Ep82: Priority Hack

Most businesses dream about having their best year ever. But that doesn’t mean it comes without new problems and without competing priorities. There’s a limit to what you can say no to and still have the full life you want, and this episode is all about finding a way to have it all – even if it involves mall-walking. 

Why is that important for business? 

When you spend a lot of time in your business, you might find other priorities suffer. Conventional wisdom might have you deciding which of your priorities you have to say no to. But a fulfilling life only has room for so many noes. 

Perhaps you can blend priorities instead.  This isn’t just about “two birds, one stone”; it’s about making each individual priority even more effective by finding a way to combine them. This can especially work with combining physical activity with stimulating business conversations. A lot of creative things happen in the white space, so why not build it in?

 In the book, “Total Leadership”, Stewart Friedman talks about how we have all of these circles of priorities in life, and the more you can overlap them, the better things will be. This ability to overlap is a next level hack for making the most out of the time we have here. 

There is also something to be said about not blending too much. This isn’t about multitasking – there are things that want your undivided full attention. But the discipline of scanning for opportunities to combine things together in a way that makes each individual thing more fun allows you to have a fuller life. It also ups their individual priority level. 

This is about more than simply not giving into the idea of competing priorities. The real value is that it provides greater meaning and significance to each priority. It is the art to using one priority to support another priority, like legs on a stool – add another leg and the stool becomes more stable. The more you use priorities to support each other, the more likely you are to accomplish all of them. 

Side note about tough conversations: There is something about having important conversations shoulder-to-shoulder instead of face-to-face. It can give a little space for detachment from the rawness, making it easier to be brave about something you weren’t brave about before. It can bring comfort to both the speaker and the listener – in a difficult conversation, the speaker might not want the listener to see how vulnerable the conversation is, but there is also shelter for the listener to process.  

Resources mentioned

Total Leadership, Stewart Friedman, http://www.totalleadership.org/books/total-leadership-5/

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