1: What if someone were to stop us in the street and ask us to share our top three priorities?
What would we say? Can we answer quickly and confidently?
“This is the very first question I ask anyone I’m coaching,” says Google productivity expert Laura Mae Martin in her book Uptime: A Practical Guide to Personal Productivity and Wellbeing.
“The first step for productivity is defining clearly what we want or need to do,” Laura writes. “I don’t often refer to goals because they feel like far-off, long-range, ‘hopefully someday’ activities. Instead I use priorities because it indicates present intention, focus, and fluidity.”
2: Why three priorities?
“A 2018 study at Ohio University confirmed the long and widely held ‘Rule of Three‘ (the idea that people will remember things if they’re grouped in threes) by showing that in learning, our brains seek patterns and group things together.”
Of course, we will likely be responsible for more than three things. But taking the time to clarify our “top three” helps drive our focus.
“One of the most productive people I’ve ever worked with is Robert Kyncl, CEO of Warner Music Group,” Laura notes. “He had his three priorities sharply defined and communicated to anyone he worked with. He had a list of tasks related to each priority and seamlessly shared them with his chief of staff, assistant, and organization.
“These priorities became the theme of his work and his days,” she writes, “which helped him focus on the right things and share a defined vision with his team. The act of defining those priorities made everything and everyone run smoother.”
We can evaluate our priorities as often as weekly, but Laura recommends doing so monthly or quarterly.
3: As Stephen Covey once demonstrated, we must put our big rocks into the jar first before we fill it with stones, pebbles, and sand.
“Trying to put the rocks in the jar when it is already full of pebbles and sand (less important, lower-priority things) will cause the jar to overflow even though there is unused space,” Laura writes.
One of the key benefits of being clear about our top three priorities is that it forces us to make decisions about where we will spend our time. Whenever we say “yes” to something, we are also saying no to something else. There will always be trade-offs.
What about personal versus professional priorities?
“As far as I know, we are each only one person, whether we’re at work or we’re at home,” she explains. “There is just one pie of time, and one brain managing it all.
“Our successes and fulfillment will be driven by different personal or work priorities at different times. They will swing back and forth based on our current situation and stages of life. If we’re preparing to move our family across the country, this should become one of our top three priorities, bumping something else off our top three list. If we’re taking on a huge project at work, something outside of work might take a backseat for a bit.”
Laura also recommends we ask others about their top three priorities.
“Just asking can help build productive and collaborative relationships by giving us a taste of what’s behind the scenes and what someone is really focused on. The answer to this one simple question can give us an understanding of decisions someone is making and how they’re spending their time.”
More tomorrow!
_______________________
Reflection: Have I clearly defined my top three priorities for this season of life, and how does that clarity shape how I spend my time?
Action: Review and write down my current top three priorities, ensuring they reflect both personal and professional commitments, and revisit them at the start of each month.
What did you think of this post?
