Every activity that we engage in – work, hobby, personal – asks us to prioritize it. But how can you prioritize everything? What does prioritizing look like?
As a freelancer, I have a lot of projects I’m working on at any time. For those, I prioritize based on immediate need – on deadlines. If I don’t have a pressing deadline, I focus on balancing projects, and consistent forward progress on those things I’m most passionate about.
But I have two priorities I have clearly chosen to value above my work life.
First is my family. If I am faced between a work project under deadline and a child in need (even a need as minor as, “Dad, will you play a game with me?”), I try to always choose the family. That’s how I prioritize.
Between my family and my work is my personal well-being. If I have to choose between an hour of extra work in the evening and an hour of sleep, I choose the sleep. But if I have a kid in need of some late-night support (a nightmare or a fever, perhaps), I prioritize the kid over the sleep.
Knowing those three big priorities helps me to make so many smaller choices. I also make gradations within those three big priorities. (I generally prioritize my ensembles over other work projects; I generally prioritize physical and mental health (yoga, a walk) over a surplus of sleep.)
But it requires honesty, and a fair-minded assessment of your own priorities. They are your priorities, not anyone else’s. Is driver’s ed more important than the ensemble I sing in? Is a family vacation more important than scheduled rehearsals?
You have to assess your priorities, and you have to deal with the repercussions of how they play out. I probably write less music than other people because I live into my own priorities; if I prioritized bars-per-day of writing over sleep, then the outcome would be different. Living into my priorities might disappoint other people, and it might cause me to lose opportunities; but I accept these as the necessary outcome from mindful prioritization.
We can’t get what we want out of our experiences if we don’t prioritize them; we can’t prioritize everything. To me, that means that without committing to prioritization, we can’t really achieve anything.