
What areas require your attention today? (e.g. health, family, finances).

You need to write down all your actions in the order that is especially important. Thus, you will have new list priorities, according to which you can proceed.

Attack your brain with this important information and soon you will see what role the ability to prioritize plays in life.

One monk kept all his belongings in one small suitcase. With a beaming smile on his face, he said, “If every three months I don’t review my things and get rid of those that I don’t need, then my suitcase will fall apart, or I will have to buy myself a second one. We need to do the same with our lives.We regularly need to carry out such cleanings. Otherwise, if we… otherwise, we will either destroy our life or live it uselessly and then get a new body with even stronger attachments.”

What this monk meant to say is: prioritize your life, focus on what is most important to you and give you strength, and know that if you do not do this, problems and difficulties await you.

Lack of the ability to prioritize puts us in a state of paralysis. When we lose our natural ability to distinguish between what is more important to us and what is less important to us, we lose the main foundation of life and get confused in life. The first thing we forget and therefore become unable to act in the right way is that we are all eternal particles of God, the Absolute, full of happiness. From the standpoint of eternity, nothing in this world, good or bad, is worth falling into slavery.

There are two simple techniques I use to prioritize: I stop and ask over and over again: what am I not currently doing that I should be doing that will change my life for the better?

When I find an answer in, let's say, a certain area, I start to look at others - like health, relationships, spiritual practice - and ask the question again. The results of this technique are amazing and very inspiring for me. In my mind I imagine the end of my life and from this position I consider the present. When we are surrounded by a thousand little things, we tend to see only what is right in front of us. We are like a person who walks in a beautiful forest, but looks only at his feet until he hits his head on a large branch hanging low. When I look at my life in terms of death, I start to care only about the most important things: relationships, moments that allow me to forgive, feel uplifted and show compassion.

Life is gradually reduced, reduced, and, in the end, there are moments. And everyone chooses what he will do in these moments. And what is amazing is that everyone focuses only on the relationship. And everyone remembers that this, this is the most important thing. This is a very interesting one. Everyone is talking about relationships. That is, everything narrows down so much, and in the end we understand where, what is important.

“This is something we need to focus on while we still have the strength, the mind and the open heart. Of the millions of opportunities that life sends us, we need to single out similar, more important things. The benefits we get from prioritization. Prioritization creates two kinds of power within us: the first is the power to say no to everything that is unimportant and to discard it like the junk it is. This is the first power - to say "no" to everything unimportant.

Hello friends. With you Yuri Okunev.

Today we will talk about how to prioritize. I have already written a number of articles about this. Today I will summarize everything that was said earlier and add a few more interesting tools.

ABS Method

This is a slightly softened version of the Pareto Rule. Tasks are already divided into three groups:
A is the most important
B - medium importance
C - not particularly important

If sorting within the resulting groups is required, the usual numbering is used: A1, A2, A3, etc.

ABS analysis is often used in business to identify more and less profitable product groups.

Eisenhower Matrix

Dwight David Eisenhower (1890–1969) General of the Army and 34th President of the United States new level work with priorities, in which, in addition to the importance of tasks, their urgency is also taken into account.

The matrix looks like this:

We take our list of tasks and distribute them into the resulting categories.

important and urgent(catastrophe square).
important and not urgent(creation square).
Not important and urgent(vanity square).
Not important and not urgent(destruction square).

The main result of this distribution is a deeper understanding of the relative weight of each task. Obviously, the main square of a productive person important and non-urgent affairs. You need to strive to devote maximum time to them.

Important and urgent We clean up the cases and draw conclusions so that in the future there will be no hands-on work.

unimportant and urgent- Delegate if possible, or ignore if we can afford it.

Unimportant and non-urgent business brave time managers boldly sent to the wastebasket. It's just a shame that our little pleasures of life often fall into this section: read an art book, watch a movie, chat with friends, etc.

Less popular ways

Olympic system

Let's turn to the experience of athletes. You can arrange a knockout game for the tasks. I don't think much explanation is needed. We divide the cases into twos, compare them with each other, and repeat the cycle until the absolute winner is identified.

Pairwise comparison

Let's continue the sports parallels. A more accurate, but also more labor-intensive method is a pairwise comparison.
When all tasks seem equally important, you can compare each task in turn with all the others. The one that scores more "wins" as a result of "meetings" will be the most important.

Assessment of mutual influence

This method allows you to evaluate the importance of the task by the degree of its influence on general situation. The most important will be the tasks from which the most arrows depart. Less significant links can be indicated by a dotted line.

Contribution to values ​​(supergoals)

One task can work simultaneously for several values. Accordingly, the task that positively affects their maximum number will be more important.

Multivariate analysis

To compare our tasks or goals by several indicators, we can make a two-dimensional table. In the left column we write out the objects for comparison. The top line defines the criteria. We put pluses and minuses in the task line, or a score in points for each criterion and look at the final result.

This method is also well suited for making important life decisions: buying real estate, a car, choosing a contractor for important work. In cases where we have time to slowly weigh everything.

weighted average

In cases where the significance of the factors by which we evaluate tasks is not initially equal, we can use the calculation of the weighted average. interesting method which I have detailed.

"Folk" methods

There are also a number of common but unpractical prioritization methods.

• Target Whatever catches my eye, I do.
• squeaky wheel- who whines more, for this I do.
• Easy first I do what doesn't bother me.
• roasted rooster- I do what is already on fire.

I think it is clear that these options go under the heading "How not to do it."

Priorities for men and women

And finally, you can think about how the priorities of men and women differ. I wrote two separate articles about this.

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Summing up

We remembered what is the basis for prioritization and ran through the main approaches to this process.
Once again I emphasize priorities are not an end in themselves. Choose for yourself one, maximum two of the most simple ways, introduce into daily practice and use.

Share information with friends, subscribe to blog news, join practices on the course. And for today I say goodbye to you.

And if you still have questions, I invite you to an individual consultation. Details.

See you soon.
Yours, Yuri Okunev.

The Pareto Principle states that a small proportion of causes, inputs, or efforts are responsible for a large proportion of results, outputs, or rewards earned. A small proportion of causes causes the lion's share of consequences. Pareto is unambiguous: the maximum of what you want will be the result of the minimum of what you do. Some things are more important than others, and by a lot. I want you to take this principle into account when compiling a to-do list - first determine the 20% of the most important, then select another 20% of them and continue in the same vein until you get the one, most important thing. You can start with a list of any length, but with the mindset that you must clear your way to the one most important thing.

Focus

To get started new task and to return to what you were doing before you were interrupted, it always takes some time, and it is not a fact that you will be able to continue exactly from the place where you were distracted. Studies show that about 28% of work time is wasted due to multitasking. Multitaskers are more stressed, make more mistakes, and lose the ability to correctly estimate the time needed to work on a task - they almost always feel that it will take more time than it really is. Every time we try to do two or more things at the same time, we simply divide our attention and reduce the demands on the results of each of the processes.

Form habits

Contrary to popular belief, success is not the result of a marathon of disciplined action. In fact, success is a sprint in which discipline is needed exactly until the moment a habit is formed. By forcing yourself, you accustom yourself to a certain course of action, and from some point it develops into a habit. Resign yourself to the brutal discipline it will take just to make the new kind habitual behavior, and everything will be much different. On average, it takes 66 days to form a habit. Build skills one by one. Success comes in sequence, not all at once. No one manages to acquire more than one strong habit in one period of time.

Ask yourself the big question

To rank tasks according to their importance, ask yourself the Focusing Question: “What is the one thing I can do that makes everything else easier or unnecessary?” This leads to specifics - you can choose only one option. The words "can do" contain a built-in command to do what is possible. People often replace this with “should” and “would like,” but all of these options are incorrect. What you can do is always more important than good intentions. The "so that as a result of this" part talks about the criteria that the answer must meet. It is a bridge between simply doing and doing purposefully. The last part of the phrase is the final test of the strength of the impact. The point is that when you do this one thing, everything else on the way to your goal will become achievable at the cost of less effort or even unnecessary.

Link today to the future

The more distant in time the future reward, the less motivation to receive it - this phenomenon is called "hyperbolic discounting". It serves as an explanation for the fact that most people prefer $100 right now to twice as much in the future. Their "current distortion" outweighs logic. There is a simple way of thinking that will overcome this.

What is one thing I can do to make everything else easier or unnecessary?

You have to imagine how one small thing gradually grows into a big one. It's a bit like a nesting doll: your main "right now" item is inside your main item for today, which sits inside your main item for this week, and so on. Train your mind to link goals in time. Connect your today to all your tomorrows. So you learn to think big, but purposefully.

Plan important

Successful people start by planning their free time from work. Why? They know they need it. Everything needs pauses to function properly, and you are no exception. Once you've planned your rest time, start allocating a temporary block for your main thing. If possible, it should be at the very beginning of the day. Leave yourself an hour to deal with urgent morning tasks, and then get on with the main thing. I recommend one four-hour time block per day. You can do more - go ahead. The next step in allocating time blocks is planning itself. This is the time when you reflect on where you are now and where you want to go. Set aside one hour each week to review your yearly and monthly goals. Ask yourself what needs to happen this month and this week to keep you within your yearly goals.

Protect your time

It is not difficult to allocate time - it is difficult to defend. The best way- setting that these time blocks are immovable. Therefore, if someone tries to keep you busy during this time, just apologize, say that you are already busy, and offer another option in return. If this is really something urgent, remember the rule of "lost - replaced" and immediately reschedule your time block. If you feel that at the moment of work, side thoughts pop up in your head, just write them down and continue doing what you were doing. Find a place to work away from the paths that distracters travel. Keep all the supplies, snacks, and drinks you might need handy, and don't leave your "bunker" for any reason other than going to the bathroom. Turn off your phone, close email. Tell those who might be looking for you what you are doing and when you will be free.

Learn to refuse

To protect what you said “yes” to and stay productive, you should say “no” to everyone and everything that can undermine your efforts. No one knew how to say "no" better than Steve Jobs. Two years after his return to the company in 1997, the number of products in the Apple product line was reduced from 350 to 10. He explained this by saying: "Focusing means saying no." Every time you say “yes,” you pinch off a piece of the effectiveness of your efforts in all areas. So the more things you try to do, the less successful you are at each one. You can't please everyone, don't even try.