Prioritize & Focus

I’m a firm believer that you can have anything you want in life.

What’s more difficult, if not impossible, is to have everything you want in life simultaneously.

The reasons are prioritization and focus. Prioritization is about deciding what’s important. Focus is about allocating a disproportionate share of your attention and resources toward the priority.

Most people do not prioritize.

And amongst those who do, many do not focus.

I’m an adamant believer that you can only have one #1 priority.

Most people have, say, five things that are “the most important” to them. That often doesn’t work well because it’s unclear how to allocate resources.

If you have an extra hour in your day, which of your five most important priorities should you focus on during that hour?

That’s why I believe in rank ordering your priorities.

So, instead of having five most important priorities, you numerically rank your priorities from one to five.

#1 Priority
#2 Priority
#3 Priority
#4 Priority
#5 Priority

If your #1 goal is to get promoted within a year, that goal is very clear. If you have a spare hour, do something during that hour related to your #1 goal.

If your #1 goal is to improve your physical fitness, when you have a spare hour, devote it to that outcome.

When you rank order your priorities, decision-making is very easy.

The #1 priority is the first thing you schedule on your calendar each day. You devote as much time and resources as possible to that priority until you reach a point of diminishing returns.

Then, you schedule your #2 priority. It gets all of the time and resources that remain until the #2 priority reaches some point of diminishing returns.

Then, you repeat the process for your #3, #4, and #5 priorities.

What you’ll notice with this prioritization process is that the #1 priority gets a massively disproportionate share of resources.

There’s a word that I use to describe this phenomenon.

It’s called…

Focus

Your level of achievement is directly related to the degree of focus you place on that outcome.

The clearer the priorities, the easier it is to focus. The deeper the focus, the greater the achievement.