Not Enough Hours in the Day To Slay Your To-Do List?

Education & Career Trends: November 22, 2022

Curated by the Knowledge Team of  ICS Career GPS

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Content Credit:

• Article published on nirandfar.com Original article link.

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You can search for the best productivity apps to make you more efficient and focused. You can implement productivity hacks and cut distractions. But you still might feel like there simply are not enough hours in the day for everything you need to get done.

Something has to give. You have to prioritise some activities over others—or else you will be spread too thin to dedicate yourself to anything fully.

Read on for a simple strategy to identify and honour your priorities.

To Prioritise, Turn Your Values Into Time

When you look at your list of want-to-dos, everything may seem necessary. Everything you listed is good for you. It would be great if you dedicated five hours a week to exercise; fantastic if you spent an hour practicing a new language; marvellous if you committed one day a week to business-growth tasks.

So how do you choose which goals and tasks to prioritise and which to set aside for now?

Don’t spend a fraught number of hours weighing the importance of every goal and task. Instead of starting with what we are going to do, we should begin with why we are going to do it. So we should start with our values.

Values are the attributes of the person you want to become. They are “how we want to be, what we want to stand for, and how we want to relate to the world around us,” according to Russ Harris, author of The Happiness Trap.

You can categorise your values into three domains of life: yourself, your work, and your relationships:

Once you have identified your values, they act as a guiding star, showing you where to focus your attention. You can then turn your values into time.

• First, write down which tasks will help fulfil those values and move you toward your ideal self. Doing so helps you decide which goals and tasks need to be prioritised now. Try to limit the number of these primary goals and tasks to the most essential. You can always add more later—but the point is to ensure your top priorities have real estate on your calendar.
• Next, use timeboxing, the most powerful time management technique, to block off space for your priorities in a calendar, giving them all the time they require. You might add dinnertime with your family every weekday, an hour of exercise every morning, or the number of hours of sleep you require. Even timeboxing one activity is a great start.

Overcoming “Not Enough Hours in the Day” Is a Process

By focusing on a few things at a time, you are more likely to achieve them. One study’s participants who tried to accomplish multiple goals were less committed and less likely to succeed than those who focused on a single goal. Trying to accomplish too much at once is overwhelming.

Perhaps the idea of dedicating a chunk of time every week to the same task for two years sounds daunting to you. But when in the middle of the process, this perception of time length becomes of insignificant value in front of accomplishment satisfaction.

Here are a few tried-and-true techniques for prioritising competing values:

• Give “seasons” to your life—say, 90 days to a year—in which you focus on one thing before moving on to the next. It may make you more comfortable prioritising a value if you know it’s just for a certain period.

• Identify what is urgent. What matters most right now?
• Use the bubble sort method: List your values on a horizontal grid. Ask yourself which of the first two values is more important, and move the most important to the left. Then compare the second and third values and move the most important to the left. Continue until your values are in order of importance from left to right.
• Tackle values that are simple to fulfil first. For example, getting enough sleep is a natural starting point if you want to be mentally and physically healthier.
• Follow the 80/20 rule: Identify the 20 percent of your values that will likely contribute to achieving 80 percent of what you want. In other words, assign time to the values that will result in the most significant traction toward your ideal self.

With a manageable set of priorities, we also increase the likelihood that they become routines or habits. Once those activities are streamlined, you will have more headspace and calendar space to focus on others.

Sometimes, dedicating time to activities that fulfil a value reveals surprising truths, such as that a value is not as significant as you once thought. Giving time to our perceived priorities helps us learn about ourselves.

Naturally, your values and priorities can change over time. You can revise your timeboxed calendar as your life and values evolve. It’s the best way to ensure you can have it all—even if it’s not all at once.

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Have you checked out yesterday’s blog yet?

Key Differences Between A Growth Mindset versus A Fixed Mindset

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(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in the article mentioned above are those of the author(s). They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of ICS Career GPS or its staff.)

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