Prioritizing Your Life
Deciding What’s Important
And What’s Not

Prioritizing Your Life in today’s fast paced world is essential. If you don’t learn to decide what’s important for yourself, sooner or later someone will decide it for you.

Prioritizing your life

We live in a society with filled with obligations. Obligated to be a great father, a faithful church go-er, a productive worker and so on.

With so many of life’s pressures on us, it’s hard to even have time for ourselves. But you have to take charge of your life.


As a leader, you are an agent of change, not a product of change. You can the one that will bring change to society, and not be a victim of society’s culture.

Because of that, you have to learn to be proactive to life’s challenges by learning to prioritize your life.

Prioritize your life presumes that you already have goals in your life. If you don’t have goals in your life, then prioritizing makes no sense at all.

When you are prioritizing your life, you are basically making a decision about what is important in moving you toward your long term goals and what is not.

Stephen Covey in his best-selling book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, divided all the activities we do on a daily basis into 4 categories:

• Urgent and Important
• Urgent and Not Important
• Not Urgent and Important
• Not Urgent and Not Important

The Urgency and Importance Matrix

Urgent and Important
Urgent and important activities are like:
• Crises
• Pressing problems and
• Projects close to deadlines.

If a large part of your time is devoted to this, you’ll find your life to be stressful and you’ll be experiencing constant burnouts. This is because you’re putting out one fire after another.

Urgent and not important
These activities are like:
• Unnecessary calls
• Replying some emails
• Some pointless meetings
• Some pressing matters

If a large part of your life is on this, you’ll constantly feel out of control, because of all the clutter in your life. You would not think about your long term goals because you’re just fighting the daily battles.

Not urgent and not important
These activities are like:
• Trivia matters
• Some phone calls
• Playing games on the job
• Surfing the net

If much of your activity is this, be careful. You are obsolete in the organization. You are really not needed and it might just be a matter of time that you would leave your organization.

Not urgent but important
This is the most important activities above all else mentioned. By spending most of your time on these activities, you’ll find you have a long term focus and your activities are meaningful and matter in the long run.

Activities like:
• Planning for the long run
• Building meaningful relationships
• Strategic thinking

Prioritizing your life is about getting the right mix of these activities. While you want to focus on the not urgent but important section the most, you must be flexible and be ready for the unexpected events.

Taking Charge

Of course, you might feel that many times you have no control over your own life. You feel that it’s not that you don’t want to prioritize; just that everything is pulling you from every direction and you have no control over it at all.

Yes, it can happen too. If you have so many things to do that you can’t even have time for yourself, then it’s time for you to say no.

Many times, we don’t say no because we feel guilty that we have time but we’re not giving it away, but you must know this: Before you can take care of other people, you must learn to take care of yourself.

You have to take charge of your time by learning to say no. It’s not that you’re selfish, but it’s because you’re a leader and that your team needs you to be up and ready. If you burn out, who’s going to take care of your organization or family?

Remember this, never become a victim of your circumstances, but be proactive and be an agent of change wherever you are. You either arrange your schedule around someone's, or someone arranges his schedule around yours.

Return from Prioritizing Your Life to Inner Leadership

Return from Prioritizing Your Life to Home Page

Articles on Inner Leadership

On Character

The most important ingredient in leadership: integrity
Integrity is the most important ingredient in leadership. Having it is the make-or-break for any leader. Understand the importance of integrity and also how you can develop yourself to be a man of integrity.

On Mental Attitudes

Looking on the bright side on life:Optimism
As a leader, you should be an optimistic person. An optimistic person will naturally seek to see the good in the future, and bring the team to create positive change together.

Have a great attitude!
Attitude is everything. The saying goes that your attitude determines your altitude. How you perceive and interpret events in your life will determine how far in life you will go.

On Vision

Vision: Having a direction in your life
Having a personal vision in your life means everything in leadership. As a leader, you must not only consider the organizational vision, but also the vision of each and every member of your team.

Articulating your vision: Pointing the way for your team
I have shared in other sections about the importance of having a vision, but it’s really one thing to have a vision, but another thing to articulate it well. Understand how you can articulate a vision in this section effectively, so that your team will catch it and run with the vision.

