Schedule Your Priorities

“The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.” — Stephen R. Covey

Planning is useful. But a beautifully planned day can still be an unproductive day if the priorities are wrong.

Priority is not simply another word for urgency. Something can be urgent and relatively unimportant. Another task may have no deadline at all and yet be extremely important to your health, career or creative ambitions.

Real prioritization considers several things: importance, urgency, difficulty, the energy required and even how much we dislike doing something.

That last point matters.

Some important activities become progressively harder to do as the day advances. Exercise is a good example. If you repeatedly plan to exercise “sometime today,” evening may arrive with a dozen perfectly reasonable excuses. If exercise matters, give it an early and protected place in your day.

Creative work deserves similar treatment. If writing, painting, composing or thinking deeply is important to you, consider doing it before opening the gates to the outside world. Once emails, messages, news and other people’s requests start arriving, your priorities can quickly be replaced by theirs.

Do not automatically begin your day with whatever is easiest, most pleasant or making the most noise.

Ask yourself a better question:

What must I accomplish today for this to have been a worthwhile day?

Identify those few things and give them your best time and energy.

Plan your day, certainly.

But first decide what deserves the best part of it. 

Give Your Brain a Bedtime Too

We prepare our bodies for sleep. We change clothes, brush our teeth, switch off the lights and get into bed. Then we pick up the phone and wake the brain all over again.

Phones, tablets, computers and television are among the worst companions before bedtime. Their light can interfere with the body’s natural preparation for sleep. More importantly, what we consume keeps the mind stimulated. News, messages, videos, social media and endless scrolling tell the brain to remain alert when it should be slowing down.

The result is predictable. We take longer to fall asleep, sleep quality can suffer, and we may wake up less refreshed. Repeated poor sleep eventually affects concentration, mood, energy and overall health.

Try something wonderfully old-fashioned instead.

Put away electronic gadgets well before bedtime. Turn off the television. Lower the lights. Pick up a regular printed book and read slowly. Choose something pleasant, not something so exciting that you cannot put it down.

Soon you may notice the words becoming blurry. You reread the same paragraph. Your eyelids become heavy. The book starts slipping from your hands.

That is natural sleepiness arriving without a fight.

Close the book. Switch off the light. Sleep.

Technology has improved countless parts of our lives. Bedtime does not necessarily have to be one of them.

Don’t Suffer Before You Have To

 “He suffers more than is necessary, who suffers before it is necessary.” — Seneca 

This advice is particularly useful when it comes to our health.

As we grow older, little aches and pains begin to appear. Something hurts that did not hurt yesterday. You feel unusually tired. A joint feels stiff. There is a strange sensation somewhere.

Today, within minutes, we can search the internet and discover twenty possible explanations. Unfortunately, we often ignore the nineteen harmless possibilities and become fascinated by the one frightening disease at the bottom of the list.

Then the suffering begins.

You read more. You ask friends. Someone knows someone who had similar symptoms and received a terrible diagnosis. Before long, a minor discomfort has acquired an elaborate medical future entirely inside your imagination.

Seneca understood this tendency two thousand years before Google existed.

If something is genuinely bothering you, do the sensible thing. See your doctor. If necessary, see a specialist. Get the appropriate tests done. Then deal with the facts as they emerge.

Until then, resist marinating yourself in stress and distress over possibilities.

Being attentive to your health is wise. Constantly worrying about it is not. Our bodies change as we age. Every new ache does not deserve a frightening story attached to it.

There is a sensible middle path: pay attention, take appropriate action, and then get on with your life.

Don’t diagnose yourself into a disease you may not have. But don’t swing to the other extreme either.

Not everything is serious.

And not everything should be ignored with a casual, “This too shall pass.”

The Best May Still Be Ahead

“Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be.” — Robert Browning

There comes a stage in life when it is tempting to look backward more often than forward. The career may have peaked. Children may have grown up. Relationships have changed. The body occasionally reminds us that it is no longer thirty. We begin measuring life by what has already happened rather than by what could still happen.

That is precisely when Robert Browning’s words become valuable: “The best is yet to be.”

Growing older is not merely about losing youth. It is also about gaining something youth could never provide—experience.

By fifty, you know yourself better. You have made mistakes and survived them. You have probably lost money, opportunities, relationships and people you loved. You have also discovered that many things you once considered terribly important were not important at all.

That knowledge is an asset.

Perhaps the second half of life should not be an attempt to recreate the first. There is little point in trying to become thirty again. Instead, ask what fifty can do that thirty could not.

You may have more patience now. Better judgment. Greater financial freedom. Less need to impress people. More confidence to say no. More willingness to pursue something simply because it matters to you.

Use those advantages.

Write the book you kept postponing. Learn something completely new. Travel differently. Get healthier. Rebuild an old friendship. Start a small venture. Teach someone what took you decades to learn. Or simply create a quieter life that suits the person you have finally become.

Growing older becomes depressing when we see life only as subtraction.

Try seeing it as refinement.

You have spent decades discovering what matters and, equally importantly, what does not.

Now you can use that knowledge.

The best years need not be the youngest years.

The best years may simply be the ones lived with the greatest clarity.

And those years may still be ahead.

The Hidden Cost of Constant Stimulation

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” — Herbert A. Simon

Never before in history have we had access to so much information.

News updates, emails, social media, videos, podcasts, text messages and endless notifications compete for our attention from the moment we wake up until we fall asleep.

The problem is not that there is too much information.

The problem is that our attention has not grown to match it.

Attention is a limited resource. Every notification, every headline and every scroll takes away a small piece of it. Individually they seem harmless. Together they leave us mentally exhausted.

That is why so many people feel tired even after a day of sitting at a desk. Their bodies may not have worked hard, but their minds have been pulled in dozens of directions every hour.

We have become experts at multitasking, yet research and experience tell us that we do not really multitask. We simply switch attention rapidly from one task to another. Each switch carries a hidden cost. Concentration weakens, mistakes increase and even simple tasks take longer to finish.

The answer is not to consume more information.

It is to consume less, but more deliberately.

Protect your attention as carefully as you protect your money. Turn off unnecessary notifications. Do one thing at a time. Allow your mind periods of silence with no screens demanding your response.

A distracted mind feels busy.

A focused mind gets things done.

In today's world, the ability to guard your attention may be one of the greatest advantages you can cultivate.