3The Vital Few: How Many #1s Are on Your To‐Do List?
On most days my task manager displays anywhere from five to twenty‐five different tasks that I have scheduled for myself. For years I thought of these tasks as a list of priorities, but a few years ago I threw out that term.
My guess is that you have a dozen or more individual tasks to complete on most days. But how many of them are must‐dos?
How many absolutely have to get done today?
Most importantly, how many of those tasks would you qualify as priorities?
PRIORITIES DO NOT EXIST
In Greg McKeown's Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, he points out that our use of the word “priorities” is a modern invention and it does not make any sense. “The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. It meant the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for the next five hundred years. Only in the 1900s did we pluralize the term and start talking about priorities” (McKeown 2014, 16).
In other words, we have misconstrued and abused a simple word. We think we have two, three, or twelve priorities at any given time when in actuality we only have one because we can never have anything else.
Our misuse of the word priority is backfiring on us and causing a wave of overwhelm in our already busy lives.
Your “priorities” are making you less productive
Having more than one priority is a lie. Every time you use the plural form of that word you are lying to yourself about what matters in the present ...
Get The Free-Time Formula now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
