We’ve all heard the age-old advice: prioritize what's most important over what's less important.
Big rocks before small rocks. Duh.
But what if we are actually solving the wrong problem?
In Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman argues that in modern society, the challenge isn’t that we’re bad at prioritizing the big rocks, but that there are just too many big rocks to begin with.
Three strategies for how to prioritize the big rocks
Burkeman calls these the “Art of Creative Neglect”:
Pay Yourself First - find time for your most valued activities first, before dealing with the less valued ones. If you deal with less valued ones first, you’ll run out of time for the most valued ones.
Limit Your Work in Progress - we all want to work on multiple projects at once because it gives us a sense that we are taking full advantage of life. But that means nothing gets finished. So only allow yourself a limited number of work-in-progress items at any point in time.
Resist the Allure of Middling Priorities - we all have many interesting things we want to do, but most of these things wouldn’t make a top-5 list of our life’s main priorities. Make a list of priorities you have in your life and stack rank them. Then pick the top few and focus on those.
For my sabbatical, applying these three principles means:
Not getting sucked into daily tasks (email, laundry, cleaning) before I spend time doing pottery
Limiting the number of books I can read at the same time. I can’t start another until I finish one.
Make a list of my sabbatical goals and focus on the top ones. Yes, it's sad that I can't do everything, but this is the first step to recognizing that our lives are finite and that means saying "no" to most of what we want.