Are You Wasting Your Time + Energy?
We’ve been deep diving into the 5 keys to hustling sanely the last few weeks and today’s post is all about key 3 - define your priorities.
I’m just gonna give it to you straight because that’s what we do around here - if everything is important then nothing is important. You cannot treat everything like it is a priority because everything can't be a priority.
The more priorities you have, the more watered down they become. Calling something a priority in your life is a sacred thing, really. I don’t recommend doing it lightly. Your time and your energy are 2 things that you can’t get back. You can’t go to the store and grab some more time off the shelf. Nope. You get 24 hours a day, girl, and YOU get to choose how you spend them.
You can’t change how you’ve spent your time and energy in the past and like I said, you can’t get them back, but you can focus on being mindful of how you spend your time and energy now and moving forward.
I think it’s also important to note that calling something a priority and actually making something a priority are 2 different things.
You can say that starting a blog is a priority to you but are your actions revealing that to be true? Have you made it a habit to dedicate X amount of time to working on launching your blog every week? Or do you choose to go out with friends or sit and watch TV every night instead? You saying that starting your blog is a priority means nothing unless you act like it’s your priority, ya feel me?
You are in charge of what goes on your calendar every day. Even if you have others depending on you (kids, co-workers, a spouse) you are still the decider of what makes its way onto your calendar. We all have to share our time and energy with others, but we are the gatekeepers.
You are one person. One wonderful, amazing, fabulous person. But there's still only one of you. You cannot do all the things and do them well. If you pile things on your to-do list every day, you'll end up having a mental or emotional breakdown or something really important will slip through the cracks.
Again, your time and energy are sacred. Give yourself permission to be choosey about what makes its way onto your calendar and to-do list. Pay attention to where your time and energy are going. Choose to use your time and energy to create (and actually stick to) habits that propel you toward your goals. If we don’t flat out define what our priorities are, that means we are letting others determine them for us.
Now here’s the thing, you have to audit and purge your priority list from time to time. As circumstances or seasons in our lives change, our priorities must shift to match. If you’re starting grad school, for example, your priorities are going to have to shift to include things like studying and going to class.
There are some things that are without a doubt no matter what always priorities. Figure those out first. Some of mine are working out 5-6 days a week, visiting my family at least once a week, having a girls’ night at least every other week, and doing creative-only work on Fridays for Hustle Sanely (so writing, making planners, etc. - not a day to do any admin stuff).
I’ve got 4 action steps for you to take to help you define your priorities:
1. Track your time.
I have all of the Hustle Sanely program babes track their time for a week. It is enlightening, let me tell you. You might think you know what your priorities are but where we’re spending our time tells us what our priorities truly are. You can’t change something if you aren’t aware of it! Tracking your time opens your eyes to habits you might not know you have.
2. Close open loops.
I talked about open loops in detail in episode 27 of The Hustle Sanely Podcast but basically an open loop is a task or conversation that is partially completed. Open loops take up space in your mind because they quietly linger there sucking up energy without you really realizing it. Closing open loops allows you to be present and productive. The fewer open loops you have, the more energy you have to focus on your true priorities.
3. Do a monthly time + energy audit.
Do a monthly time + energy audit to make sure that what you are doing in your day-to-day aligns with where you're trying to go. if something isn't serving you, your loved ones, or your goals...ditch it, girl.
4. Create boundaries and make them known.
The key is making them known so that others respect them and so they can help hold you accountable to them too. So after tracking my time, I realized that answering emails outside of business hours was eating up a lot of my time and energy. I had to create a hard boundary and implement business hours. After you’ve tracked your time, you can use the data you gather from that (aka you see where you’re wasting time and energy) and create boundaries that help you not stay on the hamster wheel of doing the same things over and over. Another example of a boundary you might want to create: maybe you notice that you’re on your phone during dinner most nights. You can create the boundary: no phones at the dinner table.
If you enjoyed this post or want to hear more about defining your priorities, tune into episode 032 of The Hustle Sanely Podcast:
