118: Define Your Priorities to Save Your Sanity

If you’re listening to this in real-time, we are in the first full week of 2022.

This month, we are going to focus on the topic of priorities. I have come to realize that if you don’t know your priorities, then it’s tough to set reasonable goals that you’ll work on and achieve. When your focus needs to be on one thing, yet your goals lead you somewhere else, there will be tension and conflict. Not joy and peace in living out your life.

I have a great example of this. A couple of months ago, as I began thinking about the goals I wanted to set for 2022, I had all kinds of ideas for my personal life and The Planning Woman. But some things have changed in the last couple of weeks that have caused me to rethink my priorities. So have had to refocus my goals for the first quarter of 2022.

The week of Christmas, my mom’s health took a turn to where she requires constant care most of the time. Thankfully she can handle herself at night. But so far, I’ve only been able to secure daytime care for part of the week. And her condition is deteriorating to the point where I’ve got to find a place for her to move. There will come a time, and probably sooner than I’d like, where she will need more care than I can provide for her in her home.

So, instead of going all out with the goals I had for this month in The Planning Woman, and in my personal life, I have come to the conclusion that the main two priorities should be finding good care for my mom and completing a freelance writing assignment that is due February 1.

Yes, I’ll continue to do the weekly tasks of caring for my home, doing the podcast, and sending out my weekly newsletter. But that’s about all I can handle right now until I have full-time care for my mom and I get this writing assignment done.

So you see, if I had not identified these two priorities, I would be pulling my hair out in frustration, trying to get a lot of the other goals done I had in mind originally for this month.

This is why it’s so important to define your priorities. Knowing your priorities can help save your sanity. You’ll be better equipped to handle the most important things when you know what’s most important.

I know it’s hard to narrow things down sometimes. But you know you can’t do it all. I’m sure if you’re like me, you’ve tried to do it all then ended up frustrated because nothing was going your way.

Listen to the episode to learn three benefits of knowing your priorities.