Have you ever felt overwhelmed? Do you have an ever-changing task list? How do you process all that needs to be done and start to do it? Our brains are fascinating! Our frontal lobes are responsible for skills known as executive function. Task prioritization is one of these types of skills. We have some areas we are better at than others and may face difficulty in certain areas of executive function, but no matter our skill level, the demands of our day call upon executive function.
Peg Dawson and Richard Guare, in their book Smart but Scattered Guide to Success define task prioritization as, "The ability to create a road map to reach a goal or complete a task. It also involves being able to make decisions about what's important to focus on and what's not important."
Do you ever struggle with knowing what to focus on? Knowing what is important and shifting your task list around accordingly?
At Work
No matter what kind of job you find yourself working, you will encounter times when you are faced with multiple items on your to-do list. Some needs occur on a relatively predictable schedule. Other times we may feel bombarded with requests. If you work in operations, with dispatch programs, face administrative duties, manage people, or provide services (to name a few), you probably know all too well the dilemma of multiple requests coming to you simultaneously. Each request is backed by someone who says it is the most important item to be dealt with. From multiple phone lines ringing to a long line of customers to a task list that seems to get longer by the end of the day instead of shorter, is it a surprise that our jobs can cause stress and we can feel overwhelmed?
At Home
Whether you spend the bulk of your time at home or feel like you live at a workplace, the household has its own needs. We cannot escape the demands of bills, appointments, chores, and family dynamics. As we keep our households running, we wade through endless task prioritization. Every time something breaks, someone gets sick, or we find ourselves facing an unexpected mess, even the best-organized task lists get shifted about to deal with the immediate need we now face.
Our Spiritual Lives
We sometimes make the mistake of approaching things like times of prayer and meditation as items to be added to our task list. We may realize the calming benefit in the spiritual practices that stand apart from the hurried world. However, we struggle to fit these practices into our days that continue to gain tasks. When the demands of our lives increase and we go about the act of prioritization, our spiritual practices often move down our list if they don't fall off the list entirely. How often do other situations arise that require our attention and we look back with regret realizing we have sacrificed our spiritual centeredness? Our spiritual lives can not be kept separate. Our spiritual practices can not be viewed as just another item on a list. We must stay connected to what our souls need and in that space, we will discover our true goals.
What Can Natural Systems Tell Us
A look at natural systems can give us a new perspective and teach us how we can better prioritize. Consider this quote from The Majesty of Calmness by William George Jordan:
"Nature is very unAmerican. Nature never hurries. Every phase of her working, shows plan, calmness, reliability, and the absence of hurry."
While we may spend our lives striving for this kind of calmness and intention in all we do, we can admire and learn from the plan of nature. When we look at plants, they grow with a blueprint. All the information that is needed is contained in the seed. You can move the plant, and change the environment, but it stays focused on what is important and chases after what it needs to grow.
We must know what is important. What is our goal? What is the need? What will we strive for? What will nourish us? Peg Dawson and Richard Guare say this another way as they label their first step in task prioritization: "Identify the endpoint."
Our Spiritual Lives: Reprioritized to the Top of the List
To successfully apply greater knowledge of our goals and spiritual centeredness to our lives, we must reconsider how we have been approaching our spiritual lives. What would it look like to place our spiritual practices that cause us to slow down, take deep breaths, and notice what is around us at the top of our lists every day? It might mean saying no. It might mean other tasks that others press us to respond to in a hurry should not require us to sacrifice our centeredness. By maintaining the correct perspective and identifying the endpoint that is important for our lives, we gain insight to inform our decisions in areas some of us like to compartmentalize like work and home life.
Work and Home
Maintaining our spiritual practices as a priority does not mean our task list will suddenly be thrown out the window, but we will find ourselves prioritizing differently. In our time at work, we need to know what is important to us: relationships, doing things to the best of our ability, being authentic... When we find ourselves drowning in tasks we can then prioritize them in order of importance based on things like deadlines, level of importance communicated by a superior, and emergency situations requiring immediate action, but we do not lose sight of our endpoint that will help guide that prioritization.
The same is true at home. There will always be things that need to be tended to and require a shift in the plan. But when this happens, if we know our endpoint, we will be able to better understand what can wait and what should not wait until later. The more we make our spiritual practices a priority, the more we will be able to navigate our daily tasks.
An important note: Some people are naturally better at task prioritization than others. You can work to improve your task prioritization skills by using resources like The Smart But Scattered Guide to Success. Remember, you can always ask for help from those around you who are more gifted in these methods.
No matter what your task prioritization skill level, we can all improve in this area by knowing what is important to us and keeping this as a focus for all our prioritization needs.
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