Do you ever find yourself procrastinating, cramming work, or struggling to find extra time in your schedule? You’re likely doing a poor job of balancing your priorities, but luckily you’ve come to the right place. Today, I want to discuss some helpful pointers I’ve used to help balance my priorities, and hopefully, you can use some of them to get your ducks in a row.
This is a constant process that I’m working on daily and still have not mastered, but the difference between me two or three years ago and today is almost night and day. Even though I haven’t perfected the balance, I do think that I can provide some valuable tips.
So right off the bat, the single most important thing that will move the needle in terms of balancing your priorities is putting in conscious effort. If you coast along and try to go through your life without any structure or planning, you are going to find yourself struggling to accomplish the bare minimum responsibilities you have. If you can’t even take care of your core tasks, you can forget about the extras that you want to add on. Just taking a little bit of time to map out your priorities and put some conscious effort into balancing them will pay massive dividends.
Start by listing out everything you need to get done during a certain time frame. You can do this with a pen and paper or digitally, it doesn’t matter that much here. These could be high-level, such as over the course of a month, or specific tasks for the week or day. It is very helpful to have different lists over different time periods to make sure the tasks you prioritize on a daily basis help you with your long-term goals.
Group these tasks and prioritize within each group. I like to use groups such as school, work, social, and chores. You can even create subgroups into categories such as classes, projects, types of chores, etc. Then within these groups, you will have your most important items, items of less importance that still need to get done, and likely some optional items that shouldn’t be addressed until after everything else is taken care of.
This document is incredibly important. Obviously, you have the benefit of having everything laid out in one central place, but getting all of these tasks out of your head and onto the paper will free up mental RAM and bring you mental clarity. Once you have this document ready, it’s time to take action.
Batch tasks within groups together and schedule blocks of time to take care of them. If you organize by week, you could dedicate different days to a specific group. Monday could be focused on school, Tuesday can be focused on making videos, etc. I usually will divide up the tasks by day and dedicate chunks of my day to a certain task. I’ve got a YouTube video out on time-blocking that you should check out if you’re looking for a practical way to implement it in your life.
Check in with yourself regularly and make sure your system is working. Don’t be afraid to switch things up and experiment if something isn’t working and most importantly, do not let perfect be the enemy of good. You are very likely going to struggle a lot to find the right system for balancing everything and no two days or weeks are going to be the same. Set up a framework for yourself that has wiggle room to account for these factors.