Learning to put first things first
Learning to prioritize your life will aid you a lot in your leadership journey where you decide what activities add value to your organization and what does not.

Subscribe to the FREE Leadership With You Newsletter and receive a monthly e-zine with:

Latest Articles in Leadership With You

Great Product Recommendations

New tips and insights to help you become a better leader

When you subscribe, every month you will receive valuable information and wonderful tips for you as a leader!

Click here to see some back issues of the Newsletter

Each issue of the Leadership With You Newsletter is filled with quality content that will greatly benefit you in your leadership journey.

You will find the content simple to understand and relevant for you. They are straight-forward, practical information that you will use immediately!


Enter Your Email Address

Enter Your First Name

Then

Don't worry -- your e-mail address is totally secure.
I promise to use it only to send you the Newsletter.

Return to Home Page

Sign Up Today


On a monthly basis, I write to you to share with you about my thoughts, some great articles and resources on leadership as well and I know it will greatly benefit you.

Become a Leader that People Follow

Sign up today and download a free leadership ebook worth USD 9.95!

E-mail Address
First Name
Then

Don't worry — your e-mail address is totally secure.
I promise to use it only to send you Growing the Leader in You.

Leadership Resources


Here are just a few of the pages that offer useful leadership resources for you. You will become a more equipped leader with these:

Great Quotes on leadership that you can use or be inspired by!

Movies: A collection on awesome leadership movies to teach leadership

Team Exercises: Some team building game ideas for you

Books: Some great books you can buy to enrich yourself

Testimonials


Let me begin by saying my deepest thanks to you for visiting this website. Your words of encouragement never fail to inspire and push me further to build this website to be a blessing to more people.

I have only skimmed over the website and the e-book so far, but what I've read was surprisingly deep for a non-commercial and easily accessible product.
- John, Germany

Hello Yihan, I am very grateful for your book about leadership. It is very exciting and amazing. It's encouraging and it gives us all hope.
-Radovanka, Serbia

I was inspired by your writing and i have started putting those principles into practice.
- Mwanki Mercy

I am compelled to write you personally and say how excited I was to discover your website. Even though I have found many websites on leadership, yours stand out because of your Leadership Movies section.
- Emmanuel Lopez

Thank you for the article that you have been sending on true leadership; I really appreciate that. I aspire to be a good leader but it starts with me first. Thank you very much. - Eagles Audacity

I have stumbled across your website a few times in my research and I wanted to commend you for the work you are doing. Your site is a great resource for leaders!
- Johnny, United States

This site is amazing...thank you. I have been exploring today, and found so many great resources!
-Cheryl, Canada

Dear Yihan, thank you for your leadership website. I am digging into visionary leadership. Thanks for your insightful summary. There are lots of valuable resources around.
- Rudolf, South Africa

I like your website a lot. In fact, I’m undertaking Masters in Construction Management and your articles help a lot.
- Josephine Teo, Malaysia

Excellent site! Thank you so much for the time and effort you've put into compiling some of the best materials on leadership.
- Patricia, Germany

Hi Yihan, Thank you so much for your generosity sharing us about Leadership awareness, skills and development. God Bless.
-
Linda, Philippines

Thanks a lot for wonderful articles on your site.it gave a lot of information in undertaking my management studies. Keep it up; good work. Thanks.
- Nicholas, Kena

Yihan, your dedication to this site is very obvious and well done dear. Blessings be upon you; I shall in turn do my best to make a difference and be a part of this journey of true leadership with you.
-Leila, Kenya

To be honest, I don’t find a correct lexical to describe, how effectively I am using your site for my personal /surroundings development. Hats off to you!!!
-Dinesh Mani, India

Very helpful website really :) sometimes it’s better to be simple than complex. You give example which helps people like me understand what you want to asay.
-Tejas, India

I am grateful to God for giving us a great mind like you. You are an extraordinary individual with the wisdom & understanding to teach others to lead. You open our eyes and reveal the answers for our everyday lives with remedies we can use to enhance our lives and that of others. Way to GO! I pray God's continuous blessings on your family, friends and for the great work you is doing!
-Darwin, Belize

If you have feedback you would like to give, please visit Contact Me and I would love to hear from you. Really.